Should have retreated from Gettysburg following the second day of battle, but Lee's ego got the better of him. When you start formulating plans that your chief Lieutenants have no faith in, you've started losing a war. Retreat is a legitimate tactic of warfare, it's not running away-it's recognizing that your current dispositions are unfavorable.
True, Lee was not up and concentrated. He really didn't have an idea of what the Federals had, as troops, who could come up and what they brought to play with. That said, falling back to better ground to be defended. That said, it would be a defensive campaign.
I guess all Lee had to do was call a timeout and Meade would have just sat on his hands and let Lee retreat. The armies were engaged and could not easily disengage without being very vulnerable to counterattack. Lee's only fault was that he placed confidence in Longstreet who failed Lee and his men. After the war you could tell if Longstreet was lying if his lips were moving or pen was writing.
Should have retreated after day 1. There was no reason to attack those heights, especially Culps Hill and Cemetery Hill. I understand that the fighting in the southern end of the field around the Peach Orchard, Wheatfield, and the Round Tops wasn’t intended to be a head on collision but rather a flanking movement against Cemetery Hill. But even then, the risk was too great, especially since you knew the rest of the army of the Potomac was coming and may end up on your flank as you drive northward toward Cemetery Hill. The only chance to win the Battle of Gettysburg was on the evening of July 1st if they had taken the heights that night. But given what happened in the twilight at Chancellorsville… you can understand their reluctance to push things in the late hours of the day. Longstreet’s idea of setting up in a defensive position and letting the Union attack has merit but if Meade was slow or patient, the south could run out of supplies. A series of small skirmishes and strength sapping fights would bleed the south of power to fight that decisive defensive battle.
@andygossard4293 War is in the way you desire this or not. We see today in América an great Strugle about who is really american people. There a social riot in the mexican border where famine people want to get in USA. Central América was sistematicaly destroyed by US Forças in first midle of XX Century and until today they can not sustain a economic growth. Incide USA almost every Day there be mais shooting, principalmente in scholl like a colective mindset of any psycho that blame Education System of América for dont respect and protect them from Bullyies, and Bullyies are now the dominar class in country. Civil War never ended in USA.
The battle was lost before Day 2. The Federals' tenacity north-west of town on July 1st, took the wind out of the Confederates' desire to follow-up their initial successes. Once The Union was entrenched on Cemetery and Culp's Hills, and with the arrival of additional Federal Corps, the die was cast.
Ok, I feel like the dialogue of others describing Longstreet at Gettysburg could infer that he didn’t try hard to win. Meaning he sent off tens of thousands to die or be seriously wounded. I have a hard time accepting that as a rational conclusion. I believe he did what he honestly felt best within the parameters of his orders. And no, I don’t believe that going around to the right would have worked. Thousands of Union troops were either marching through or were already stationed there. The way around to the right was a red herring that simply wouldn’t work. Mead simply beat Lee. Sometimes that all there is to it.
Lee never stood a chance as the US had a constant resupply of troops and material, while the southern logistics did not exist so far in US territory. Meade simply had to wait and watch Lee's army die or retreat.
@@TorianTammas Lincoln understood pretty early in the war that the destruction of the armies in rebellion was how the war would end. Seems like utilizing the resources he had was a winning strategy. And there was far more to the winning strategy of the North than just keep sending more and more men until the south’s men all died. The naval blockage and the theaters in the west destroying the south’s ability to move men and supplies are a major part of what won the war. Lee figured out pretty early that the North would win if he couldn’t effect a serious victory in battle to force peace talks. It’s why he invaded Pennsylvania to begin with. The war was being lost in every other theater of action. He basically was the only force that could potentially get it done. But then Mead beat him fair and square when Lee HAD to win. That’s just how the roll of the historical dice went. Lee wasn’t perfect. He made mistakes and lost. Same as most other generals in history.
You are correct in noting that when the Confederate forces looped around the Army of the Potomac and entered Maryland and PA, the Federals had interior lines and could concentrate more easily, whereas the CSA forces were scattered, and Stuart was off chasing with his ego. The battle was lost on the first day when the Confederates did not vie for the local elevated ground. I doubt Jackson would have missed that. Meade also did a better job of keeping his army within supporting distance. The odds of Lee pulling off victory with the manpower limitations he had and "lieutenants" that no longer were so capable of tactical brilliance-surprise nor had complete faith in the strategic offense, were awfully thin to begin with, and after the first day, Lee's stubbornness set in. The third day was stubbornness bordering on delusion. The Federals had numbers AND position, and they had long proved they could fight.
My great great grandfather fought at Gettysburg with Jackson's Virginia horse artillery of Jenkins Cavalry Brigade. There's a letter he wrote shortly after the battle in which he referenced the confusion among Confederate leadership during the fight. His unit received zero orders when arriving on the field on the first day and simply watched things unfold. On the second day they were placed in such an exposed position that they were forced to move their ammunition further to the rear thus increasing reload time. And then on the third day, prior to Pickett's Charge, the battery commander realized that he was out of range but was denied when he requested to move forward. He took it upon himself to move the guns forward anyway but was soon ordered back to the original position. When the brigade commander noticed that they weren't firing he chastised the battery commander and ordered him to open fire. The battery proceeded to launch several dozen shells into an empty field 40 yards short of the Union line.
Good video - one thing that should be not forgotten is that Lee just didn’t lose Gettysburg, Meade and crew out generaled the confederate forces on balance over the entire battle and won a great victory.
@sba8710 There's an in depth discussion of this. Meade's supply train had been hit by Stuart, and his troops desperately needed food. That plus the rain and the huge numbers of wounded left on the battlefield made effective pursuit impossible.
@@sba8710 That isn't as true as you think. The weather turned to rain and turned the roads into quagmire, Meades Army was reconstituting after a major battle, but the Union Cavalry harassed and pursued Lee all the way to Williamsport. Lee's Army had fortified positions along the Potomac and the weather hampered the Union's ability to accurately scout Lee's Army. A defeat in the Aftermath of Gettysburg could have left Washington open to the Confederates.
After the war Longstreet advocated unity. He was character assassinated by unreconstructed confederates - the mediocre Jubal Early and Richard Ewell. Who also set up the Virginia Historical Society to push the Lost Cause myth + control textbooks. They used Longstreet's mild criticism of Lee (e.g. on the 2nd + 3rd day at Gettysburg). Lee was fine with him, but older & died soon after. The attacks then buried Longstreet's reputation for many for a century or more. He was right about a lot!
Let's heap tons of praise on Tom Berenger for his portrayal of Longstreet . We saw a very humane and complex character asked to do the impossible and who full well knew it.
Lee would have done well to remain in a defensive war knowing his manpower was limited .His decision at Gettysburg was a water loo outcome .Longstreet was right about the advance.
