If the Confederate Army had invaded the Union more than in July 1863,

[raccoon]

when they invaded MD and PA, what would their targets have been, other
than Washington, DC?

Just wondering, what if...

[mucifer]

1. I'm not sure but I saw this documentary last night that proved that they were vampires and

the north had to use silver to kill them.

BTW if you are in the right mood the Abraham Lincoln Vampire movie is hilarious!

[AsahinaKimi]

9. I thought it was interesting that

In the same year, Two movies with similar themes came out. Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter and....Abraham Lincoln vs zombies . It would seem that the 5th President of the United States, really had his hands full!

[lastlib]

10. (uhh...Lincoln was 16th.........) eom

[AsahinaKimi]

12. whoops you are right..

Brain fart!

[JHB]

14. Understandable. After all, James Monroe was a werewolf...

[AsahinaKimi]

15. Howls!!!

Do you think that could be the next movie? James Manroe, PRESIDENT AND WEREWOLF!!

[JHB]

28. The Monroe Doctrine...

...no European interference with the Americas, and outlawing silver bullets.

[Poll_Blind]

27. THESE are censored TIME magazine images of motherfucking "Ladybird" Johnson:

THEY THINK WE CAN'T HANDLE THE TRUTH!

THEY THINK WE CAn'T HANDLE THE TRUTH!

Papa Satàn, papa Satàn aleppi, aleppi!

PB

[bongbong]

33. Happens all the time

Lots of similar-themed movies come out at around the same time.

It happens because scripts get shopped around to multiple studios. All except one (for the lucky scripts ) will reject it; frequently if a studio hears it is in production elsewhere they will have one of their in-house writing crews make a near-copy, with the lawyers hovering nearby to make sure it is different enough to pass muster.

[Throckmorton]

39. Teddy Roosevelt was the Zombie Killer.

Abe did in the Vampires, and rumor has it that George Washington slew all the Warewolfs.

[Buns_of_Fire]

52. Any President who'd take on both vampires and (especially) zombies is OK in my book.

I think it should be made a requirement by the DNC for candidates to get an endorsement.

(No need to even attempt it in today's RNC, since they're already vampires and/or zombies.)

[Tuesday Afternoon]

2. two doors down they're having a party over in -

Creative Speculation.

[raccoon]

3. Guess I should've posted in American History --maybe in a week or so I'd get a response.nt

[mucifer]

18. I'm sorry. My response to your post really belongs in the DU lounge.

[GarroHorus]

4. All that needed to happen in early Spetember, 1862, is for a courier to not loose Special Order 191

On September 9, 1862, General Robert E. Lee drafted special order 191. This was the order of battle for the Army of Virgina's invasion of Maryland.

A courier lost a copy of special order 191 wrapped around three cigars. Corporal Barton W. Mitchell of the 27th Indiana Volunteers found it and it ended up in General McClellan's hands. This lead to the Battle of Antietem and that battle lead to Lincoln issuing Emancipation Proclamation which kept England and France from recognizing the Confederacy as a nation.

That single document guaranteed the South would lose.

In his Timeline 191 series, Harry Turtledove speculates on how history would have turned had a confederate corporal seen the courier lose the document and handed it back to him. The entire series covers through the end of the Second World War.

[Art_from_Ark]

7. Britain and France weren't about to recognize the Confederacy

while there was still an armed conflict with the North going on. First of all, they were busy with their empires and didn't want to be dragged into another conflict in North America. And the South, with its over-reliance on cotton production, had little else to interest Britain and France. Furthermore, the South had some pretty lousy generals (see Earl van Dorn for a good bad example), and a lower population base and almost no industrial production, resources, or money, so, even ignoring the question of slavery, their cause was not worth the risk of supporting.

[GarroHorus]

8. if McClellen had not had acces to special order 191, Lee woud have surrounded DC

France and England would have recognized the Confederacy had that happened.

