Posted on 08/13/2002 8:15:22 PM PDT by stainlessbanner
Norristown native poses provocative questions about Gen. Robert E. Lee in newest book.
Some might say Albert M. Gambone has "overcompensated" for failing his history course at Norristown High School back in 1957.
But back then, he claims, no one ever told him about the important role Norristown played in the Civil War.
The author of four books on the Civil War who maintains a personal library of approximately 3,000 volumes on the subject, Gambone has virtually become a Civil War expert.
However, Gambone counters that he is "convinced there is no such thing as an 'expert' on the war . . . perhaps on a battle or a person or event . . . but not the entire war."
It was this past July 4 that Gambone's book, "Lee at Gettysburg . . . commentary on defeat" was released. The controversial work suggests that the famous Confederate general, Robert E. Lee, was not the great military genius portrayed in the history books and that it was Lee, not his subordinates, who bore the responsibility for the Confederate defeat at Gettysburg.
From his home in Myrtle Beach, S.C., Gambone good-naturedly denies that he has received disdain from friends and neighbors but admits that his next-door neighbor "absolutely refuses to read the Lee work."
On the other hand, on the day his latest book was released, Gambone presented two workshops on his subject at Gettysburg.
At the first, one man stood up, walked out and slammed the door. Following the second, at a book signing, another man approached the table, thanked Gambone and quietly told the author he had had strict instructions from his wife not "to buy a book from that son of a b--."
But Gambone says he has also heard from a South Carolina free lance author who takes exception to some things "but on the whole, he says it causes him to look at Lee with a more objective eye. That, in my opinion, is a great leap forward."
In his foreword, Gambone claims that history's portrayal of Robert E. Lee was a creation of image makers and that, while the general "was a God-fearing individual, devoted father, faithful husband, dedicated soldier and committed educator. In short, a good man... Lee never won more than five or six major battles."
The author further notes "that precious few generals in history are labeled 'great' when they lose a war!"
Furthermore, Gambone states that, Lee was, "by marriage, the legal grandson of the first president" and he speculates, "It is rather doubtful that Washington would have thought anything different of Robert E. Lee than how he viewed traitorous Benedict Arnold."
Gambone says his volumne on Lee is the result of six years of research. Three of his prior four books are biographies of Norristown men who were Civil War generals and who are all buried in Norristown's Montgomery Cemetery: John F. Hartranft (released in 1995), Samuel K. Zook (1996), and Winfield Scott Hancock (1997). The fourth book is a biography of Major General Daarius Nash Couch (2000) who was from New York and who led the Union II Corps prior to Hancock.
Born and raised in Norristown's East End, Gambone attended Lowell Technical Institute (now Lowell University), studying chemistry and mathematics, following his graduation from Norristown High. He later studied religion and philosophy at Mattactuck Community College in Waterbury, Conn. After moving from Norristown in 1965, he spent 35 years in New England, where he wascvice president of a manufacturing firm. He and his wife, Nancy moved to Myrtle Beach about six years ago.
It was only 20 years ago that the Civil War captured his interest when he read a condensed version of Carl Sandburg's "Lincoln."
"It left so many questions," he relates, "that I went back and read all six volumes and I was off and running. I was touched by the human factor of the war. I could really care less about the left flank or the right flank. Those men (in particular), Northern and Southern, were real flesh and blood and, when I was bitten, I wanted to crawl inside their heads to see what made them tick. I am still crawling and that is why everything I write is a bio of sort . . . even though it might be a monograph."
He says he was inspired to write the biographies "because I came across the names Hancock, Hartranft and Zook so often - Hancock the most. I graduated from the schools in Norristown and not once did anyone ever tell me about those men . . . not to mention the other two Civil War generals, Slemmer and McClennan. I was amazed that my hometown was so significant in the war and I decided to write about all five generals."
He adds that, at the time of the Civil War, Norristown's population numbered about 8,000 "and it is likely that no other town, North or South, with the same size population, had as many general-sons."
Conceding that he is now not sure he will get to the other two generals' biographies, Gambone declares, "I belong to the Hancock Society of Montgomery County and have a great interest in Montgomery Cemetery. I have lectured there frequently and am embarrassed that it is in such a state of destruction and the townspeople, in general, know so little (about it). It is a treasure chest of historical information."
Listing what he calls "just a few examples," Gambone notes that when Winfield Scott Hancock was a Democratic presidential contender, Pennsylvania, Norristown and Montgomery County did not vote for him.
