Gettysburg: the Last Invasion - updated 10/25

Gettysburg: the Last Invasion,  by Allen Guelzo

Weak at beginning and end, though kind to Reynolds. 

If Lee's intelligence was good, as Guelzo claims, Ewell wouldn't have been preparing to assault Harrisburg on the 30th. 

At 3 pm on the 29th, Ewell received a message from Lee to move back from Carlisle outside Harrisburg to Chambersburg on the west side of South Mountain. Fatefully, Ewell started Johnson's division in that direction. At 7 pm, Ewell received a countermanding order from Lee to head for the vicinity of Cashtown/Gettysburg. It was too late to call back Johnson. Johnson's division would not arrive in time to fight at Gettysburg on the 1st because of the circuit route it took to Gettysburg. Better intelligence and Ewell might have had the manpower to successfully assault Cemetery Hill on July 1.   With adequate intelligence and sound judgement,  Lee would have never let Hill bring on a battle while Lee's army was divided by South Mountain.  How in heaven's name did Hill and only two-thirds of Ewell's corps end up at Gettysburg with the entire army of the Potomac already at or nearby.

Where was J.E.B. Stuart?   Regardless of how he got there,  he was where he was supposed to be on July 1.  At Carlisle,  ready to cover Ewell's assault on Harrisburg.   Problem was Ewell was long gone and neither Ewell nor Lee had bothered to leave someone at the appointed rendezvous to tell Stuart plans had changed.

By plan, by definition, Stuart would be separated from the rest of Lee's army by South Mountain until Stuart linked up with Ewell at Carlisle.   It was Lee's plan.

In the pursuit of Lee after the battle, Guelzo assumes Meade could have destroyed Lee if Meade had attacked on the 13th before Lee could cross the Potomac. Earlier Guelzo says Lee had very nearly won at Gettysburg and that his efforts had left the Union army in tatters. It's hard to believe that an army in tatters only days before would have been able to successfully assault Lee's prepared positions on the east bank of the Potomac. More likely a precipitous, all out attack on the 13th would have been another Cold Harbor.

American historians blame generals, Lee and Meade included, for failures to deliver a knockout punch during the Civil War.   Few if any of these historians seem to have read Epstein's Napoleon's Last Victory, which describes the paradigm shift that occurred during the Napoleonic wars.  Countries mobilized by mass conscription.  Campaigns were fought on multiple fronts.  By 1808, armies were being organized into corps structures that were flexible and resilient, making it extremely difficult to entirely destroy an army in one battle like the French did at Austerlitz in 1805.   Viewed in light of the paradigm shift, the North should have expected a long war of attrition, but didn't.   Instead the North expected an easy victory, mobilized piecemeal, never fully taking advantage of its massive manpower advantage, fighting battles far too often on roughly equal terms ... often against opponents barricaded as extensively, if not more so, than the Russians at Borodino.

Moreover,  historians neglect questions of individual and organizational development.   American's had never fought a war with gigantic, multi-corps armies.   Some of the officers had solid theoretical backgrounds and combat experience with smaller units, but to a man, the Civil War was on-the-job training, building huge organizations and moving them all over a continent while navigating the politics of a nation that was divided on more than one front.   General officers were finding themselves and finding competent officers to work under them.   Meade couldn't have succeeded without Reynolds, Hancock and Warren.   Grant had Sherman and Sheridan.   Connolly's diary 
(https://hidden-civil-war.blogspot.com/2018/07/the-irish-and-lincoln-why.html) is valuable not simply because it illuminates Sherman's Georgia campaign, but also because, in passing, it details the competencies a staff officer needed to develop and how general officers relied on young staff officers to scout movements and deploy troops.

In 1861,  there were few if any 1864 Connolly's.   The Grant of 1862 wouldn't have fared any better than the McClellan of 1862.  The Grant of 1862 was lucky to survive Shiloh.  The Grant of 1863 wouldn't have done better than Meade.  It took Grant six months to capture Vicksburg in 1863.

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For more detail on the lead up to Gettysburg, see 
http://hidden-civil-war.blogspot.com/2013/08/the-great-militia-mobilization-of-june.html

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The Corps d'Armee engagement, or trap. Acting on superior understanding of the tactical situation,  an army corps engages an enemy and hangs on while its supporting allied corps concentrate to develop a tactical advantage in an escalating battle of attrition,  if possible the opponent is drawn in the direction of the concentrating allied corps.

The Irish and Lincoln: Why Reconstruction Was Doomed

"Ask them where they are going ... invariably the reply is:  'Don't know Massa; gwine along wid you all."

"I shall be home in 100 days."

James A. Connolly was the first-generation Irish-American who blew the whistle on General Jefferson Davis when Davis deliberately abandoned liberated African-Americans on the Confederate side of Ebenezer Creek during Sherman's 1864 march to the sea.   Connolly was present when Davis's aides pulled in the the pontoon bridge, telling an outraged Connolly that it was Davis's order to leave the blacks behind.

It's astonishing that Major Connolly's whistle-blowing went unpunished.   He went outside the chain of command and wrote directly to congress and others.   This was a doubly bold move since Davis was infamous for murdering a superior officer in 1862.   Connolly's survival is probably due to his own commanding general [Baird] being a devout abolitionist and relative of Gerrit Smith,  Connolly being a popular officer and Davis realizing he wouldn't get away with murder twice.    When called on the carpet over the Ebenezer Creek incident,  Davis claimed leaving the blacks behind was an accident.  Sherman left Davis in command of the XIV Corps for the Carolinas campaign, but the U.S. Senate refused to confirm Davis's brevet appointment to major general and after the war Davis was sent to command the Department of Alaska.  Connolly went back to Illinois when the war ended and successfully ran as a Republican for the state and U.S. House of Representatives.