Lee refused to accept that he was a middling offensive general, at best. His real strength was in defensive warfare and fortifications. He just refused to believe that he could win without going on the offensive, so he kept attacking when the smart move would have been to simply entrench and wait for the North to get tired of the war.
I have never thought that the souths industrial base allowed them anything but being capable of defensive war. Maybe if they had taken DC in the first months but after that…. How many times has it been said that the Civil War presaged contemporary industrial warfare on a scale no one was prepared for?
Lee is said to have been sick with dysentery during Gettysburg. That may have affected his judgment, made him want to just get it over with. And up to that time ANV had been winning most of the battles. Lee had two problems; he didn't have good intel on the total Federal strength, and he didn't realize that under Meade, the Union army was finally getting its act together. Lee assumed that Meade was just another new, fumbling Union commander. A third factor was that the Union could send fresh troops to the front by railroad. Lee had only what he brought with him.
This is excuse-making. Dysentery and other ailments were commonplace in the 19th century. He wasn't the only general with these problems. If he was that sick, he should have temporarily yielded command or retreated until his health returned. Lee owns the defeat, pure and simple. As he himself said. If he was a union general, he would have been replaced after that battle. Say what you want about Lincoln, he was serious about winning and refused to put up with losers. _His_ problem was that he had so damn many bad generals to weed through. But by then, Lee _was_ the south. He couldn't be replaced because the AoNV would have collapsed. The thing people forget is that the armies were not static. The union army was not very good from 1860 through 1862. By 1863, it was much better, top to bottom. Whereas the southern forces got worse. Lee lost, in part, because he didn't have the army he used to have, but he gave orders as if he did.
I disagree with the previous commentor reply or at least in part. It's believed that lee was recovering from a heart attack he had just a week or two earlier and it's well known that for whatever reason heart attacks are known to effect people's judgment and even alter some people's personality. This isn't excuse making it's fact. Now as far as the union armies getting better where as the Confederate armies getting worse, I mostly agree with or at least when its comes to better equipment, better logistics, and moral. By 1863 the union was massively improving where as the south was being to wither.
@@curious968 Well said. Also worth noting that even in '62, the Army of the Potomac performed admirably on the defensive, especially in the Seven Days battles. Lee does not seem to have learned much from his experience at Malvern Hill.
So what the army depended on one man, and without him, they were 99% less effective? In the austrian-prussian war of 1866 the winning Prussian General did not give any orders on the battlefield as everyone knew how to play out the plan, and Austria surrendered after these losses.
Fredericksburgh & Chancellosville were Confederate victories that put an end to the respective invasions of Virginia but the Union army always regrouped and invaded Virginia again. To end this cycle Lee wanted a Napoleon -esque like battle of annihilation resulting in the destruction of the Union army. Lee's desperation to deliver a knockout blow may have influenced some of his decisions at Gettysburg. Even for a risk taker like him that final assault was really pushing it and seemed doomed from the start.
Lee's inability to put together a cohesive strategy made him flail about from one massive bloodbath to another. Of course Davis is just as much, maybe more, at fault for the lack of a national strategy, but Lee was the leading general in the Confederacy and he gave Davis no help.
Lee never took out a single army. So the likelihood to achieve that in the north were supply of men and material was strongest for the US was ludicrous.
@@aaronfleming9426 Yup. A number of ACW generals proved competent or better on defense. Only a precious few proved capable going on the offense. Lee is not on that list. A lack of coherent national strategy is a big contributing factor. Working with Davis was not easy, but "not my job" is a very weak excuse. Lee was one of the few men Davis would listen to. Lee is like the football head coach or baseball manager who takes his scrappy roster of players to the playoffs only to always lose every single post-season game, again and again. Yes, the man has some talent, but he is not worthy of consideration as among the greats. Malvern Hill. Antietam. Gettysburg is Lee's third and most egregious "running around like a chicken with his head cut off" moment. Lee had no understanding of the strategic situation. When in doubt, he threw away the lives of the men under his command.
Waterloo and Gettysburg were identical in that both unneccessarially assaulted a strong defensive position. The wiser tactic in both cases would have been to maneuver the enemy out of that position, then engage them. The Confederate leadership knew they likely could not win a long war against the North's greater manpower and resources. They had to seek a decisive victory to get a peace.
It should be noted that Longstreet's enthusiasm for an attack by 150,000 men into the Union is not necessarily at odds with his stated opposition to an offensive by the Army of Northern Virginia, roughly 60,000 men, in the event.
I noticed that too. There's a big "IF we had 150,000 men we could do it; but we DON"T so we shouldn't do it" implied in his statement; they all knew they didn't have that number.
@@aaronfleming9426 At the end the Army of Northern Virginia did not get the troops they could get. In fact 7000 to 9000 troops did not took part in the Gettysburg campaign. Lee asked for these troops in May, but Davies and special D.H. Hill refused this. This mostly very able and trained troops possibly could made the difference in battle.
The fundamental issue I have with Lee's decisions on this campaign is a lack of strategy. Lee might have thought that invading Pennsylvania was a strategy, but at best, it was only part of one. Longstreet wanting to fight only defensively was also only part of a strategy. The Confederate forces needed to do both, but they needed one more thing. They needed to put themselves into a position at which the Union forces needed to attack them. Longstreet wanting to move around the Union forces, get between the Army of the Potomac and Washington D.C., and then find good ground to defend, that might have worked. Might, but we will never know.
Even getting the Union to attack them wasn't a strategy; the Union was already on the strategic offensive, so they would have to attack sooner or later...or abandon the war. A strategy would have been to preserve resources when possible, waiting for opportunities to strike the heaviest blow at lowest cost, so that the Union would become discouraged and vote out the Lincoln administration in favor of a peace candidate. Without a real strategy, Lee's default setting was to defend every inch of Virginia and fight a pitched battle whenever the opportunity arose, with the vague notion that a knockout punch would win the war somehow.
The US in the north had a constant resupply of men and material. So any rebel army was a sitting duck waiting to die when their ammunition and supplies run out. The US did have no reason to attack them just to pin keep them engaged and wait for them to die or retreat. Lee had zero chance of achieving anything in the north.
@@TorianTammas I think you're mostly right, with the one caveat that invading the north was a great opportunity for Lee to resupply his army on northern soil. By the same token, we was preserving northern Virginia from the pressures of war, at least for a few weeks. So I'd just adjust the statement a bit to say that he had zero chance of achieving by fighting a major battle. I see the invasion of Pennsylvania as very similar to the invasion of Maryland the year before. It created some opportunities, but should not have had the objective of fighting a pitched battle. For example, in the invasion of Maryland, Lee was able to capture Harpers Ferry with a garrison of 12,000 men, at the cost of just a few hundred casualties of his own. That's a pretty nice victory...inflicting casualties at the rate of 24:1! He should have gone into Pennsylvania looking for a similar opportunity, but that's not how Lee worked. He wanted that big battle.
