Who is this "Martin Luther King" and why does he have his day off today?

[MichaeltheGreat]

California, Oregon and Nevada? Doubt they could split from the North if 11 Confederate States came up empty. Been thinking about it since reading these pages. In order to win the war the Confederacy would have had to abolish slavery before Antietam and have the Brits and or French come in. Politically very difficult move, but might it have been doable in order to win the war? The South couldn't sell their cotton anyway with the blockage, they would have been better off paying their workers and having the Euros keep the sea routes open. Even a heartless slave owner can do math. So lets say the Brits come in, keep South's trade open and blockade the North. War comes to a negociated end with the North saying they won freedom for the slaves, and rightly so. Personally I think its a much better world for historical gaming.

TheCSA could have won politically by a couple of routes.

A critical political mistake was the simple shortsightedness of the original core CSA states - they had huge opportunities to stockpile modern arms before the yankee imperialist aggression, but didn't believe there would be a real fight - it was positively delusional. The whole "King Cotton" mindset blew up in their face, and then you had things like Stonewall Jackson proposing to equip regiments with pikes due to a shortage of muskets. Or the fact that Jackson was killed by a regiment armed, two plus years into the war, with smoothbores that had about 40% of the reload speed of Minié ball muskets like the .577 Enfield. Artillery shortages were also acute, especially rifled artillery other than the 3" Ordnance Rifle for effective counter-battery fire. The Brit Army rejected the Whitworth Rifle and bunches of those could have been had for a song, a dance and a bale of Cotton. Those would have been an artillerist's wet dream (and an enemy artillerist's ticket to meet his maker.

Later on, with everything playing out the way it did, the south still could have won politically - especially by freeing the slaves and removing the moral high ground at the right time. After Vicksburg and Gettysburg, you had the original "War will be over by Christmas!" delusion, and when that didn't happen, civilian enthusiam plummeted. Fast forward to 1864 and Grant's campaign. Grant was effective, but he was a callous bastard with not much tactical sense. All the subtlety of a berzerker coming at you with a club, but he realized he could sustain the casualties and materiel loss pretty much indefinitely, and the CSA couldn't. After the Wilderness, Spotsylvania, etc., although Grant was winning, the sheer magnitude of the casualties reported in the news vaporized yankee enthusiasm for the war. If Johnston had been allowed to maintain a delaying action on the retreat into Georgia, it is entirely possible that McClellan would have won, simply by a lack of good war news - people were getting sick of it, with no clear, visible end in sight. God knows McClellan didn't have the guts to prosecute any offensive action.

Oh and the western states could have made it quite nicely. All that distance, no railroad yet, and all that gold and later silver. Plus no slaves and no possibility of blockade.

[Alexander's Horse]

all valid points, I would add they didn't make a serious effort to besiege or isolate Washington early in the war, the confederate army was very close but didn't press home their attacks from what I have read. Washington was close to panic after First Manassas. That was the time to negotiate.

The Confederate didn't seem to have any offensive strat at all early in the war before the union could bring its superiority to bear. Losing control of the mouth of the Missisipi early in the war was a major fubar but they didn't seem to grasp what a mortal blow that was. The union blockade would have been very hard to enforce if the confederates had hung on to the delta.

[Dinner]

It was federally occupied land since South Carolina's possession predated federal possession, and the US government never directly purchased the land.

My ass. The Feds paid for it and it was under Federal ownership.

[MichaeltheGreat]

They paid for the fort. Not the underlying land. And they certainly extracted enough tariffs from the port of Charleston to pay for that rockpile 100 times over. The good folks of South Carolina would have let 'em take their rocks. Or paid top Confederate dollar for 'em.

[MichaeltheGreat]

And yes, there's a legislative act by the State of South Carolina to appease the feds after Laval made his claim. Except for two details. You couldn't, as a matter of law, create or transfer title to "land" below mean low tide, so the legislative act was a sham to appease the feds because they had no jurisdiction over state land claims. And, state civil and criminal process still applied. Consider the cannonade to be service of process that those yankees were trespassing.

