Joined: Sun May 14, 2017 1:55 am
Posts: 1207
Location: Tennessee
|
Quaama wrote: I think hypotheticals are fun and there's always room to change, or amend, your thinking if some new fact is introduced by someone else. If Pickett had broken the line, I think a rout of the Union was very likely. Routs are infectious and the ANV had other brigades nearby and ready to move up of to follow Pickett's Division (Anderson had two brigades very close and ready to follow through after Pickett). Still, 'twas not to be.
Are you nuts? 
There is no way in the world that Pickett, even if a miracle occurs, could have done more than held what he had gained at Cemetery Hill.
Just for fun, I asked the A/I about it (I knew you will appreciate that) and it fully agreed:
Even if the charge had achieved a breakthrough, the Union would have used its superior interior lines and fresh reserves to quickly overwhelm the Confederate attackers, leading to the same outcome.
Operational and tactical reasons
Union position: The Union army occupied a strong "fish hook" shaped position on high ground, which allowed them to easily shift reinforcements to any threatened area.
Lack of coordination: The charge was not part of a coordinated Confederate effort, as the attacks on other parts of the Union line, such as Culp's Hill, failed to materialize.
Union reserves: The Union had thousands of troops held in reserve behind their main line, who could be deployed to meet any breakthrough.
Confederate army condition: Lee's army was severely depleted and disorganized after two days of fighting, and its artillery ammunition was nearly exhausted.
Or, to quote author/historian H.W. Brands:
“For every Southern boy fourteen years old, not once but whenever he wants it, there is the instant when it's still not yet two o'clock on that July afternoon in 1863, the brigades are in position behind the rail fence, the guns are laid and ready in the woods and the furled flags are already loosened to break out and Pickett himself with his long oiled ringlets and his hat in one hand probably and his sword in the other looking up the hill waiting for Longstreet to give the word and it's all in the balance, it hasn't happened yet, it hasn't even begun yet, it not only hasn't begun yet but there is still time for it not to begin against that position and those circumstances which made more men than Garnett and Kemper and Armstead and Wilcox look grave yet it's going to begin, we all know that, we have come too far with too much at stake and that moment doesn't need even a fourteen-year-old boy to think This time. Maybe this time with all this much to lose and all this much to gain: Pennsylvania, Maryland, the world, the golden dome of Washington itself to crown with desperate and unbelievable victory the desperate gamble, the cast made two years ago.”
William Faulkner had been the fourteen-year-old boy he described in Intruder in the Dust. He had heard from Confederate old-timers about Pickett's charge at Gettysburg, where the flower of Virginia’s brave young men marched across an open field into the teeth of enemy fire and fell just short of breaking the Union line and attaining a victory that could have opened Washington to Confederate capture. Until that moment, victory for the South — independence for the Confederate States of America — was tantalizingly possible. Afterward it grew increasingly impossible.
Writers of history relish turning points — pivotal moments when fate pauses in doubt as to which path to follow. Theorists of history, by contrast, rarely take note of turning points or even admit their existence. A theory that awaited the outcome of a single charge in a single battle wouldn't be much of a theory at all.
Yet battles do matter, and the actions within them. We humans sometimes do things that don't make sense, but we wouldn't keep fighting battles if they were wholly irrelevant. Even so, some battles matter more than others. What about the battle of Gettysburg? Were Faulkner and generations of Southerners right to imagine that the Civil War might have ended differently had the Confederates won that battle? Or were they deluding themselves?
Union commander George Meade believed Gettysburg could be decisive, if handled badly. Meade was newly promoted to his position, and he didn’t want to lose the war in the first battle of his command. He considered withdrawing from Gettysburg before reaching a decision there, lest a ruinous defeat imperil the Union capital. Meade went so far as to draft retreat orders, in case the battle turned swiftly against his forces.
It’s this thinking by Meade that makes it unlikely that the success of Pickett’s charge would have changed the outcome of the war. Meade understood the essential arithmetic of the contest between North and South. The North could lose men in battle – even lots of men – and still keep fighting. The population of the North was much larger than that of the South, and the pool of potential soldiers in the North remained large. The South couldn’t afford to lose men in battle. Its manpower pool was nearly empty.
Only if Meade had foolishly insisted on fighting Robert E. Lee to the death at Gettysburg would a Confederate victory there have changed the outcome of the war. And Meade was anything but foolish. Indeed, Lincoln thought him too cautious. The president moaned when Meade failed to follow up the repulse of Pickett’s charge and pursue Lee on the Confederate retreat to Virginia. Lincoln had hoped Gettysburg would be decisive – for the Union.
If Pickett’s men had captured the Union position on Cemetery Ridge, Meade would have ordered the retreat he had planned. His army would have fallen back toward Washington, gathering strength from soldiers mustered by a recently enacted draft law.
Lee might have chased him, but at the hazard of extending his supply lines in enemy territory. Meade and Lee would have fought again, when the odds were more in Meade’s favor.
In some wars, especially when the stakes are low and the belligerents evenly matched, single battles can determine the outcome. The Civil War was not such a war. The stakes were existentially high for both sides, and the North had a sizable advantage in the resources essential to victory in war in the second half of the nineteenth century, including railroads, factories and mines, in addition to men of military age.
The one wild card that might have offset the North’s advantages was political opinion. Lee and Jefferson Davis hoped the invasion of the North that produced the battle of Gettysburg would demoralize Northern voters sufficiently to force Abraham Lincoln from office. A successor president might be amenable to a negotiated peace.
Had Meade allowed the destruction of his army at Gettysburg, demoralization to this degree would have been plausible. But Meade was determined to prevent that.
Had the Gettysburg battle taken place a year later, closer to the 1864 election, a Confederate victory even short of the destruction of Meade’s force might have done the trick. As things happened, the Union war effort after Gettysburg stalled by the summer of 1864. Lincoln expected to lose the election. But Union victories at Atlanta and Mobile Bay heartened voters, who returned Lincoln to office. At that point the dream of Southern independence definitively died.
Except in the minds of fourteen-year-old Southern boys with the imagination of William Faulkner.
There is a possibility, 1/1,000, that if Pickett succeeds that Meade inexplicably commits every blunder possible and the Confederacy scores a striking victory. If you are arguing based on that small of a percentage then, yeah, I agree it is possible. But it was extremely unlikely given all the variables which would have had to have gone Lee's way. More plusible is that Meade simply repositions his army and Lee retreats back to Virginia rather than exposing his army to another major battle deep in enemy territory. _________________ Gen. Blake Strickler
Confederate General-in-Chief
El Presidente 2010 - 2012
|
|
ACWGC 
ACWGC Memorial
CSA HQ
VMI
Join CSA
Union HQ
Join Union 
Login
FAQ
Search
Members