"Of all Union generals, he was undoubtedly the most respected and beloved in the South for his bravery and human compassion," he continues. "John Hartranft, a citzen soldier, won the Medal of Honor for his work at the first battle of Manassas. He took the bridge at the Battle of Antietam, defeated Lee's last offensive at the Battle of Fort Stedman, was the jailer during the Lincoln Conspiracy Trial and put Mary Surratt to death by Federal government fiat. After the war, he was twice governor of Pennsylvania. He gave blacks the right to vote in this state and did away with the Molly Maguires."
He notes that the Civil War obelisk on the green just south of the court house in Norristown lists Zook's name as the highest ranking officer to die during the war from Montgomery County.
Reiterating his pride in Norristown's contributions, the writer says, "White men and women were not the only Norristown and Norristown-area contributors because, if you look upon that monument near the court house (in Norristown), you will see the names of those area men who belonged to the famed 54th Massachusetts.
"That regiment was the focal point for the movie 'Glory' and their assault upon Battery Wagner in July of 1863, which cost them almost half of their numbers. The 54th Mass. was not only from the Bay State; they came from many parts of the Union and Norristown gave its own numbers as well. And for many, the actions and bravery of those black men turned the tide of hatred and doubt then associated with the Negro. Consequently, there is plenty of pride to go around for everyone."
He adds, "If I had one wish, it would be that our schools and teachers would pass onto the youth the pride of where they are from - and what those who went before them really did."
Even his detractors have to give him all that. And what else is there, really? Military strtegy after the fact could be debated for eternity. I find Lee to be one of the most truly honorable and loveable men in history, and even I am not sure whether I agree with his opposition to a guerilla war, for instance. Those kinds of things pale next to the character traits that really matter, which in Lee are irrefutable!
As for rating Lee less than Jackson or Forrest, we must remember Lee was an engineer by training. Jackson fought like hell b/c he was a "divinely" driven Christian; Forrest seems like a rough and tumble type of guy, although I have not studied him closely (but I plan too!).
Horseshoes and hand grenades!
If we're going to talk almost lost or won battles, Lee is undoubtedly the winner in the first category. In several cases, he had really lost the battle in tactical terms, yet managed to bluff his opponent into retreating from a winning position. Antietam is a classic example.
Not exactly. During the Ft. Donelson campaign, he attacked a roughly equal force that was in a very strong position and defeated it quickly.
During the Vicksburg campaign, as others have pointed out, he was in hostile country, had no line of supply and was between two armies which between them outnumbered him significantly.
As Sherman said, he had put himself into a position that an enemy would have manuevered for a year to get him into. Yet he pulled it off. It was the riskiest and boldest campaign of the entire war.
When you really examine this campaign, it was probably the most brilliant of the war, with the exception of Jackson's Valley campaign.
If Independence, rather than the preservation of Slavery, had indeed been the primary objective of secession, it could easily have been achieved.
Emancipation of the slaves by the Confederacy, even on a very gradual and compensated basis, would have sabotaged the Union supporters in Europe, especially in Britain. It is almost certain that such a policy would have led to intervention by Britain and probably France, which would have quickly broken the Union blockade and led to a Confederate victory.
Of course, in the next century Britaina and France might have regretted not having a United States to rescue them a couple of times, but that's another story.
If Independence, rather than the preservation of Slavery, had indeed been the primary objective of secession, it could easily have been achieved.
Emancipation of the slaves by the Confederacy, even on a very gradual and compensated basis, would have sabotaged the Union supporters in Europe, especially in Britain. It is almost certain that such a policy would have led to intervention by Britain and probably France, which would have quickly broken the Union blockade and led to a Confederate victory.
Of course, in the next century Britaina and France might have regretted not having a United States to rescue them a couple of times, but that's another story.
While I've never visited Chancellorsville, I've been to Chickamauga twice and know something about the battle. Seven Days was indeed a strategic victory, and Chickamauga could have been very easily, but for the fundamental incompetence of General Polk, who was very tardy in attempting to encircle the Union left behind Battle Line Road, and because of his obdurate insistence on battering, frontal attacks (hell, I could have done better than that!!), was feeble in his maneuver when he finally committed, his Floridians being easily dispersed by Negley's bold cavalry countercharge, which held open the escape route up the Rossville Road for George Thomas's embattled formations.
