As another Lame Cherry exclusive in matter anti matter.
There have always been a number of puzzling realities about thee American Civil War in events which simply did not make any sense or they clashed with the interpretation. No help ever came from that broken prism of nonsense which Ken Burns attempted which won awards as the historians never understood the premises of what they were speaking of.
In the history of Abraham Lincoln by Carl Sandberg, I have come across inclusions of information which simply have been lost or ignored, but they are the defining explanations of events which turned mole hills into calderas.
What this examination of America in a modern era delves into are two seemingly non related events, but they were the events which joined to form the ghastliness of this war of Americans slaughtering Americans.
It seems odd, but no one ever called General George McClellan a butcher, for 13,000 dead Union Soldiers at Sharpsburg nor 13,000 dead by General Ambrose Burnside at Fredericksburg, nor for the equal horrendous slaughters of General Robert Lee at Sharpsburg and Gettyburg. Yet the Southerners in being slaughtered and slaughtering General Hiram Grant's army, condemned him as a butcher.
There is something which I came across which Sandberg included in a paragraph which stunned me by the statement and calculations involved. It was after Fredericksburg which was a slaughter of Union troops in Burnside should never have attacked Lee in those defenses, which Lee constructed, and instead should have crossed the Potomac, and feinted with a screening force to taking Richmond. Burnside should have then picked his ground to defend, drew Lee out and made him pay with destroying the Army of Northern Virginia. In all the histories I have read, I never have understood generals violating the principles of mobility, outflanking and striking with superior forces to win a battle, and instead attacking the center or storming fixed fortifications
This is what Sandberg recorded.
It was voiced as something known from Abraham Lincoln after Fredericksburg by White House staff member William O. Stoddard that in Lincoln's arithmetic that even with the Union loosing twice as many soldiers as the Confederacy, that given enough battles, the Union would by attrition destroy the South and win, because the math clearly revealed the Union had more resources to expend. Those calculations showed that the Confederacy would be gone and the war would be over.
It was stated that no such general at that time could face this arithmetic in what it would takek to win this war, but the end of the war would be at hand when this general was found.
It was after Shiloh in General Grant was almost defeated, that he came to the conclusion that there was not going to be an end to the war as the South would not give up. The Confederacy would have to be crushed to be defeated. It was at this genesis in the Army of the West where another General in William Sherman, who was also at Shiloh, would appear later in the invasion of the South in the burning of Georgia and the Carolinas with the full intent, that doing this would break the South and the intention was to so rape the South that in 100 years, they would never contemplate war again.
This is fascinating to me in McClellan and others tried to strategize the war. Lincoln first tried to finance the war in buying slaves to win it, but the actual bloodshed would produce upon the paper of the hearts and minds of Lincoln, Grant and Sherman an order of battle to win this civil war it would require destruction of what was Southern independence. By 1864, these three men would be pressed into each other, and this would become the order of battle of the civil war.
General Grant was faced with an entrenched General Lee, and had to extrude him from those trenches and once he had the Army of Northern Virginia in the wilderness of Virginia, Grant was not going to let it go to ground again, but kept attacking the left flank, and forcing Lee to move left to a theater where he could be surrounded at Appomattox Court House. Grant did not kill the entire South as the Virginia Army was brought to bay in being degraded. Sherman would come to terms with General Joe Johnston's Army in the Carolinas and General Thomas would produce the lost cause of General Hood in Tennessee.
In certain parts of this history, Sandberg records President Lincoln not just depressed at times, in Fredericksburg, but out of control in almost insane. This was a man whose child had died i the White House. His wife was not mentally fit. The massive deaths and pressures had got to him. His focus which he would not let go of as his anchor was America had to survive as a Union for him to survive.
At one point after the death of his son, the stables caught on fire and killed all the horses, even the dead son's pony. Lincoln had rushed out and tried to enter that burning barn, but was held back. He was desperate in trying to save anything, even a part of his dead son, in a pet.
From all of that would become the Fredericksburg solution. Lincoln would win the war, and save himself when he found a general who would kill and expend the North to kill and destroy the South.
It became thee only policy left after McClellan's strategy had been not to seize victory by taking Richmond when he could in 1862 AD in the year of our Lord.
Nuff Said
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