Improper fuses resulted in inadequate confederate shelling on day 3. Day 2 was inadequate coordination of attacks. Neither day should have happened. Lee should have moved to ground in between the Union and D.C. after day 1 victory. I personally think Lee wanted to just end it all at Gettysburg either way. Win oe Lose, he just wanted it over. However, his Army kept fighting and he couldn't quit on them.
Lee's coordination of forces would have been difficult with radio, let alone by horseback on that massive 6 Mile Long exterior line. If I remember correctly, the ends of the union position were 15 to 20 minutes apart
@@decimated550 I think you're on target. With the Union right bent back as it was, it was only about a mile from Little Round Top...a 15-20 minute walk or jog.
@@decimated550 During the entire battle, Meade had 10k men in the center of the position that could be moved to any place they were needed in minutes. Lee never had any hope of winning.
Not really. Lincoln believed himself to be in serious political danger as late as summer of '64. A rebel victory at Gettysburg - even a minor victory, which was about all they could hope for - may well have changed the dynamics of the war in favor of the insurrection.
@@andrewsiff Nope. The Confederates seccedes without really waiting any political moves from Lincoln. They attacked not only fort sumter, but also many others federal armoury without any federal agression.
Lee screwed up invading without a strategy, without a supply line and without enough men. The US had a constant resupply of men and material and Meade's army got stronger by the hour. Lee could either die or retreat.
Longstreet's comments about Lee are partly correct and partly a dislike of each other. Yes, ordering Pickett's charge across open field and up a rise to Cemetery Ridge was a huge blunder on the part of Lee. Yes, it's also a fact that the Confederates were outnumbered 2 to 1.
Where and when were the Confederates outnumbered 2:1? I mean, certainly in the aggregate, but not at Gettysburg, and definitely not on the first day. Other notable battles where the rebels had a numerical advantage: Wilsons Creek, Mill Springs, Gaines Mill, Pea Ridge, Chickamauga. They won several of those, and lost several rather spectacularly.
@@aaronfleming9426 - Glad you responded and brought that up. And just off the top of my head, here's another two battles where Confederate forces had a numerical advantage: Cedar Mountain and Brawner's Farm/Groveton. (Ironically, two fights where Stonewall Jackson did not perform nearly as well as his reputation among the general public would suggest.)
@@JTK122 Oh, good ones! Yes, Jackson was caught napping - literally - at Brawner's Farm. Another favorite - because it's the only one where a shot landed in my home state, Iowa - was Athens, Missouri. 2,000 rebels were whipped by 350 Union men. A victorious rebel army would have controlled northeast Missouri and could have walked across the Des Moines River into Iowa, cut a major railroad, broken up recruiting depots, seized piles of materiel...a minor battle because the Union won, but could have had major implications if the rebels had won...
Did read that E Porter Alexanders shells did not have proper fuses and flew way over the Union lines in the center. Longstreet was entirely correct, but Lee's ego would not give way. Glad, for Gettysburg became the high water mark of the Confederacy. The move back in the 1990s showed the disagreement between Longstreet and Lee. Obviously in the end, Longstreet was correct.
The Battle of Gettysburg was Gen Lee's Waterloo Like Napoleon he lost the battle due to not understanding what the enemy were doing and and why they were doing it and he's own arrogance and overconfidence
Well, the Confederacy did not have the moral high ground in the war so some people are still going to be gleeful that they lost. Remember the picturesque antebellum South with fiddle, DD and maids and horses and Mansions with large Greek columns. All that was built on slave wealth. The north was moving into the future with industry but the South wanted to remain Frozen in agricultural slave States and upper class with their ill-gotten gains
1:52 Jackson died 10 days after being wounded. You have blown all your credibility with me already. 3:23 The ANV never at any time had 150,000 men. 11:07 Johnston's information wasn't inaccurate at the TIME he checked the ground. 15:48 Your map completely left R.H. Anderson's Division out of the attack. 19:42 Lee never rode on Emmitsburg Road. That was certainly in artillery range and in rifle range in places.
Why not? All they had to do was inflict enough pain on the Union to get the Lincoln administration voted out. The huge Republican losses in the midterms were a good start. Their number one problem wasn't manpower or industry, it was lack of strategic vision.
For any chance of a confederate victory at Gettysburg, the southerners needed to take the high ground on day 1. Lee and Ewell screwed that up and Lee was downright foolish on days 2 and 3 which had zero chance of victories.
I don't think you know Pete at all. He left a memoire and there are several good bios. Best, "I Rode w Stonewall" by Henry Kidd Douglas who knew all these men intimately. bye
Can't bring yourself to blame the sainted Bobby Lee for his greatest failure, can you? Face facts, frontal assaults almost never worked in the Civil War no matter who did them. I've been to Gettysburg. The amount of sheer distance the southern forces had to cover to do Pickett was horrible. Even if the union artillery had been taken out (and why did no one verify this?) I'm not sure it works. And why didn't anyone use some of that southern artillery to take out some of the fencing on the Emmitsburg road? They knew it was there.
@@curious968 I don’t have to wasn’t it Gen. Lee who said, “It all my fault,” he took responsibility. As a commander, he bears ultimate responsibility for the actions of his men. He also wrote a letter to President Davis where he solicited his replacement at the head of the army.
What instructions are you referring to? Lee was astonishingly passive throughout the battle of Gettysburg. He gave, I believe, only one written order in three days. He never called a council of war; never got his three corps commanders in the same room. He'd already mismanaged his cavalry by giving contradictory orders to Stuart. The fact is, going on an offensive campaign was far more difficult than defensive operations in his native Virginia. Both of Lee's offensive campaigns were bungling messes.
I dont agree with this vision. North advance in a small batle to a huge invasion, but they underestimated The Union Army capability to learn fast with his own and many failures and made a desperate defense, os loose entire war..Pickets Charge was a huge mistake based in belief in power of great Confederate artillery attack.
So, somehow Lee has gone down in history as a great commander while Longstreet's name will always be tarnished by the loss at Gettysburg? And yet Longstreet had the winning strategy while Lee decided to ignore him and go for a frontal assault against an entrenched opponent. Short of point blank refusing Lee's orders, Longstreet had no choice to carry out what he knew would be a losing strategy and somehow HE gets blamed for it.
Your caption reads in ALL CAPS "THEY LIED TO YOU FOR 161 YEARS!" A lie means that the truth has been intentionally suppressed or replaced by an untruth. Your caption also infers that this plot to lie was hatched 161 years ago. I am left to wonder who the "THEY" is that would do such a thing and what their evil motive for doing so was. I also wonder what could have been gained from such a miscarriage of justice and dishonesty. Since disagreements and opposing opinions among the leadership in most conflicts are not uncommon, I have yet to discover where this big lie is. Apparently, you must’ve sensed its existence and worked tirelessly to expose it and put things right! If that is true why is it still so difficult to detect? But now that you have exposed it you certainly must feel a righteous sense of relief and satisfaction. What you have really exposed is your tendency toward sensational reporting, and your own willingness to bend the truth to bolster your TH-cam image. All you need to do to gain a faithful following is simply present the facts. You will not get a “Like” and a “Subscribe” from me.
