With all due respect to the western theater, the true decisive battles were in the east - Antietam and Gettysburg. They were the battles upon which european involvement largely turned and upon which the strategy of turning northern opinion against the war was settled.
Lee gets a good press. Those four victories nestle in among the Seven Days battles, where Lee lost more men every day than McClellan,
Yet without any decisive losses.
and of course Antietam and Gettysburg, obviously rebel defeats.
Antietam is considered a stalemate in practically every credible history of the war. Its effects with europe were strong, but the battle itself ended in a draw.
It should be remembered that Lee had absolutely no success outside Virginia.
Considering that Lee's action was almost entirely in Virginia, such a statement is both misleading and silly.
Flip that, and you logically have him equal in prowess to Pope, Hooker and Burnside, who had no success inside Virginia.
No. That would be illogical. See above.
What decided the war was the devestation of the Shenandoah Valley and the breadbasket that was Georgia.
Walt
You don't know what you are talking about.
As I said just the other day (and you probably only skim my posts), Lee needed to follow the same strategy as G. Washington did. Maintain an army in the field and wait. Washington had that hot-blooded Virginia thing going on too. But he learned from his mistakes, and Lee did not.
This town, that town -- it didn't matter. The armies were the center of gravity, not the towns. Lee gained nothing at Antietam but to atrite his army in a way he could not afford, but that he was too inept to see.
As I say in another note above, wrecking the breadbaskets ended the war and to do that, you have to first disable or neutralize the enemy army. Grant did that by besieging Lee. Sherman did it by driving the AOT back and back and back and defeating them over and over until Hood decided that he could no longer fight Sherman toe to toe and tried to wreck his supply lines.
The problem with ALL the early commanders in the ACW was that they had Napoleonic blinders on. This was true on two levels. On the tactical level, they wanted mass Napoleonic assaults. You may have heard of the least successful of these -- it was ordered by Robert E. Lee, and was led partly by a man named Pickett. Lee learned --ZILCH-- from Malvern Hill and his other experiences. Another was at the battle of Franklin. Oddly, the commanding officer who ordered that charge was at Gettysburg and ordered a Napoleonic charge any way. Similar Union fiascoes occured at Fredericksburg and Cold Harbor. Why did it work for Napoleon and not in the ACW? Because the weapons, although superficially similar, had vastly different capabilities. In napoleon's day, the musket had an effective range of 50 meters. Forty years later it was ten times that.
In Napoleon's day, yu could mass your infantry, soak up one volley, and close with the enemy before they could reload. In the ACW no way. Lee attempted to close on troops a mile away, who had a clear field of fire and who could engage him with cannon at that range and rifled muskets at 500 yards. Lee had learned nothing from a year's campaigning. Grant did little better at Cold Harbor.
On a strategic level, Napoleon's influence was also pernicious. The early "On to Richmond" crew knew that Napoleon had squashed for after foe by siezing the capitals of his opponents. People of little understanding (like J. Davis) focused on this factoid. Others, Like President Lincoln, rightly saw the enemy army as the rightful center of gravity right off. He just couldn't find any generals to act on that precept.
Because ACW generals largely could grasp neither successful tactics or strategy, the war was a bloody mess.
You call Antietam decisive. Clueless. Of 60 major engagements in the ACW, 56 resulted in indecisive bloodlettings that solved nothing.
The battle of Franklin was one of the four others. The Army of Tennessee was hounded into oblivion by a successful pursuit after it was wrecked by its commanding general in Napoleonic type assaults.
And you know, it didn't really matter what those 44 dock workers were doing out in Texas.
Walt
Yet without any decisive losses.
Clueless. Lee had one quarter the manpower of the North. He couldn't afford to fight battles the way he persistently did. Lee wrecked his own army. He was perhaps the main architect of secessionist defeat.
Walt
Yet without any decisive losses.
Clueless. Lee had one quarter the manpower of the North. He couldn't afford to fight battles the way he persistently did. Lee wrecked his own army. He was perhaps the main architect of secessionist defeat.
Walt
Well, here is what you said in # 276:
With all due respect to the western theater, the true decisive battles were in the east - Antietam and Gettysburg.
Please try and keep your lies straight.
Walt