So I just finished a great book called " Killer angels" which was a great introduction to the US Civil War, I don't really know a ton about the civil war but I have the bug now and have another book on the way. I did finish" Killer angels" with a couple of questions and I was hoping someone on here might be able to
tackle them for me.
1. Why was ( and still is) Lee considered a great General? From what I read his tactics cost the confederates that battle and Pickett's charge was a calamity.
2. If Lee had listen to Longstreet do you think the confederates could have won that battle?
Since a lot of this comes down to Pickett's charge, I'm gonna post what another user on another forum wrote about it that I found pretty informative.
"I don’t think Lee ordering Pickett’s Charge was a mistake. It certainly didn’t end up with the results he wanted, but ordering an attack on the Federal lines wasn’t necessarily a predetermined blunder. We have to realize that hindsight is a thing and Lee had only his reports and observations from the previous two days to work with. And those reports and observations were actually quite good.
The conflicts that erupted in the first and second days of Gettysburg were tactically a draw, but the Army of Northern Virginia had nevertheless dealt a tremendous amount of damage to its Union counterpart. The 1st and 11th Corps had been thoroughly decimated by repeated Confederate attacks. The 3rd, 5th, and an entire division of the 2nd Corps had been ground into oblivion. On the night of July 2nd, Meade had only the 12th Corps and the 6th Corps in any form of coherent shape, along with four brigades in Hancock’s 2nd Corps that had escaped the catastrophe at the Peach Orchard. In comparison, Lee had an entire division of Longstreet’s corps ready for action anywhere he might choose, along with several lightly damaged portions of Powell Hill’s corps and one of Ewell’s brigades. And this isn’t counting several miscellaneous regiments that had stayed out of most of the fighting. What Lee had were fresh, battle-ready troops facing exhausted, battered ones, and I don’t think it was ignorance to expect the former to overcome the latter. What’s more, Lee also had precedence.
Scarcely ten years earlier, at Alma, Lord Raglan marched forward four divisions of infantry, 20,000 strong, in an enormous double line of battle two miles long. They were ordered to attack across 4,000 yards of difficult terrain, cross the knee-deep moat formed by the river Alma, and ascend the steep slopes of Kourgan Hill and Telegraph Hill to get to grips with the enemy. It cost Raglan 353 dead and 1,612 wounded but the British drove off 14,000 Russian infantry and took an entire series of earthwork batteries. Likewise in 1859, the French used the same tactics at Magenta and Solferino to such great effect that the defeated Austrians dropped rifle training from their drill regimen and concentrated on stosstaktik --- storming forward with the bayonet.
Mass infantry assaults during those times and certainly in Lee’s times could work, provided that they had enough momentum left when they reach the enemy lines. The key word here being momentum. And contrary to popular belief, it wasn’t artillery that forced momentum to stop in Pickett’s charge.
If we look back to Raglan’s attack at the Alma, the general had dispensed with any artillery bombardment altogether. No supporting battery fire seems suicidal, but the simple reason was that the British didn’t need it. At Waterloo, Napoleon needed his artillery to silence the enemy’s in order to prevent his moving columns of infantry from being smashed apart. At Alma, Raglan had intended his force to advance in line of battle from the very start. Just as an advance in line was slower than a swiftly moving column, it also presented a much thinner and harder target for artillery to disperse at long range (with shell) or medium range (with solid shot). This was the formation that the Confederates used when they marched out of tree line of Seminary Ridge and into the sights of the Federal artillery. The Union had plenty of cannons and plenty of ammunition, thanks to the foresight of Meade’s chief of artillery, Henry Hunt, but the targets they were presented with, the wafer-thin lines of rebel infantry, were incredibly hard to hit. Many of their shells overshot and those that did hit their mark killed men in twos or threes, instead of the potential dozens had the Confederates attacked in columns or blocks. The Federal batteries were causing casualties, hundreds of them, but it was not enough to stall the butternut advance or even to slow it.
No, it wasn’t the vaunted artillery that would cause Pickett’s Charge to falter, but the
terrain."
eace