[Art_from_Ark]

22. Only if the Union had surrendered and recognized Confederate independence

would Britain and France have recognized the Confederacy. There is no guarantee that Lee's plan would have succeeded, even if it had not been intercepted, considering the lousy civilian and military leadership that the South had. And since the South had little besides cotton that interested Britain and France, it just wouldn't have been worth the risk for them to prematurely recognize Confederate independence.

[JHB]

11. It's been a while since I read the first book of that series...

...How Few Remain, IIRC, but what ended the war there was a Confederate thrust on Philadelphia (forget if they took the city or not, but it was within reach and had less defense in position than Washington did). That led a still-vacillating North to negotiate an end to the war.

I'm sure no one will be surprised that as the series progressed, the Confederacy took setbacks in fighting the USA during WWI poorly, and developed its own fascist party that went by the name "Freedom Party".

[FarCenter]

17. Loss of Washington would not have crippled the Union

After all, it had been captured by the British just 50 years earlier, and that had little effect on the War of 1812.

The Union won the war by cutting the Confederacy into three parts along the Mississippi and by Sherman's March to the Sea, combined with a war of attrition on Richmond, the first modern war of trenches and artillery supplied by rail.

A similar push northwards by the Confederacy was not in their power. Their only hope was to injure the army of the Potomac enough tha the Union would enter into negotiations.

[ronwelldobbs]

46. If they took Washington, New York would have likely been the interim capital.

It would not have ended though war or guaranteed recognition for the Confederates. It would likely have been a rallying cry for the Union to defeat the South.

[FarCenter]

47. Possibly New York would have been the permanent capital

By that time, New York was the economic center of the country, and in most cases the economic capital and the political capital are the same.

DC was an artificiality that was no longer required after the Civil War.

[4th law of robotics]

21. I think as long as the North stayed committed to the fight they could have taken

Last edited Sun Jul 1, 2012, 12:39 PM - Edit history (1)

a number of catastrophic losses and still won.

The old school Napoleonic style warfare kinda favors the side with an inexhaustible supply of disposable men and munitions.

[gordianot]

5. If D.C. would have the war was over much the same as Richmond as thinking at that time goes.

Both targets were elusive and more symbolic in real value. The war was over when Union blockaded the Confederacy it just took time.

[GarroHorus]

6. France and England were a real threat to the blockade

That fact made the Emancipation Proclamation crucial for a Union victory. The real reason that proclamation was made was to take the possibility of England and France backing the confederacy off the table.

[Anarcho-Socialist]

13. I don't think the UK were particularly close to recognising the CSA

The CSA had a great deal of sympathy from the monarchy, the aristocracy, the House of Lords and sections of the Tory Party. But the working and middle classes were overwhelmingly pro-Union (save for the odd cotton town). It could have toppled any government which attempted it.

British military intervention would have been costly and for little reward. As much as Britain liked the South's cotton and its purchases of shipping, the North was a massive consumer of British exports, more so than the South.

By 1862 British investment had centered on cotton production in India which quickly replaced the trade with the South.

I would argue that the Emancipation Proclamation was crucial for an earlier victory in the sense that it would undermine the basis of the South's agrarian slave-holding economy, thus destroying the South's ability to wage war.

[demwing]

16. Your subject line is unclear

can you rephrase it please?

[coalition_unwilling]

26. Ha-ha-ha. One could say the war was over when P.G.T. Beauregard fired

on Fort Sumter . . . It just took time. Or the war was over when Lincoln was elected . . .

Watch out for the post hoc, ergo propter hoc fallacy

[coalition_unwilling]

19. Lee did not have to invest or capture Washington, D.C. to achieve

strategic success. He merely needed to present a credible threat to do so, in order to force Lincoln to sue for peace on terms that allowed the South to secede.

Lee's target was never purely geographic, it was always largely political.

Here's an interesting irony to ponder along those same lines (courtesy of James McPherson): had McClellan defeated the Confederates during the Peninsula campaign, the South would have re-entered the Union with slavery largely intact! In a weird sort of way, Lee's brilliant generalship during the '7 Days Battle' kept the South alive with slavery so that slavery could be ended after Antietam (when Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation).

