As another Lame Cherry exclusive in matter anti matter.
The examination of the Lost Cause, as created by Jubal Early as an excuse for incompetence and incorrect, yet correct, choices by the Confederacy in losing the war, is important as it appeared in the Ken Burns award winning fiction of the Civil War, as it was all based upon the fake history that the South was part of a lost cause, in which the Union was too strong, too industrial and too peopled to defeat.
There are several points in why the South lost the war. The two most glaring are not evils, but were proper judgments which simply were incorrect.
1. The first is President Andrew Johnson was relying on foreign involvement by European powers in England and France to destroy America. This hope or wish was the Southern Leadership's idea of victory in a rescue of their position, when it should have been instead a prosecution of the war to win.
2. The second is the political military junction in General Robert E. Lee. He refused to ever make war on the American Civilians, while the Union was the greatest terror state against Americans in burning homes to making war on towns like Fredericksburg.
In this General Lee was fighting to defeat the Union Army, not the succor of the army, and his entire two ventures in the North at Sharpsburg or Antietam, along with Gettysburg were aimed at forcing Abraham Lincoln to peace with the Confederacy, instead of the necessary focus in 1863 of the dividing of the Union by marching on Ohio.
As a prelude to this, General Lee should not have moved to Gettysburg Pennsylvania, but instead of held ready at Fredricksburg Virginia, to hold the Union Army of the Potomac, while Lee would win the war in the west by this invasion plan.
To understand the theaters of battle. General Grant was in the west, and driving for Vicksburg Mississippi, where he was facing General Joseph Johnston. A second body of forces was General Rosecrans in the Tennessee, facing General Braxton Bragg.
General Lee was in Virginia, having defeated General Burnside as Fredericksburg and then was in the process of shattering General Hooker at Chancellorsville.
As a backdrop in this, General Lee in his victory at Chancellorsville, had shattered the Union, but also his Army of Northern Virginia. The great loss was General Stonewall Jackson was wounded and died from those wounds in the late battle. Jackson was one of the premier Generals of the Confederacy. His equals were Generals Longstreet and DH Hill as battlefield field marshals.
Even at Chancellorsville, General Lee in getting his blood up, as he always desired to strike, if he simply would have allowed the battle front to develop a few more days, his position would have been stronger, General Hooker weaker, and in the result, Lee would not have used up his army and General Jackson would not have been wounded in the heat of that battle.
In to this General Longstreet met with the Confederacy's Secretary of War, and upon being questioned laid out a battle plan to relieve Mississippi in the west and deal with the Tennessee military operations.
The focus of the plan was part of Longstreet's forces were to move to assist Braxton Bragg in Tennessee, and move so swiftly as to crush General Rosecrans. It would be then that instead of raising an Army for General Joseph Johnston to fight the tenacious General Grant, that Grant would be diverted by the Washington City politicians to follow General Johnston flanking north in Grant's way, who would be then sent to deal with the combined armies of Braxton Bragg and James Longstreet, smashing into Ohio, and capturing Cincinnati.
Taking the manufacturing and produce of the Union, and dividing the Union from east to west, would then force the Army of the Potomac to divide in defending Washington City and be weakened by forces sent to deal with the conquered territory of Ohio and west to Minnesota and Wisconsin.
This would be the measure by which peace would have been forced upon Abraham Lincoln, as the next crushing blow would have been on Washington City, as a Union Army in Grant without Ohio supply, would have been left in the field in rags in 6 months and crushed.
Instead General Lee, not wanting his army so far from his control, opted for Pennsylvania, which was a mistake as it drew too ready the forces from the Army of the Potomac. General Lee was masterful at works or seige warfare, in entrenchment battles as at Bull Run II, Fredericksbrug and Chancellorsville. General Lee though was checked every time he dealt with Union lines at Sharpsburg and at Gettysburg, and he was ground to nothing in Grant's Wilderness Campaign of moving by the left flank and eroding Lee's Army to surrender by encirclement.
This is another proof that the Lost Cause of Jubal Early and other modern historians have seized upon are incorrect. Early did not want the gods of the south exposed for incorrect decisions which were correct, and Northern terrorists desired an excuse for crushing the Southern Peoples in it being inevitable.
General Longstreet attempted three times to obtain victory for the South in correct battle plans. He wanted to strike the Shenandoah with Jackson early after Bull Run, but Jackson did not want a superior officer in Longstreet on his field commanding.
Longstreet did not want to offer battle at Antietam, but was overruled by Lee and Jackson planning that incorrect battle.
The South needed rest and resupply, not battle, but Lee thought he could force a concession of peace by making battle. Lee though was out of his works, and what instead took place was Abraham Lincoln unleashing after the battle, that worst form of racial terrorism in the Emancipation Proclamation which Lincoln had been sitting on for over a year.
The third attempt was in the conquering of Ohio, by smashing Rosecrans in Tennessee and forcing General Grant to be forced to move from Mississippi to Ohio, where Grant would have been crushed by lack of supply and the two armies of Bragg and Johnston, with part of Lee's in Longstreet reinforcing.
All of this information is there, and is historical fact. If one has any modicum of intelligence, one can read the assessments of different commanders and soon enough gain an understanding of what was the proper order of battle, as what was engaged in, was not the proper order of battle as it brought defeat.
General Lee made a crucial error too in the death of General Jackson in appointing another Virginian to the leadership in Lt. General Jubal Early, who passed over more competent and ranking officers, including the General who should have been appointed in DH Hill, who was both field marshal of his division and could have managed an entire army as Jackson did, and perhaps better.
Jubal Early is where all of this began with the Lost Cause fake history, and Early began the war was a flanker or rear gaurd, who shot over or shot his own Confederates in front of his forces as at Bull Run. He reached some success in defeating Union forces when other Generals on the field were engaged in combat, but ended up in the Shenandoah and in complete incompetence was routed by General Sheridan, and then fled after the war to Texas, Mexico, wherever and then Canada, where after Lee's death he created this fiction of the Lost Cause, to hide his incompetence in battle and Lee's misjudgment in correct combat, as much as appointing Early as the head of a corp.
Those are the facts which refute the Lost Cause and Jubal Early completely. The war was lost because God desired to preserve the Union, not because the Union was all powerful. If Lee and Jackson had only embarked upon prudent warfare, Jackson would have been alive, because there were three mindsets at the start of 1863, and they were:
1. Lee was to fight in the east.
2. Jackson desired to fight in the west by invading it.
3. Longstreet's battle plans were to strike the Union Army, but retire to defensive position to use up Union resources and men, and defeat the Lincoln War on those terms.
The Confederacy would have won Lincoln's War if those principles had been engaged in, instead of the incorrect battle deployments and grinding battles of attrition which the South was forced into by the incorrect battle plans from 1861 to 1863.
Nuff Said
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