PITY that you don’t evidently KNOW (or are IGNORING) that it takes 400-500 “front line troops” to effectively deal with ONE talented, armed guerrilla fighter.
Had GEN Lee NOT been so gentlemanly, he could have DESTROYED the Union army in PA & MD & decimated the civilian areas with numerous fires & explosions.
The Unionists of 1860-65 should be GLAD that there were FEW trained “counter-guerrilla” armed forces members OR experienced “Indian fighters”, who wore the GRAY & who were quite willing to destroy MD & PA by “fire & sword”, using “hit & run” tactics, as Francis Marion did in the AWI & COL Quantrill & other Partisan Rangers did in the Trans-Mississippi Theater..
(IF you know how to fight guerrillas, you can effectively fight AS a guerrilla.)
Yours, TMN78247
Irrelevant (as well as somewhat of an overstatement in most situations, once a real army has decided they’ve had enough of the irregulars, and takes appropriate action. See below.) You yourself point out that overall, the South did not have large numbers of trained guerrillas in the East. Further, Lee was an honorable man and could have no more directed his army to become guerrillas, so long as his opponents stayed largely “within the rules”, than he could have held his breath to off himself. It was not in his nature, and, besides, he surely had thought out the below:
For one thing, guerrillas need time to attrite their foe, and are usually not too effective for long if they lack support from a considerable portion of the local citizenry. Such support was largely lacking in Union territory (States) in the East.
There were of course considerable numbers of bushwhackers and partisan rangers who primarily operated in the Southern states and also contested areas mainly in the West (Missouri, Kansas, etc.) In contested areas, often the Jayhawks kept them busy much of the time (and vice versa). In the East, Col. Mosby’s “Cavalry” (partisan “rangers”) and others were quite effective at harassing and demoralizing Union forces for a couple years. Quantrill was effective, and brutal, too. However, note they and others did NOT destroy the Union armies or stop them for long, even though these irregulars were largely fighting on their own turf & with civilian support - significant advantages.
What DID happen, as Lee surely foresaw, was that all the Confederates’ efforts could not keep Union forces off of Southern lands, and eventually the Union got fed up and went scorched Earth. That incapacitated Southern civilians’ ability to effectively support, well, anybody. Sherman’s letter to the mayor of Atlanta addresses this very point. (Atlanta was lucky: Sherman was relatively honorable too. Many in the Union armies came to hate ALL Southerners because of the guerrillas. Without the discipline of Sherman and his command staff, the March Through Georgia could have been 10x as bloody for Southern civilians.)
IF you know your history objectively (seems doubtful), you also know that toward the end of the Civil War, the guerrilla movement lost much of its civilian support and largely died out.