[Laelth]

20. Both sides were operating on a "slice and dice" theory of warfare.

In the West, the Union sought to control the Mississippi in order to "sever" Texas and Arkansas from the main body of the Confederate states. Sherman's march to the sea was designed to sever Virginia, North Carolina, and South Carolina from Florida, Alabama and Mississippi while dividing Georgia in half. Similarly, Lee's campaign into Pennsylvania was headed towards the Great Lakes in order to "sever" the Midwest from the mid-atlantic and New England states.

Whether this was wise military strategy is another question. Ultimately, that was the thinking of the day. Liberating DC, as far as I know, was no longer a Confederate objective in 1863. So, as far as targets go, I don't think the Confederates had any specific targets in mind. Rather, they wanted to cut rail lines and communications between large sections of the North, and this could have been achieved using any number of various "slice and dice" models.

-Laelth

[coalition_unwilling]

23. Laeith, I have to disagree strongly with your assessment of

Southern strategic aims in 1863. AFAIK, the South cared only about successfully seceding from the Union and shaped its military strategy to serve that end. Such that, when Lee invaded Pennsylvania in 1863, it was with the idea of posing a credible threat to D.C. (by pivoting to the East), so as to compel the Union to sue for peace on terms that would allow the South to secede.

Then Lee saw a chance to fight a decisive battle at Gettsyburg and ignored Longstreet's pleas to try to maneuver around Meade.

Now I don't stay up to date on Civil War historiography, so there may be some recent scholarship to support the 'Great Lakes' idea you put forth in your first paragraph. Again, though, my reading suggests that any military action the South took, imo, was done with an eye to forcing the Union to sue for peace and not to liberate territory or sever the Union.

[Laelth]

24. There can be little doubt that Lee's principal goals were political.

That, after all, was as much as the Army of Northern Virginia could really do--pose a credible threat, as you say, and hope for a political solution, i.e. that the North would give up and just let the South go. And I'm reciting what I recall from study many years ago. I am certainly not up to date on the most recent scholarship, but I do recall having heard that the Confederates at least debated severing the North in the same way that the North was severing the South. In fact, the main body of Lee's army, iirc, was well north of Gettysburg when Meade took up a strategic position to the south of Gettysburg and threatened Lee's supply lines. Lee had to turn his army around and head back south in order to engage Meade. From what I recall, whether he intended to go all the way to the Great Lakes or not, Lee wanted Lincoln and Congress to think he was headed to the Great Lakes and intended to sever the North.

I honestly don't think I dreamed this up, but I haven't done any real study on this in years. I'll have to look around and see what I can find.

-Laelth

[coalition_unwilling]

25. I shall do likewise later today and tomorrow (when library is open here in LA). I only

have McPherson's one-volume 'Battle Cry of Freedom' on my shelf and mostly rely on the library.

Gettysburg actually happened 'by accident' as Confederates had heard rumors that there were shoes available in the town and did a Reconaissance in Force to liberate not territory but simply some shoes. On that whimsical note turned the fate of the entire Union.

[Laelth]

31. After some brief research ...

Coddington says Lee wanted to give Virginia a rest (by insuring that the Summer campaign did not occur on Southern soil) and to collect supplies in the North. That makes sense to me. Lee was also under pressure to aid in the defense of Vicksburg by sending troops into the Western theater, but rather than doing so, he decided to invade the North in the hopes that the North would pull troops away from Vicksburg to defend D.C. That makes sense to me as well. Ultimately, Coddington says, Lee just wanted to delay the war until the Fall of 1864 when, he believed, the "friends of peace" would sweep the Republicans out of office and put an end to the war. In the mean time, however, it appears Lee just wanted to get the war out of Virginia and to collect supplies in the North.

In that sense, I stand corrected. While railroad lines and telegraph lines were cut by the Army of Northern Virginia all the way up to Harrisburg, it seems that Lee, at least, had no intention of "severing the North" in 1863. Perhaps I am recalling some blowhard in Richmond who was still demanding that strategy, but Lee wasn't really taking orders from Richmond at that time. He was, pretty much, on his own and free to make his own decisions.

If you find out more, please let me know. Thanks.