I think the Confederate’s won battle after battle and thought they would win . Pickets charge was through an open field and that was dangerous. I think they should have took higher ground and waited for the enemy to come to them.
The US had no reason to attack Lee. They just had to sit close by and watch him die or retreat. Every day, Meade's army got stronger, and Lee's army weaker.
Lee was not a good general and the myth of his greatness is exactly that, a myth. Lee was a strategic failure. His tactical victories ended in overall defeat.
The Gettysburg Campaign was lost before they left Virginia. Why would you invade with an army you know to be much smaller than the one you'll be facing? The 3rd corps should've been manned with new divisions instead of pulling divisions from the 1st and 2nd corps. They had literally 10s of thousands of troops all over the South doing absolutely nothing. Even if they won at Gettysburg, they didn't have the troops to follow up on the victory.
Like the invasion of Maryland the year before, it wasn't a terrible concept. Lee could, and did, shift the theater of operations out of Virginia, and was able to handsomely supply his army with hundreds of wagonloads of Pennsylvania food. In the invasion of '62, Lee captured over 12,000 Union troops at Harpers Ferry...that's nearly equal to Grant's capture of Fort Donelson, and no mean feat. A raid into Pennsylvania might have yielded similar opportunities...the first day of fighting at Gettysburg, taken by itself, would have been a Confederate victory. He had the numbers, he drove 2 Union corps from the field, and he inflicted a good deal more casualties. The problem with Lee is that he wasn't looking for good victories; he was looking for that elusive knockout punch. That's why he foolishly stayed to fight at Antietam in '62, and continued to attack at Gettysburg in '63.
Lee is certainly overrated, as evidenced by his actions at Gettysburg. As others have already said, his pursuit of a grand napoleonic style victory on the battlefield was not a viable strategy for the south in the end. He should never have fought the battle of Gettysburg.
Well in 1866 and in 1870 the Prussian and Prussian-German Army did achieve such overwhelming victories against Austria first and later France. They had a clear strategy formulated by a general staff, the trained troops, and the plan was executed in the field.
I think that Lee knew that the South would lose a defensive war. He decided to abandon caution and try to strike a blow that would break Lincoln's resolve to prosecute the war further. The strategy failed.
@@curious968 Exactly. Lee (and Davis) should have had an eye on the elections of '64 instead of trying to win with a big knockout punch. As it happened, Lincoln was near despair by the summer of '64...imagine if Lee had preserved his forces for true opportunities instead of squandering his army in futile battles like Antietam, Chancellorsville, and Gettysburg.
It was a far fetched idea that the US with a constant resupply of troops and material could be harmed by that Virginian army without logistics and staying power in the north.
I'm thrilled the South lost and our Constitution was safe until lately. But I think Lee knew a protracted war would wear the Confederates down and the Union would not give up even with heavy losses. He saw if he could break the Union army at Gettysburg he could threaten Baltimore, Philadelphia and perhaps even New York. Sure Lee could have back off at Gettysburg. But the Union would still have worn him down and won, imo.
Lee could threaten nothing as his army had no resupply of ammunition or men. So even a beaten army of the Poromoc would gain daily more men. So it was a failed plan from the beginning to invade.
Say Lee wins at Gettysburg. It ends the war sooner. His army couldn't threaten the defenses at Washington at full strength, so his goal of defeating Meade and marching on Washington was a losing proposition anyway. If he did march on Washington after defeating Meade, he would do so with a weakened army with very little ammunition, unable to overwhelm the defenses. That puts his army into the position of having to put Washington under seige...which allows Lincoln to simply have another Union army hit Lee's forces from behind, crushing them against the fixed defenses of the city. Lee loses.
Wish to God any commentator here had been in Lee's place, then we should have been relieved of Yankee depredations after the war, and would have remained a free people. Why is no mention made of this... Lee was very ill around the time of this battle, displaying symptoms of a heart attack, often taken to bed. With Lee down, Stuart on a glory hound galavant, and the number two general disobeying orders, what would you expect?
Stuart was executing the discretionary - and rather garbled - orders that Lee gave him. What orders did Longstreet disobey? If anything, he was understandably reluctant to send his men on a suicide mission, and perhaps slow in executing the orders. Lee wasn't really behaving differently at Gettysburg than previous battles. Same recklessness, same hubris, same poor staff work, same strategic cluelessness. If anything he was more detached and inactive than previous battles...he sent what, one single written order in three days? Perhaps that was the result of a heart attack.
@@kevinbarrow5396 Of course it was. It required a constitutional amendment to get rid of and everyone in the 19th century, at least, knew it. It was the south itself that gave the opportunity for the 13th amendment to pass. Which Lincoln worked hard to get through congress. Never happens without the war. But the south was afraid that if too many free states got admitted, abolition would happen. They seceded in 1860 not because the demise of slavery was imminent, but because they realized the longer they waited, the worse their position was going to be. This gave Lincoln an opening he never gets otherwise.
@lotswifemusic9965 it wasn't the north either!New Jersey refused to ratify the 13th amendment until 1905.so it wasn't the north!I'm sure you'd like to believe that!
Longstreet 's account is basically a "It wasn't my Fault' apology written some 30 years later, when Lee was no longer around to defend himself and designed to make him look good to Northerners. It is in the end the memoir of a bitter and resentful man in his old age
Lee was a tactician. He never formulated a working strategy. So invading the north without logistic to supply his troops with ammunition and men was a failure to begin.
His account was only written because of the attacks from Jubal Early who tried to exonerate Lee and blame Longstreet and to take focus off his failure on the first day Cemetery Hill.
I only made it three and half minutes into this. So far, not one single accurate historical statement. Uh.... you do realize that Longstreet was a SUBORDINATE to Gen. Lee, right? That he was NOT in command?? Trash.
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Nice going, says a lot about you.
Should have retreated from Gettysburg following the second day of battle, but Lee's ego got the better of him. When you start formulating plans that your chief Lieutenants have no faith in, you've started losing a war. Retreat is a legitimate tactic of warfare, it's not running away-it's recognizing that your current dispositions are unfavorable.
True, Lee was not up and concentrated. He really didn't have an idea of what the Federals had, as troops, who could come up and what they brought to play with. That said, falling back to better ground to be defended. That said, it would be a defensive campaign.
I guess all Lee had to do was call a timeout and Meade would have just sat on his hands and let Lee retreat. The armies were engaged and could not easily disengage without being very vulnerable to counterattack. Lee's only fault was that he placed confidence in Longstreet who failed Lee and his men. After the war you could tell if Longstreet was lying if his lips were moving or pen was writing.