So the yankees owned the rocks piled up on the submerged, non-titleable lands of South Carolina.

[Imran Siddiqui]

Grant was effective, but he was a callous bastard with not much tactical sense.

The Vicksburg campaign says hello.

[Ogie Oglethorpe]

Lee chewed up his men in far greater disregard to what should have been his defensive posture then Grant did while primarily in offensive posture. Further it is generally understood that Lee had at his disposal a far better number/compliment of subordinate officers than Grant. Thus most of the tactical accomplishment of the Army of Northern Virginia are due to the individual initiative of the Corp and Divisional commanders not applicable to Lee per se.

http://clevelandcivilwarroundtable.c..._grant_won.htm

[Sava]

and who turned the inauguration into a bible revival?

the secular religion hating socialist islamofascist OBAMA

duh

[MichaeltheGreat]

The Vicksburg campaign says hello.

Try one way and fail. Try another way and fail again. Try a third way and fail yet again. Try a fourth time, and finally.

[MichaeltheGreat]

Lee chewed up his men in far greater disregard to what should have been his defensive posture then Grant did while primarily in offensive posture. Further it is generally understood that Lee had at his disposal a far better number/compliment of subordinate officers than Grant. Thus most of the tactical accomplishment of the Army of Northern Virginia are due to the individual initiative of the Corp and Divisional commanders not applicable to Lee per se.

Which completely disregards strategic and political reality.

Lee inherited command when Joe Johnston was wounded. Johnston's staff had no idea what Johnston had in mind, if anything, his divisional commanders were a fractious lot prone to non-coordination and non-cooperation with each other due to egotistical pissing matches because many were promoted to grade on the same day and thus none had seniority, and McClellan was only a few miles from Richmond with enough artillery and siege guns just upriver to flatten Richmond, and a substantially larger army. McClellan had the means at his disposal to destroy Richmond and break the Confederacy's back well before the end of summer, despite Jackson's success and the yankee humiliation in the Valley Campaign.

What did Lee do with an outnumbered, outgunned, non-cohesive command backed up against his national capital, with an inadequate staff and no inherited offensive or defensive plan? Defend and succumb to an inevitable defeat? No, he split his outnumbered forces and attacked with such aggression and ferocity that he got in McClellan's and several of his subordinate Corps commanders' heads, and unnerved McClellan to the extent that McClellan called off his advance on Richmond.

Then Lee started reorganizing his forces and replacing his commanders. Then Lee moved to meet and crush Pope's army so decisively that Pope spent the rest of the war murdering Indians in Minnesota.

Then Lee, realizing that the yankees would not be defeated politically by sitting around and waiting to be invaded again, took the war north, even though he had less than half the available forces that McClellan (remember him?) had. Despite being outnumbered and outgunned, Lee held at Sharpsburg, then withdrew without any pressure from McClellan (remember him?) after waiting for McClellan to attack again the next day. Lee, realizing there was nothing to be accomplished by sitting around in the face of a concentrated, dug in yankee army twice the size of his own, executed an orderly withdrawal.

When Burnside tried to force the issue at Fredericksburg, Lee was in position well before Burnside was ready, and prepared an unassailable defensive position, which Burnside found out the hard way. Lee also had a heart attack in this campaign. Five months later, at Chancellorsville, Lee once again faced an army much larger than his own, with yet another commander (Lee seemed to have this ability to find new career options for yankee army commanders), and Lee once again divided his forces while facing greater numbers, and once again inflicted a crushing defeat on the yankee army. Then Lee once again took the war even farther north, against all odds, because he realized that sitting defensively and waiting for the yankees to be willing nails hitting his hammer was not going to win the war. If it hadn't been for General Robt. E. Lee, the Confederacy would have been broken in the summer of 1862. The failures at Gettysburg were primarily failures of execution, not overall plan, and Lee was forced to adapt to circumstances forced upon him by the inept acts of Stuart, Heth, Rodes, Ewell, Early, Law and Anderson, who each had specific failures which doomed a very good possibility of victory at Gettysburg on either Day 1 or Day 2.