-Laelth

[coalition_unwilling]

35. I actually believe you are more correct than I as to Lee's

strategic aim in invading PA.

After some brief research of my own . . . here's what McPherson has to say:

" . . . the Virginian dazzled Davis and Seddon with a proposal to invade Pennsylvania with a reinforced army and inflict a crushing defeat on the Yankees in their own backyard. This would remove the enemy threat on the Rappahannock, take the armies out of war-ravaged Virginia, and enable Lee to feed his troops in the enemy's country. It would also strengthen Peace Democrats, discredit Republicans, reopen the question of foreign recognition and perhaps even conquer peace and recognition from the Union government itself." (Emphasis added, p. 647)

Confederates to this point had not suffered a single major defeat in the East -- Antietam had ended up a stalemate -- and Lee's vision swayed the Confederate cabinet. But getting the Union to sue for peace seems at best a secondary or even tertiary goal, at least as far as the invasion of Pennysylvania is concerned. So it is I who stand corrected.

I wanted to check Bruce Catton and Shelby Foote tomorrow at the library to see what each could add. But I'm pretty sure we have between us covered all the major bases already.

[Laelth]

49. Excellent. Thanks for the insight from McPherson.

Always good to discuss these things with fellow history buffs.

-Laelth

[Laelth]

32. As an aside, Tim Smith says the "shoe supply" theory is a myth.

Here: http://www.civilwar.org/battlefields/gettysburg/gettysburg-2011/gettysburg-then-and-now.html

-Laelth

[KG]

29. both of Lee's invasions were disasters for the AoNV.

the south just didn't have the resources to support invading the north. Wash was never in danger of being captured, especially by '63.

the west had been lost by 1863. the best the south could hope for by then was to play for a tie and hope the north got tired of war.

[Tierra_y_Libertad]

30. Invading the North in 1863 was an act of desperation for the Confederacy.

They were being strangled by the blockade and Vicksburg was about to fall cutting them off from the west. It was a roll of the dice that failed. Meade's failure to pursue and destroy the Army of Northern Virginia prolonged an already lost war but brought in Grant who knew how to win one. If Lee had been as "honorable" as he was advertised to be, he would have surrendered after Gettysburg.

[coalition_unwilling]

34. If Lee had been as smart as his hagiographers would have him, he

would have surrendered to McClellan during the Peninsula campaign so that the South could re-enter the Union with slavery largely intact.

After Antietam (Sharpsburg), that ship had sailed.

Oops

[Tierra_y_Libertad]

36. Yep. And, Lee knew it.

But, instead of facing up to that reality, he fought on for the "lost cause" long after it was lost in a vain attempt to lure the Brits into getting involved. The French would do nothing without the Brits because they knew that the Brits would happily sit on the sidelines.

Lee could have spared the south Sherman's march and the horrors of the Wilderness and Sherman's March. If there was a "hero", it was Johnston who defied Jeff Davis and surrendered his army which prevented a prolonged and bloody guerrilla war.

[nadinbrzezinski]

37. The French had a problem in Mexico with Juarez

Not widely known in the US, but if they didn't have that issue, they probably would have gotten involved.

[Tierra_y_Libertad]

40. Yes. And, they needed the Brits to back them up.

Which is why, without British backing, they were steering clear of backing the Rebs.

[nadinbrzezinski]

45. Juarez was far more of an issue

I mean, they SHOULD have taken over the country like this, with no resistance and things...

Napoleon III was actually shocked that these indians fought back so hard, and even effectively to boot.

Even less known, there were some US Volunteers in Mexico.

[coalition_unwilling]

38. Well, I think had his orders not been discovered by a Union soldier, Lee

might well have whipped McClellan's ass during the invasion of Maryland and thereby forced the evacuation of D.C. As it was, Mac knew exactly what Lee planned and Lee still fought him to a stalemate at Antietam.

One of those what-if's of history.

The British working class (textile workers) are the real 'heroes,' imo, as they prevented the British government from backing a slaveocracy just to keep the supplies of cheap cotton coming. Of course, the British working class will never get the credit it deserves.