Chickamauga, because of feebleness in command and Longstreet's tardiness in getting his whole division up, can't be rated at better than a marginal Confederate victory, and I believe some of the "official" historians have called it that way. The call is predicated on the recovery of Rosecrans's shattered divisions to Chattanooga, and Thomas's safe escape, which allowed the Union to hold Chattanooga against the ensuing siege, with important consequences when Grant showed up later on with detachments of the Army of the Potomac.
The matter of casualty ratios figures prominently in Bonekemper's bill of particulars against General Lee. Bonekemper quotes liberally from British military historians J.F.C. Fuller and Basil H. Liddell-Hart, in his appendix titled "Historians' Treatment of Lee":
"Another critical evaluation of Lee came from British Major General J.F.C. Fuller. In his 1933 book, Grant and Lee: A Study in Personality and Generalship, Fuller described Lee as "in several respects....one of the most incapable Generals-in-Chief in history" and found Grant superior to Lee because of the former's broad strategic outlook -- in contrast to Lee's narrow eastern theater perspective. He also criticized Lee for his over-aggressiveness during the Peninsular, Gettysburg, and 1864 Virginia campaigns. In his earlier The Generalship of Ulysses S. Grant (1929), Fuller combined these ideas in a succint statement: "Unlike Grant, [Lee] did not create a strategy in spite of his Government; instead, by his restless audacity, he ruined such strategy as his Government created."
Another British military historian, Basil Liddell Hart, wrote two devastating mid-1930's articles critical of Lee in the Saturday Review of Literature. In "Lee: A Psychological Problem," he found Lee to be mediocre, overly concerned about Virginia (instead of the entire Confederacy), and guilty of bleeding the South to death with his suicidally aggressive tactics. In "Why Lee Lost Gettysburg," Hart criticized Lee as a strategist for failing to recognize the Confederacy's limited manpower resources."
In a second appendix, "Casualties of the Civil War", Bonekemper substantiates Hart's indictment using figures drawn from Richard Current's Encyclopedia of the Confederacy (1993) and from Grady McWhiney and Perry Jamieson's Attack and Die: Civil War Military Tactics and the Southern Heritage (1982):
"An analysis of the combined Attack and [Die] and Encyclopedia numbers allows us to determine Lee's contributions to casualties inflicted and suffered by Confederate forces. As indicated in the .... chapter above, Lee's numbers were worse than those of his fellow Confederate commanders. Lee's soldiers suffered 38 percent of all Confederate battlefield deaths and injuries (121,000 of 320,000) while inflicting only 35 percent of the battlefield deaths and injuries (135,000 of 385,000) suffered by Union troops. Conversely, the men serving under all other Confederate commanders imposed 65 percent of all Union battlefield deaths and injuries (250,000 of 385,000) while suffering only 62 percent of such casualties themselves (199,000 of 320,000)...... Regardless of which set of numbers is used for analysis [i.e., the numbers just cited, or the numbers in Thomas L. Livermore's widely used Numbers and Losses in the Civil War in America, 1861-1865 (1901)], Lee's army incurred a much higher percentage of casualties than its opponent in each of these significant battles. [Antietam, Chancellorsville, and Gettysburg] These statistics are typical of Lee's experience at least through the Wilderness in May 1864 and demonstrate that he undermined the fighting capacity of his army.
Bonekemper's overall thesis is that the Confederacy could not have succeeded in achieving independence except by the overthrow of the Lincoln Administration at the polls in 1864, and that therefore the Southern commanders needed to avoid conflicts costly in manpower and resources in the early years of the war, and save their aggressivity and resources for the cardinal year 1864. This Lee conspicuously failed to do.
This is a good point, sometimes overlooked. The idea would have been very unpopular with enlisted Confederate servicemen who, as generally poor white farmers, saw the Negro as a social and economic threat and bugbear, and transferred to him all their antipathy toward, and worry about, the difficulty of sustaining their farms in the face of economic competition by the much larger "agribusinesses", if we can use that anachronistic term, of the planter class.
When you're poor in the South, being white is just about the last thing you can point to, as you try to arrange the rags of your credibility to cover the shame of your failure, backwardness, and want. Pride is the scar tissue that grows over damaged self-worth. As several writers have pointed out, it was only the above-it-all planter gentry who affected to receive Negro callers through the front door. This attitude was called "planter liberalism", and it was exactly the same creature as "limousine liberalism", and hugely resented by others less well-off, as a deliberate provocation and insult.