[Docfeelgood]

[MrFun]

President Grant effectively endorsed this point after his presidency, while touring Japan. He was asked his view about an incident when a foreign (IIRC German) ship entered without permission and put a cholera infected sailor ashore triggering a major cholera epidemic in the Kansai region. Grant replied something to the effect of "[you] ought to have fired on them."

False comparison, as the Southern states and Northern states were not two separate, foreign countries.

[Imran Siddiqui]

Try one way and fail. Try another way and fail again. Try a third way and fail yet again. Try a fourth time, and finally.

Sieges tend to be very easy affairs, after all.

As much I do get amused by the revisionist pro-Southern view of the Civil War which emerged after Reconstruction, it just doesn't correspond to what actually happened. Thankfully military academies don't get suckered into it as easy and study Grants tactics, esp the Overland Campaign where even after defeat, instead of withdrawing, he kept trying to outflank Lee, giving Lee no shot to regroup... which ended up winning the war. It also tends to ignore that proportionally, Lee suffered greater causalities.

Grant was less reckless with his soldiers' lives than his predecessors had been. No single day of Grant's pounding saw the magnitude of Union casualties that McClellan incurred in one day at Antietam, and no three consecutive days of Grant's warring proved as costly to the Union in blood as did Meade's three days at Gettysburg. ... Grant and Lee were about as evenly matched in military talent as any two opposing generals have ever been. Grant's strength was unwavering adherence to his strategic objective. He made mistakes, but the overall pattern of his campaign reveals an innovative general employing thoughtful combinations of maneuver and force to bring a difficult adversary to bay on his home turf. Lee's strength was resilience and the fierce devotion that he inspired in his troops. He, too, made mistakes and often placed his smaller army in peril. But each time—Spotsylvania Court House and the North Anna River come to mind—he improvised solutions that turned bad situations his way.

- Gordon C. Rhea, In the Footsteps of Grant and Lee

Oh, and re: Vicksburg

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vicksburg_campaign

Despite his ultimate success in winning the war, historians have often considered Vicksburg his finest campaign—imaginative, audacious, relentless, and a masterpiece of maneuver warfare. James M. McPherson called Vicksburg "the most brilliant and innovative campaign of the Civil War"; T. Harry Williams described it as "one of the classic campaigns of the Civil War and, indeed, of military history"; and the U.S. Army Field Manual 100-5 (May 1986) called it "the most brilliant campaign ever fought on American soil."[31]

[MichaeltheGreat]

False comparison, as the Southern states and Northern states were not two separate, foreign countries.

They most certainly were.

[MichaeltheGreat]

Sieges tend to be very easy affairs, after all.

As much I do get amused by the revisionist pro-Southern view of the Civil War which emerged after Reconstruction, it just doesn't correspond to what actually happened. Thankfully military academies don't get suckered into it as easy and study Grants tactics, esp the Overland Campaign where even after defeat, instead of withdrawing, he kept trying to outflank Lee, giving Lee no shot to regroup... which ended up winning the war. It also tends to ignore that proportionally, Lee suffered greater causalities.

Military acedemies study lots of things. And of course, grinding down an enemy with an endless supply of cannon-fodder gets the job done in comparison to running back north to lick your wounds. "Proportionately" doesn't mean much against an outnumbered enemy. Of course Grant had less "proportionate" casualties, because he had a massive, ongoing influx of replacements.

Oh, and re: Vicksburg
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vicksburg_campaign

That's what happens when the victors write the history books, as they say. I guess trying to dig a canal could be considered innovative, yes.