[Tierra_y_Libertad]

42. McClellan did his damndest to lose.

Not puposely, of course, but because of his sheer tactical stupidity and undying belief that the Confederates were always stronger than the Army of the Potomac. Grant finally broke that belief commonly held by the Union generals who preceded him and Sherman.

[coalition_unwilling]

44. Let's give McClellan his due. He was a great organizer and I think it's

fair to say that the Army of the Potomac that Grant inherited was McClellan's creation. But when it came to actual fighting and maneuvering, um, not so much.

One thing that endears me to Grant is that he was such a fuck-up before the War, almost as if it took something as significant as war to give his life meaning. There was an incident very early on (maybe Fort Henry or Donelson) where Grant said he realized that the Confederates were just as scared of him as he was of them. He never looked back from that realization.

[Laelth]

50. While we're giving credit ...

Joe Hooker deserves a lot of credit for his re-organization of the Army of the Potomac. It was Hooker's army that Meade inherited and used effectively at Gettysburg and that was then passed on to Ulysses S. Grant.

-Laelth

[coalition_unwilling]

54. It ain't just the Army of the Potomac that

Meade inherited from the eponymous Hooker

That aside, you raise a good point. None of Lincoln's commanding generals, imo, were without merit of some sort. It's simply that some (like McClellan) showed a marked lack of will to battle, while others (like Hooker) were impetuous to the point of ignoring Tactics 101 and making sure their flanks were securely anchored.

[Laelth]

55. Hehe. Well said. n/t

-Laelth

[exboyfil]

51. Lee was a military general

What you and the previous post are proposing is nothing short of treason. Lee would never throw the game (especially with lives at stake). No general should ever do that. Davis and the Confederate Congress would have had to make the decision to surrender at that time. Johnston surrended because obviously no functioning government remained after the fall of Richmond and the surrender of Lee's army (which he had to surrender or see it destroyed).

Lee is overrated especially given Gettysburg, but he was an extraordinary general. He was not a politician. His cause and tactics were far less barbaric than Shermans (contrast the behavior of his troops in the north versus that of Sherman). Sherman had to do what he did to break the back of the South but it was cruel and unpleasant (kind of like the 200 years that people were owned and not allowed freedom in the colonies and the U.S.). The South got what they deserved, and, in my mind, especially South Carolina who Sherman took a special interest in.

[Laelth]

56. Lee was an inspirational leader, but he also took extraordinary risks.

Pete Longstreet was probably the best corps commander and tactician of all the generals who participated in the war on both sides. If Lee had listened to Longstreet at Gettysburg, things may have turned out very differently.

As for the justice of the cause, it is sad, to me, that rich plantation owners in the South convinced hundreds of thousands of poor people to fight and die for slavery, an institution that hurt poor whites much more than it helped them. On the other hand, I have the same feelings about non-millionaires who vote for Republicans.

Plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose.

-Laelth

[exboyfil]

57. I agree with you about Longsteet

His suggestion to go around Meade's entrenched position and head towards D.C. was the right call (easy to say in hindsight). Longstreet always wanted to counterpunch from an entrenched position. He and George Thomas are two generals highly underrated with similar styles. They met at Chatanooga with Thomas holding the line after Rosencrans shameful retreat. If Longstreet did not have to answer to Bragg, then he might have broken an Union army on that day.

As to your second point, I always loved the fact that plantation owners/overseers were exempt if they had a certain number of slaves (Rich man's war - Poor man's fight). Of course the North had $300 as the price to get out of the draft (or hire a substitute which went for around $1000).

[hfojvt]

41. you mean besides Lawrence, Kansas

the campaign to take the northern half of New Mexico and Braxton Bragg's invasion of Kentucky?

[raccoon]

48. I'll have to google that...not familiar with it. nt

[Motown_Johnny]

43. Boston, New York...

any and all major sea ports along the Atlantic to cut off help from Europe and to help move troops and supplies.

[TexasProgresive]

53. While Lee was trying to invade the Union

He let the life blood of the Confederacy die. When the Mississippi was lost there went the South.