Jackson, you are right, was a true believer and had such great determination that, it would seem, when God ordained that the Confederacy should not succeed, it was necessary to remove him from the scene. The only time he was not brilliant was during the Seven Days Campaign, when some historians found him to be lethargic. A few speculate that he was not enthusiastic about the frontal assaults Lee was undertaking and the high casualties. Jackson was concerned about his men's lives. Someone once asked him why he drove his men so hard (sometimes 35-40 miles a day). He replied,"I sacrifice their legs to spare their lives."
Forrest is an interesting character. He is not the impeccable individual that Lee was nor was he fervently religious, as Jackson was. He had little formal education. Many historians say that it was a pity for the South that Forrest never attended West Point. Not that it would have made him a better commander, but that it would have opened up opportunities for high command early in the war. In spite of Non Sequitur's protestations, Forrest would have been an incredible corps or army commander. He had almost an instinctive grasp of topography. He could survey ground once and immediately perceive its weak spots (in the case of attack) or its strong points (in the case of defense). Had Forrest been in command at Shiloh instead of Beauregard, the Union Army (along with U.S. Grant and W.T. Sherman) would have been driven into the river the first day, and Buell's army would have been destroyed in detail the next. Similarly, Chickamauga would have been not just an empty vitory on the way to the defeats of Lookout Mountain and Missionary Ridge,but would have resulted in the recapture of Chattanooga and, at least, a delay in the taking of Atlanta until 1865, with the possible consequence that Lincoln would have lost the 1864 election.
Forrest was a fierce fighter who killed 31 men in hand to hand combat and had 30 horses shot out from under him. He was far from the normal conception of a general. It's also noteworthy that Forrest rose further in rank than any other soldier in either army. He enlisted as a private in 1861 and finished the war as a Lieutenant General in 1865. He was finally defeated by the Yankees at Selma in the spring of 1865. Reason: They had repeating rifles.
I am not very familiar with Ft Donelson, but if Grant did not deploy superior numbers in spite of having access to them and still won, the credit should probably go to his subordinates and to his men.
My argument is not that Grant never did anything right.(I am sure his Vicksburg campaign involved some strategy, as you suggest, although I do not believe that he ever faced a credible Confederate offensive threat during that campaign and he knew that he could call on reinforcements, if necessary. If memory serves, Sherman did reinforce him during that campaign) It is just that his tactics and appraoch do not qualify him as a great general. He did win. So did Wellington. So did the Romans over Hannibal. So did Montgomery over Rommel. In none of those cases was the victor the better general. In some of the cases (Montgomery), the victor was mediocre beyond belief.
He was not generally thought of as a great commander during the French and Indian War period of 1754, following the French takeover of the British fort under construction in Pennsylvania where the Allegheny and the Monongahela rivers join to form the Ohio and continued the construction, renaming it Fort Duquesne. Washington then set out with troops to retake the post and set up camp in Great Meadows, southeast of Fort Duquesne. Upon receipt that a nearby French contingent intended to attack, he launched a preemptive strike against the French camp, the first engagement of the yet undeclared French & Indian War.
Though Washington's forces were victorious won that engagement, he was then defeated by a superior force sent out from Fort Duquesne, leaving the French in command of the entire region west of the Allegheny Mountains.
Lee managed at least a little better than that over his years as commander of the armies of the Confederacy, though bedeviled by logistical shortcomings from the beginning that only worsened as the war progressed. But his political leaders never found cause to replace him in the field, though the same cannot be said on the other side.
-archy-/-
All true, and I suppose you're aware that as a young man, Forrest made his way to Texas during the fight for Texas independence, arriving there late for the party, but having undoubtedly met some of the leaders of the Texian forces and having learned of their actions under fire, pieced that together in his mind with the places in front of him where some of those events had earlier taken place. That may have been nearly as good a firsthand education into at least small-unit tactics and movement as anything he'd have learned as one of West Point's young gentlemen.
It's interesting too to wonder if Forrest heard former Tennessee congressman Davy Crockett's farewell address to his home state when he left for Texas from Memphis, but almost certainly he heard of it.
And where were you, sir, when we gathered at Forrest's gravesite on his birthday last month to recall his life and memory? There were a good many there I did not know, but it was a swell occasion both to meet new friends and recall a great man.
-archy-/-
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