Should have retreated after day 1. There was no reason to attack those heights, especially Culps Hill and Cemetery Hill.
I understand that the fighting in the southern end of the field around the Peach Orchard, Wheatfield, and the Round Tops wasn’t intended to be a head on collision but rather a flanking movement against Cemetery Hill. But even then, the risk was too great, especially since you knew the rest of the army of the Potomac was coming and may end up on your flank as you drive northward toward Cemetery Hill.
The only chance to win the Battle of Gettysburg was on the evening of July 1st if they had taken the heights that night. But given what happened in the twilight at Chancellorsville… you can understand their reluctance to push things in the late hours of the day.
Longstreet’s idea of setting up in a defensive position and letting the Union attack has merit but if Meade was slow or patient, the south could run out of supplies. A series of small skirmishes and strength sapping fights would bleed the south of power to fight that decisive defensive battle.
Since the south hadwon so many battles, Lee thought his army was invincible. Nuh ha.
I don't think timeouts are called in warfare.
Greetings from Brazil. Merry Christmas for all war aficcionates and Civil War students and researchers. A war that that not ended untill today..
I think a real war afficionado would be someone who prepares strength relentlessly in order to avoid war at all costs.
@andygossard4293 War is in the way you desire this or not. We see today in América an great Strugle about who is really american people. There a social riot in the mexican border where famine people want to get in USA. Central América was sistematicaly destroyed by US Forças in first midle of XX Century and until today they can not sustain a economic growth. Incide USA almost every Day there be mais shooting, principalmente in scholl like a colective mindset of any psycho that blame Education System of América for dont respect and protect them from Bullyies, and Bullyies are now the dominar class in country. Civil War never ended in USA.
The battle was lost early in the second day. Time defeated them.
"I may lose a battle but I will never lose a minute." Napoleon.
The battle was lost before Day 2. The Federals' tenacity north-west of town on July 1st, took the wind out of the Confederates' desire to follow-up their initial successes. Once The Union was entrenched on Cemetery and Culp's Hills, and with the arrival of additional Federal Corps, the die was cast.
Ok, I feel like the dialogue of others describing Longstreet at Gettysburg could infer that he didn’t try hard to win. Meaning he sent off tens of thousands to die or be seriously wounded. I have a hard time accepting that as a rational conclusion. I believe he did what he honestly felt best within the parameters of his orders. And no, I don’t believe that going around to the right would have worked. Thousands of Union troops were either marching through or were already stationed there. The way around to the right was a red herring that simply wouldn’t work. Mead simply beat Lee. Sometimes that all there is to it.
Well said.
Yep
Lee never stood a chance as the US had a constant resupply of troops and material, while the southern logistics did not exist so far in US territory. Meade simply had to wait and watch Lee's army die or retreat.
@@TorianTammas Lincoln understood pretty early in the war that the destruction of the armies in rebellion was how the war would end. Seems like utilizing the resources he had was a winning strategy. And there was far more to the winning strategy of the North than just keep sending more and more men until the south’s men all died. The naval blockage and the theaters in the west destroying the south’s ability to move men and supplies are a major part of what won the war. Lee figured out pretty early that the North would win if he couldn’t effect a serious victory in battle to force peace talks. It’s why he invaded Pennsylvania to begin with. The war was being lost in every other theater of action. He basically was the only force that could potentially get it done. But then Mead beat him fair and square when Lee HAD to win. That’s just how the roll of the historical dice went. Lee wasn’t perfect. He made mistakes and lost. Same as most other generals in history.
You are correct in noting that when the Confederate forces looped around the Army of the Potomac and entered Maryland and PA, the Federals had interior lines and could concentrate more easily, whereas the CSA forces were scattered, and Stuart was off chasing with his ego. The battle was lost on the first day when the Confederates did not vie for the local elevated ground. I doubt Jackson would have missed that. Meade also did a better job of keeping his army within supporting distance.
The odds of Lee pulling off victory with the manpower limitations he had and "lieutenants" that no longer were so capable of tactical brilliance-surprise nor had complete faith in the strategic offense, were awfully thin to begin with, and after the first day, Lee's stubbornness set in. The third day was stubbornness bordering on delusion. The Federals had numbers AND position, and they had long proved they could fight.
My great great grandfather fought at Gettysburg with Jackson's Virginia horse artillery of Jenkins Cavalry Brigade. There's a letter he wrote shortly after the battle in which he referenced the confusion among Confederate leadership during the fight. His unit received zero orders when arriving on the field on the first day and simply watched things unfold. On the second day they were placed in such an exposed position that they were forced to move their ammunition further to the rear thus increasing reload time. And then on the third day, prior to Pickett's Charge, the battery commander realized that he was out of range but was denied when he requested to move forward. He took it upon himself to move the guns forward anyway but was soon ordered back to the original position. When the brigade commander noticed that they weren't firing he chastised the battery commander and ordered him to open fire. The battery proceeded to launch several dozen shells into an empty field 40 yards short of the Union line.
Filing this under things that never happened. You’re making up stories. Do you realize the range of those guns?
Good video - one thing that should be not forgotten is that Lee just didn’t lose Gettysburg, Meade and crew out generaled the confederate forces on balance over the entire battle and won a great victory.
Except for the part about not attacking the retreating Confederates and prolonging the war for years. That was a massive failure.
@sba8710 There's an in depth discussion of this. Meade's supply train had been hit by Stuart, and his troops desperately needed food. That plus the rain and the huge numbers of wounded left on the battlefield made effective pursuit impossible.
@@sba8710 That isn't as true as you think. The weather turned to rain and turned the roads into quagmire, Meades Army was reconstituting after a major battle, but the Union Cavalry harassed and pursued Lee all the way to Williamsport. Lee's Army had fortified positions along the Potomac and the weather hampered the Union's ability to accurately scout Lee's Army. A defeat in the Aftermath of Gettysburg could have left Washington open to the Confederates.
What "lie" has been exposed here? We have long known Longstreet's disagreement w Lee.
Agreed with u on that
After the war Longstreet advocated unity. He was character assassinated by unreconstructed confederates - the mediocre Jubal Early and Richard Ewell. Who also set up the Virginia Historical Society to push the Lost Cause myth + control textbooks. They used Longstreet's mild criticism of Lee (e.g. on the 2nd + 3rd day at Gettysburg). Lee was fine with him, but older & died soon after. The attacks then buried Longstreet's reputation for many for a century or more. He was right about a lot!
Lost cause myth!you fool!you have to be a Democrat today!no idea about reallity at all!
Let's heap tons of praise on Tom Berenger for his portrayal of Longstreet . We saw a very humane and complex character asked to do the impossible and who full well knew it.
