Posted on 09/10/2004 3:46:54 AM PDT by carton253
He STILL was a great General regardless...
Thanks....here is a link for your interest:
http://www.battleoffranklin.com/
Good luck.
Actually, even great Generals can make mistakes. Napoleon was a military genius, but he did make mistakes. Robert E. Lee did as well at Gettysburg.
Wow! For all that to happen...Lee would have had to be operating under a different stated objective, which he was not.
But breaking a line and exploiting it are two different things. Imagine Armstead's units in a pocket, surrounded by the Union forces on each side with enfilade fire, and in front of them by the entire Yankee reserve, and
Okay...but there is so much you are leaving out... If the plan of attack had been carried out as directed, then Armstead would not have been surrounded. His brigade would have been folding up the Union Line into Ewell's and Hill's waiting arms.
IMHO, Lee was LUCKY he didn't have a reserve, because the entire army would have been annihilated had his forces actually taken a narrow strip of Cemetary Hill and tried to hold it. The war easily could have been over that day if Lee was "successful."
These types of overgeneralizations at the what-if games doesn't leave much room for discussion. I could as easily over generalize and say that Lee would have held the field like he had done in every battle he had fought up to that point.
South=0
What's left to know?
Lee really needed to win this battle and I suspect that he gambled that using the sledgehammer approach was his best option. I'm sure he knew that even if sucessfull, it was going to be costly. Longstreet, from everything I have read, wasn't a happy camper, even years after the battle. Pickett on the other hand, wanted to get his name in the history books and saw this as his best chance to achieve that goal.
Tom
AMEN! I'm inclined, however, to believe that the combination of his heart disease and the loss of Jackson adversely affected his tactical judgment. I'm not always impressed with Lee as a strategist, but as a tactician he was usually on the ball. Sorta like Napoleon :-).
To be sure, the best option for Lee would have been to have withdrawn to a position between Washington and the Yankees, and get a good position on some high ground. I would bet if Stonewall Jackson had been alive at the time, the battle would have been a Confederate victory.
I must add, the way my blog is set up, you must read from the bottom up, because it posts the most recent post at the top.
Realistically, we'd have to say that the "objective" of the campaign as a whole was simply to win a decisive victory over the Union Army.
Well...duh! LOL! I'm sure that Lee wanted a little more than the Peach Orchard, but battles are one an objective at a time.
The whole Gettysburg battle was improvised, after all, once the leading units made contact without any orders from the commanders.
Well, I disagree with this statement. Lee wasn't near Gettysburg by accident. Gettysburg was a strategic town. The armies may have stumbled into battle...but it didn't take Lee long to establish his plan and his objectives.
Official results are written with hindsight, was my point.
Jackson can be forgiven for his performance in the Seven Days battles since he was new to working with Lee. Any mistakes that he made did not affect the outcome at Malvern Hill. That was Lee's decision alone.
Amen.
Lee wasn't using the sledgehammer effect. He was applying strategy that had worked in the past. Gettysburg was not to be Fredericksburg. It was to be 2nd Manassas in the planning and the initial moments. Pickett's men could not stand up to the flanking fire and therefore the line disintegrated... the disintegration of the line has become, to historians, Lee's strategy.
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