The Davis story is but a part of the story told in Connolly's dairy and his many letters to his wife:   Three Years in the Army of the Cumberland.   Nearly 400 pages of the monumental and mundane.   The entire story is an unfiltered epistle to Connolly's wife.   Lot's of "I love you," "I miss you," I'll be home soon."   "Many are sick."   I think I had typhoid, am weak but getting better.   Sniper missed me.  I'll be more careful.   Connolly's wife Mary Dunn is a school teacher.   They're readers and trade literary references:  I stayed "up to midnight last night to read Alexander Dumas' account of the life and death of Louis XV.   Every fellow has to 'paddle his own canoe,' even Louis XV, and a sorry voyage he made of it."

The story gives insight into the development of effective staff officers who the generals use to supply, encamp and deploy troops, scout routes for moving the army and confirming whereabouts of the enemy.  Connolly also describes the evolution of an army's organic capability to fight a battle.   At Missionary Ridge the men were ordered to assault trenches at the foot of the ridge ... with the general's expectation that this limited maneuver would relieve pressure on another part of the battlefield.   Charging into the open in front of the heavily defended ridge seemed suicidal, but almost immediately the men realize they are under the guns of the Confederates entrenched on the top of the ridge.   The Union troops just keep going.   Soon flag bearers are waving their flags on the steep ridge just below the Confederate trenches.  One, two then three are waving their flags.   The Confederates can't shoot at the flag bearers without standing up in the open.   The men following the flag bearers probe for a weakness.   Then suddenly Union troops find a weakness and hop up into the Confederate fortifications and are followed by others across the line and in a blink of an eye and furious fighting 60 Union regiments are on top of the ridge and the Confederates are running for their lives.   General Grant is watching and shouts in dismay "who the hell ordered that."   Tolstoy who recounted the chaos of Borodino, a battle that dwarfed Gettysburg in combatants and casualties,  and pooh-poohed the idea that great men control the fate of nations,  would have chuckled at this.   In Georgia and the Carolinas Connolly portrays an army that is often barely under control with the soldiers saving their special vengeance of fire and mayhem for South Carolina.

Clueless.  Connolly represents the best of the enlightened Union army soldier.   He admires Henry Ward Beecher,  Lincoln, Gerrit Smith, Wendell Phillips, and generals Rosecrans, Sherman and Baird.  Connolly's set on whipping the Confederates,  freeing the slaves ... and going home as soon as possible ... oblivious to the fate of the freed slaves as soon as Connolly and the Union soldiers go home.   His unfiltered comments, at times benevolent, at times offensive, illustrate  how incomprehensible the idea of slaves fully becoming Americans was even to enlightened Northerner.   

An American War and Peace

Regarding favorite books,  you can only read War and Peace so many times ... so at the moment ... I am reading an Irishman's American  War and Peace,   Sherman's march through the South ... part Tolstoy and part Mark Twain... a lot of Twain.   It's a fascinating account ... the author swears up and down that the adopted Irishman Sherman did not really make Georgia howl.   It was South Carolina that Sherman let have it.   His men could hardly wait to burn and loot the state that spawned the rebellion.  By the time they reached the capital Columbia there was little Sherman and his officers could do to stop them and the soldiers and angry blacks burned Columbia to the ground.

Shortly after Columbia burned:

An apparently wealthy planter, feeling that he was quite safe under the British lion's paw, pompously walks up to [the Irish]  General Logan, with his hands stuffed in his capacious pockets, and his hat independently on, saying,  "General, you see I want protection from these houtrages;"  and he points at two soldiers, one in pursuit of a young grunter [pig], which seemed as indignant as his master at the outrages inflicted on a Hinglish subject; another was carrying on an excited chase after a rooster, timing the amusement by an occasional fling at some members of the rooster's family that crossed his path.

"Why would I give you protection?"

"Sir, I claim protection.  I am a Hinglish subject!"  he exclaimed, with the air of Lord John Russell [who let Ireland starve]

"A what?"

"A Hinglish subject, sir;"  and he actually swelled out, like the frog in the fable, at his own importance.

"What the h--ll, then, are you doing here if you are?  The boys will take every hog and chicken that you have, though you are a British subject.  British subject be hanged!"

The last thing we heard from the old gentleman, as we rode away, was "I'll have redress,"  "Hingland shall hear of this," and the like, while the boys were making flank movements on all sides, well loaded with the rich spoils of the farm-yard.  I think the number of muskets we picked up, with the Tower stamp on them, did not dispose the general very favorably towards Hinglish subjects.

In another Logan cameo,  the Confederate cavalry are hectoring the Union troops like Tolstoy's Cossacks hectored the French as they retreated from Moscow in the dead of the Russian winter.  The Confederate Cossacks engaged Logan's foragers, kill most and then execute the rest after they surrender.   Logan immediately executes two Confederate prisoners and sends a third back to the Cossacks with the warning that if the Cossacks kill another Yankee who surrenders that he, Logan, will shoot five Confederate prisoners for every Yankee executed.

The war between brothers?