Lee would have done well to remain in a defensive war knowing his manpower was limited .His decision at Gettysburg was a water loo outcome .Longstreet was right about the advance.
Lee refused to accept that he was a middling offensive general, at best. His real strength was in defensive warfare and fortifications. He just refused to believe that he could win without going on the offensive, so he kept attacking when the smart move would have been to simply entrench and wait for the North to get tired of the war.
Longstreet and others tried to talk Lee out of his plans to send Pickett out and up to the ridge. Lee's blunder.
Except Napoleon might have won Waterloo while Lee was doomed either way.
I have never thought that the souths industrial base allowed them anything but being capable of defensive war. Maybe if they had taken DC in the first months but after that…. How many times has it been said that the Civil War presaged contemporary industrial warfare on a scale no one was prepared for?
😂😂😂😂😂@@LonesomeDove-dn8dk
Lee is said to have been sick with dysentery during Gettysburg. That may have affected his judgment, made him want to just get it over with. And up to that time ANV had been winning most of the battles.
Lee had two problems; he didn't have good intel on the total Federal strength, and he didn't realize that under Meade, the Union army was finally getting its act together. Lee assumed that Meade was just another new, fumbling Union commander. A third factor was that the Union could send fresh troops to the front by railroad. Lee had only what he brought with him.
This is excuse-making. Dysentery and other ailments were commonplace in the 19th century. He wasn't the only general with these problems. If he was that sick, he should have temporarily yielded command or retreated until his health returned.
Lee owns the defeat, pure and simple. As he himself said. If he was a union general, he would have been replaced after that battle. Say what you want about Lincoln, he was serious about winning and refused to put up with losers. _His_ problem was that he had so damn many bad generals to weed through.
But by then, Lee _was_ the south. He couldn't be replaced because the AoNV would have collapsed.
The thing people forget is that the armies were not static. The union army was not very good from 1860 through 1862. By 1863, it was much better, top to bottom. Whereas the southern forces got worse.
Lee lost, in part, because he didn't have the army he used to have, but he gave orders as if he did.
I disagree with the previous commentor reply or at least in part. It's believed that lee was recovering from a heart attack he had just a week or two earlier and it's well known that for whatever reason heart attacks are known to effect people's judgment and even alter some people's personality. This isn't excuse making it's fact.
Now as far as the union armies getting better where as the Confederate armies getting worse, I mostly agree with or at least when its comes to better equipment, better logistics, and moral. By 1863 the union was massively improving where as the south was being to wither.
@@curious968 Well said. Also worth noting that even in '62, the Army of the Potomac performed admirably on the defensive, especially in the Seven Days battles. Lee does not seem to have learned much from his experience at Malvern Hill.
So what the army depended on one man, and without him, they were 99% less effective? In the austrian-prussian war of 1866 the winning Prussian General did not give any orders on the battlefield as everyone knew how to play out the plan, and Austria surrendered after these losses.
@@TorianTammas The Prussian military culture expected officers to aggressive and exercise their own initiative to achieve the mission.
Another thing weighting on Longstreet was that 4 of his children died a while ago from scarlet fever.
Fredericksburgh & Chancellosville were Confederate victories that put an end to the respective invasions of Virginia but the Union army always regrouped and invaded Virginia again. To end this cycle Lee wanted a Napoleon -esque like battle of annihilation resulting in the destruction of the Union army. Lee's desperation to deliver a knockout blow may have influenced some of his decisions at Gettysburg. Even for a risk taker like him that final assault was really pushing it and seemed doomed from the start.
Lee's inability to put together a cohesive strategy made him flail about from one massive bloodbath to another. Of course Davis is just as much, maybe more, at fault for the lack of a national strategy, but Lee was the leading general in the Confederacy and he gave Davis no help.
Lee never took out a single army. So the likelihood to achieve that in the north were supply of men and material was strongest for the US was ludicrous.
Lee should have been looking for a Saratoga, not an Austerlitz. He simply didn't understand the war he was fighting.
@@aaronfleming9426 Yup. A number of ACW generals proved competent or better on defense. Only a precious few proved capable going on the offense. Lee is not on that list. A lack of coherent national strategy is a big contributing factor. Working with Davis was not easy, but "not my job" is a very weak excuse. Lee was one of the few men Davis would listen to.
Lee is like the football head coach or baseball manager who takes his scrappy roster of players to the playoffs only to always lose every single post-season game, again and again. Yes, the man has some talent, but he is not worthy of consideration as among the greats.
Malvern Hill. Antietam. Gettysburg is Lee's third and most egregious "running around like a chicken with his head cut off" moment. Lee had no understanding of the strategic situation. When in doubt, he threw away the lives of the men under his command.
And Lee was by no means a Napoleon.
Waterloo and Gettysburg were identical in that both unneccessarially assaulted a strong defensive position. The wiser tactic in both cases would have been to maneuver the enemy out of that position, then engage them. The Confederate leadership knew they likely could not win a long war against the North's greater manpower and resources. They had to seek a decisive victory to get a peace.
Disarray on battlefield? Gee, that never happens.
A general, after the war, says he had all the right answers? Gee, that never happens either.
“corps” did he mean corps (pronounced “core") commander 28:00?
It should be noted that Longstreet's enthusiasm for an attack by 150,000 men into the Union is not necessarily at odds with his stated opposition to an offensive by the Army of Northern Virginia, roughly 60,000 men, in the event.
I noticed that too. There's a big "IF we had 150,000 men we could do it; but we DON"T so we shouldn't do it" implied in his statement; they all knew they didn't have that number.
@@aaronfleming9426 At the end the Army of Northern Virginia did not get the troops they could get. In fact 7000 to 9000 troops did not took part in the Gettysburg campaign. Lee asked for these troops in May, but Davies and special D.H. Hill refused this. This mostly very able and trained troops possibly could made the difference in battle.
It was probably a bad sign when Lee promoted an officer to *"corpse* commander"
The fundamental issue I have with Lee's decisions on this campaign is a lack of strategy. Lee might have thought that invading Pennsylvania was a strategy, but at best, it was only part of one. Longstreet wanting to fight only defensively was also only part of a strategy. The Confederate forces needed to do both, but they needed one more thing. They needed to put themselves into a position at which the Union forces needed to attack them. Longstreet wanting to move around the Union forces, get between the Army of the Potomac and Washington D.C., and then find good ground to defend, that might have worked.
Might, but we will never know.
Even getting the Union to attack them wasn't a strategy; the Union was already on the strategic offensive, so they would have to attack sooner or later...or abandon the war. A strategy would have been to preserve resources when possible, waiting for opportunities to strike the heaviest blow at lowest cost, so that the Union would become discouraged and vote out the Lincoln administration in favor of a peace candidate.
Without a real strategy, Lee's default setting was to defend every inch of Virginia and fight a pitched battle whenever the opportunity arose, with the vague notion that a knockout punch would win the war somehow.
