This was interesting.
"Why was the Army of Northern Virginia so frequently ill-provisioned, indeed sometimes on quarter rations, while operating in fairly close vicinity to well-stocked Confederate supply depots in the Richmond area. One would think that any competent army commander, and Lee certainly fitted that description in most respects, would see it as his primary responsibility and duty to cut through or bypass any ineffective bureaucratic supply system in such a situation. Army commanders through the ages have met such situations by a variety of emergency strategies, from coercive foraging to the setting up of soldier-run vegetable gardens, swineyards, leather tanneries, shoe repair shops, etc.
Lee did not, and his army was frequently the most poorly supplied of all Confederate armies, a factor which contributed to his constant need to move his army for subsistence rather than military purposes -- and to his army's high AWOL rate. Yet he and his staff never took an active role in procuring and transporting the necessary food and other materials needed to supply his troops when the Confederate quartermaster and subsistence bureaus didn't deliver.
WHY?
A possible answer to this question may be found in Gerald Northrop Moore's CONFEDERATE COMMISSARY GENERAL: LUCIUS BELLINGER NORTHROP AND THE SUBSISTENCE BUREAU OF THE SOUTHERN ARMY (Shippensburg, PA: White Mane Publishing Company, 1996). Moore cited Douglas Southall Freeman's analysis in R. E. LEE that one of the weaknesses in Lee's training for plantation or military management was his "lack of any detailed knowledge of the service of supply", a menial function normally shunned by plantation society and relegated to plantation overseers and military clerks. Moore then buttressed this line of reasoning by referencing a communication from Northrop to Lee (OR ser. I, vol. 51, pt. 2, 738) in which Northrop angily referred to a statement Lee had made previously during the hungry winter of 1862-3 that he (Lee) had "no responsibility for feeding his troops." Lee held stubbornly to this opinion, even to the extent of repeatedly refusing to lend ex-railroader soldiers to the effort to repair rail communications between Confederate supply depots and the food-short ANV winter quarters, or to assign army wagons to temporary supply-hauling duty in the absence of railroad repairs.
Is this a true picture? Did Lee have a legitimate reason to dodge responsibility for this major factor in assuring the health and military efficiency of his troops? Or did the problem merely illustrate Thomas Sowell's concept of "negative human capital": those cultural attitudes and practices that tend to introduce inefficiencies into the human activities (including economic and military) of a particular society?
That is the conventional wisdom on the matter. However, the example in my previous post was a situation where Northrop had managed to stock the supply depots with adequate supplies, but Lee's mistaken priorities and stubbornness were the reason the food did not reach the ANV. This was not an isolated case, but an example of a pattern. As to the "dramatic improvement" in the supply situation after Jeff Davis booted Northrup as Commissary General, much of that improvement had its origins in last-minute changes to uncoordinated and inefficient purchasing, impressment and railroad policies that had long been sought, unsuccessfully, by Northrup. An additional factor in the sudden improvement was the release in 1865 of large food stocks held in reserve by the Confederate Nitre and Mining Bureau, which St. John, ex-Chief of the Nitre Bureau and Northrup's successor as Commissary General, had accumulated in 1864 BY OFFERING HIGHER PRICES IN COMPETITION WITH NORTHRUP'S SUBSISTENCE BUREAU and subsequently withheld from Lee's army while Northrup was in the saddle. Now, these are some of the many clownish aspects of the Confederate experience, but Lee saw it all. Why didn't he respond in an effective manner with direct action?
C'mon, guys. Don't you think it odd that Lee would wash his hands of responsibility for assuring, ASSURING, that his troops got adequate food? Wasn't that his primary duty to his men and his country (Virginia)?
During the first month of 1864, Lee penned the following to Jefferson Davis (Document # 602 of Dowdy & Manhurin's THE WARTIME PAPERS OF ROBERT E. LEE): " We are now issuing to the troops a fourth of a pound of salt meat & have only three days supply ..... I can learn of no supply of meat on the road to the army, & fear I shall be unable to retain it in the field." Davis advised him that the emrergency justified impressment -- advice which was ignored. At the time Lee wrote, the standard daily Union army meat ration was one and a fourth pound of salt or fresh beef. J. E. Johnston reported that month from Dalton that his men had only 8 day's rations in reserve and Longstreet complained from East Tennessee that the lack of supplies in his area precluded the possibility of offensive action. Yet, in the midst of this critical food shortage, that same month, Mary Boykin Chesnut attended a party given by Varina Davis for the elite ladies of Richmond society in which the table fare was described as "gumbo, ducks and olives, supreme de volaille, chickens in jelly, oysters, lettuce salad, chocolate jelly cake, claret soup, champagne, &c&c&c." (31 January 1864 diary entry in Woodward's MARY CHESNUT'S CIVIL WAR). Several of those menu items were imported luxury items.
Why didn't Lee take direct action in such circumstances? What greater duty and responsibility did Lee have than to the health and combat effectiveness of his men? Is it to his credit that he didn't act (other than to complain) because it was another's "duty"?
-- from the AOL Civil War forum.
Give me Grant and Sherman any day.
THIS is VERY interesting:
J. E. Johnston reported that month from Dalton [Georgia]that his men had only 8 day's rations in reserve
That was January, 1864
But we read of Sherman's march:
"We also took a good many cows and oxen, and a large number of mules. In all these the country was quite rich, never before having been visited by a hostile army; the recent crop had been excellent, had been just gathered and laid by for the winter. As a rule, we destroyed none, but kept our wagons full, and fed our teams bountifully."
--G. W. Nichols, "Story of the Great March" published 1865, London
It just makes the rebel leaders look like incompent bums, don't ya think?
Walt
That is about as germane as what Lincoln had for dinner at the White House when the 600 Confederate prisoners were being fed a starvation diet of pickles and wormy sour corn meal by the Federals.
As one of the Federal medical inspectors reportedly put it when shown the condition of the 600, if this treatment lasted for one month longer, there would be none of the prisoners left to tell the tale (Joslyn, pg 219).
You're spamming, in other words.