The US in the north had a constant resupply of men and material. So any rebel army was a sitting duck waiting to die when their ammunition and supplies run out. The US did have no reason to attack them just to pin keep them engaged and wait for them to die or retreat. Lee had zero chance of achieving anything in the north.
@@TorianTammas I think you're mostly right, with the one caveat that invading the north was a great opportunity for Lee to resupply his army on northern soil. By the same token, we was preserving northern Virginia from the pressures of war, at least for a few weeks. So I'd just adjust the statement a bit to say that he had zero chance of achieving by fighting a major battle.
I see the invasion of Pennsylvania as very similar to the invasion of Maryland the year before. It created some opportunities, but should not have had the objective of fighting a pitched battle. For example, in the invasion of Maryland, Lee was able to capture Harpers Ferry with a garrison of 12,000 men, at the cost of just a few hundred casualties of his own. That's a pretty nice victory...inflicting casualties at the rate of 24:1! He should have gone into Pennsylvania looking for a similar opportunity, but that's not how Lee worked. He wanted that big battle.
The high southern bank of Pipe Creek, south of Gettysburg in northern Maryland, would have been ideal.
The Hodges family lost at least two fighting for the south. We lost one at Atlanta who fought north of Atlanta.
Improper fuses resulted in inadequate confederate shelling on day 3. Day 2 was inadequate coordination of attacks. Neither day should have happened. Lee should have moved to ground in between the Union and D.C. after day 1 victory. I personally think Lee wanted to just end it all at Gettysburg either way. Win oe Lose, he just wanted it over. However, his Army kept fighting and he couldn't quit on them.
How would Lee have moved to ground between Meade and D.C.? Meade controlled all the roads to D.C.
For someone wanting it to just be over, he sure fought on for another two years.
Lee's coordination of forces would have been difficult with radio, let alone by horseback on that massive 6 Mile Long exterior line. If I remember correctly, the ends of the union position were 15 to 20 minutes apart
@@decimated550 I think you're on target. With the Union right bent back as it was, it was only about a mile from Little Round Top...a 15-20 minute walk or jog.
@@decimated550 During the entire battle, Meade had 10k men in the center of the position that could be moved to any place they were needed in minutes. Lee never had any hope of winning.
Even if the confederate won at Gettysburg the war was already lost
Not really. Lincoln believed himself to be in serious political danger as late as summer of '64. A rebel victory at Gettysburg - even a minor victory, which was about all they could hope for - may well have changed the dynamics of the war in favor of the insurrection.
@@aaronfleming9426 No they would still lose the war. It was again futile and criminal by the traitors from the south causing more deaths.
@@aaronfleming9426what insurrection? Lincoln started the war.
@@andrewsiff Nope.
The Confederates seccedes without really waiting any political moves from Lincoln. They attacked not only fort sumter, but also many others federal armoury without any federal agression.
@ occupation of Sumter was aggression. Lincoln knew it.
Thanks
J.E.B Stewart screwed up joy riding up toward Harrisburg.
Lee screwed up not giving Stuart clear orders.
Lee screwed up invading without a strategy, without a supply line and without enough men. The US had a constant resupply of men and material and Meade's army got stronger by the hour. Lee could either die or retreat.
Lee screwed up by not utilizing the two corps of cavalry that stayed with his main forces.
@@DaveReece-u4b Lee screwed up they day he became a traitor.
Longstreet's comments about Lee are partly correct and partly a dislike of each other. Yes, ordering Pickett's charge across open field and up a rise to Cemetery Ridge was a huge blunder on the part of Lee. Yes, it's also a fact that the Confederates were outnumbered 2 to 1.
Where and when were the Confederates outnumbered 2:1? I mean, certainly in the aggregate, but not at Gettysburg, and definitely not on the first day. Other notable battles where the rebels had a numerical advantage: Wilsons Creek, Mill Springs, Gaines Mill, Pea Ridge, Chickamauga. They won several of those, and lost several rather spectacularly.
@@aaronfleming9426 - Glad you responded and brought that up. And just off the top of my head, here's another two battles where Confederate forces had a numerical advantage: Cedar Mountain and Brawner's Farm/Groveton. (Ironically, two fights where Stonewall Jackson did not perform nearly as well as his reputation among the general public would suggest.)
@@JTK122 Oh, good ones! Yes, Jackson was caught napping - literally - at Brawner's Farm.
Another favorite - because it's the only one where a shot landed in my home state, Iowa - was Athens, Missouri. 2,000 rebels were whipped by 350 Union men. A victorious rebel army would have controlled northeast Missouri and could have walked across the Des Moines River into Iowa, cut a major railroad, broken up recruiting depots, seized piles of materiel...a minor battle because the Union won, but could have had major implications if the rebels had won...
Did read that E Porter Alexanders shells did not have proper fuses and flew way over the Union lines in the center. Longstreet was entirely correct, but Lee's ego would not give way. Glad, for Gettysburg became the high water mark of the Confederacy. The move back in the 1990s showed the disagreement between Longstreet and Lee. Obviously in the end, Longstreet was correct.
Wow! Now Hollywood is an authoritative reference. 🤡
@qd4192 no, it's a fact. The Confederates could not maintain the quality levels of their shells which cost them at Gettysburg
@williamrossetter9430 it is a fact, but facts don't come out of Hollywood.
The Battle of Gettysburg was Gen Lee's Waterloo Like Napoleon he lost the battle due to not understanding what the enemy were doing and and why they were doing it and he's own arrogance and overconfidence
Gettysburg was Lee's "Battle of the Bulge."
who is "they?"
The fact that you all keep hammering the Confederacy at every turn....I doubt anything you say.
Well, the Confederacy did not have the moral high ground in the war so some people are still going to be gleeful that they lost. Remember the picturesque antebellum South with fiddle, DD and maids and horses and Mansions with large Greek columns. All that was built on slave wealth. The north was moving into the future with industry but the South wanted to remain Frozen in agricultural slave States and upper class with their ill-gotten gains
Much of the narrative is directly lifted from the movie “Gettysburg” but some good parts as well.
I've never heard of McClaus, for some reason.
It’s McLaws
@jimminshall7449 never heard of him either.
. Division commander in Longstreet's Corps.
@ETLee-db6cn thank you
1:52 Jackson died 10 days after being wounded. You have blown all your credibility with me already.
3:23 The ANV never at any time had 150,000 men.
11:07 Johnston's information wasn't inaccurate at the TIME he checked the ground.
15:48 Your map completely left R.H. Anderson's Division out of the attack.
19:42 Lee never rode on Emmitsburg Road. That was certainly in artillery range and in rifle range in places.
For the algorithm 🍻
The CSA never had any chance of victory in the war
Why not? All they had to do was inflict enough pain on the Union to get the Lincoln administration voted out. The huge Republican losses in the midterms were a good start. Their number one problem wasn't manpower or industry, it was lack of strategic vision.
For any chance of a confederate victory at Gettysburg, the southerners needed to take the high ground on day 1. Lee and Ewell screwed that up and Lee was downright foolish on days 2 and 3 which had zero chance of victories.
Longstreet was defeated before he started, didn’t even follow instructions…
If you’re defeated before you start you’ve already lost…
I don't think you know Pete at all. He left a memoire and there are several good bios. Best, "I Rode w Stonewall" by Henry Kidd Douglas who knew all these men intimately. bye
@@mjford6152he was a first rate commander. A great General . One of a Kind . He knew the Attack would not work . He was a brilliant commander.
Can't bring yourself to blame the sainted Bobby Lee for his greatest failure, can you?
Face facts, frontal assaults almost never worked in the Civil War no matter who did them.
I've been to Gettysburg. The amount of sheer distance the southern forces had to cover to do Pickett was horrible. Even if the union artillery had been taken out (and why did no one verify this?) I'm not sure it works.
And why didn't anyone use some of that southern artillery to take out some of the fencing on the Emmitsburg road? They knew it was there.
@@curious968 I don’t have to wasn’t it Gen. Lee who said, “It all my fault,” he took responsibility. As a commander, he bears ultimate responsibility for the actions of his men. He also wrote a letter to President Davis where he solicited his replacement at the head of the army.
What instructions are you referring to?
Lee was astonishingly passive throughout the battle of Gettysburg. He gave, I believe, only one written order in three days. He never called a council of war; never got his three corps commanders in the same room. He'd already mismanaged his cavalry by giving contradictory orders to Stuart.
The fact is, going on an offensive campaign was far more difficult than defensive operations in his native Virginia. Both of Lee's offensive campaigns were bungling messes.
I dont agree with this vision. North advance in a small batle to a huge invasion, but they underestimated The Union Army capability to learn fast with his own and many failures and made a desperate defense, os loose entire war..Pickets Charge was a huge mistake based in belief in power of great Confederate artillery attack.
nothing in war is easy or nice. Hence the difference between war and peace. Dont get the two mixed up.
So, somehow Lee has gone down in history as a great commander while Longstreet's name will always be tarnished by the loss at Gettysburg? And yet Longstreet had the winning strategy while Lee decided to ignore him and go for a frontal assault against an entrenched opponent. Short of point blank refusing Lee's orders, Longstreet had no choice to carry out what he knew would be a losing strategy and somehow HE gets blamed for it.
That's what the Lost Cause will do for a general's reputation...
I've always considered Longstreet the best leader for the Confederates. Seemed more controlled than Lee.
Your caption reads in ALL CAPS "THEY LIED TO YOU FOR 161 YEARS!" A lie means that the truth has been intentionally suppressed or replaced by an untruth. Your caption also infers that this plot to lie was hatched 161 years ago. I am left to wonder who the "THEY" is that would do such a thing and what their evil motive for doing so was. I also wonder what could have been gained from such a miscarriage of justice and dishonesty. Since disagreements and opposing opinions among the leadership in most conflicts are not uncommon, I have yet to discover where this big lie is. Apparently, you must’ve sensed its existence and worked tirelessly to expose it and put things right! If that is true why is it still so difficult to detect? But now that you have exposed it you certainly must feel a righteous sense of relief and satisfaction. What you have really exposed is your tendency toward sensational reporting, and your own willingness to bend the truth to bolster your TH-cam image. All you need to do to gain a faithful following is simply present the facts. You will not get a “Like” and a “Subscribe” from me.
Thanks buddy 😊
corpse commander?
DH. Hill was an interesting and probably a better choice for Corps command than AP Hill
I think the Confederate’s won battle after battle and thought they would win . Pickets charge was through an open field and that was dangerous. I think they should have took higher ground and waited for the enemy to come to them.
The US had no reason to attack Lee. They just had to sit close by and watch him die or retreat. Every day, Meade's army got stronger, and Lee's army weaker.
Lee was not a good general and the myth of his greatness is exactly that, a myth.
Lee was a strategic failure. His tactical victories ended in overall defeat.
fully agree!
You've gotta be a Democrat no real understanding of reallity!
@@kevinbarrow5396Dixiecrat.
@@kevinbarrow5396 Lee was the Democrat.
The Gettysburg Campaign was lost before they left Virginia. Why would you invade with an army you know to be much smaller than the one you'll be facing? The 3rd corps should've been manned with new divisions instead of pulling divisions from the 1st and 2nd corps. They had literally 10s of thousands of troops all over the South doing absolutely nothing. Even if they won at Gettysburg, they didn't have the troops to follow up on the victory.
Like the invasion of Maryland the year before, it wasn't a terrible concept. Lee could, and did, shift the theater of operations out of Virginia, and was able to handsomely supply his army with hundreds of wagonloads of Pennsylvania food. In the invasion of '62, Lee captured over 12,000 Union troops at Harpers Ferry...that's nearly equal to Grant's capture of Fort Donelson, and no mean feat.
A raid into Pennsylvania might have yielded similar opportunities...the first day of fighting at Gettysburg, taken by itself, would have been a Confederate victory. He had the numbers, he drove 2 Union corps from the field, and he inflicted a good deal more casualties.
The problem with Lee is that he wasn't looking for good victories; he was looking for that elusive knockout punch. That's why he foolishly stayed to fight at Antietam in '62, and continued to attack at Gettysburg in '63.
Lee made a big mistake and paid dearly
Lee is certainly overrated, as evidenced by his actions at Gettysburg. As others have already said, his pursuit of a grand napoleonic style victory on the battlefield was not a viable strategy for the south in the end. He should never have fought the battle of Gettysburg.
Well in 1866 and in 1870 the Prussian and Prussian-German Army did achieve such overwhelming victories against Austria first and later France. They had a clear strategy formulated by a general staff, the trained troops, and the plan was executed in the field.
@@TorianTammas They also had a rifle that was not a muzzle loader which gave their infantry a decisive firepower advantage.
@Arrowfodder-garbage take.
@@keithconnell8460 Nah. OP is spot-on. Lee was flailing and without a clear or viable strategic plan.
I think that Lee knew that the South would lose a defensive war. He decided to abandon caution and try to strike a blow that would break Lincoln's resolve to prosecute the war further. The strategy failed.
He mistook his man, then. Lincoln was never going to fold. The only hope was to get McClellan elected in 1864.
@@curious968 Exactly. Lee (and Davis) should have had an eye on the elections of '64 instead of trying to win with a big knockout punch. As it happened, Lincoln was near despair by the summer of '64...imagine if Lee had preserved his forces for true opportunities instead of squandering his army in futile battles like Antietam, Chancellorsville, and Gettysburg.
It was a far fetched idea that the US with a constant resupply of troops and material could be harmed by that Virginian army without logistics and staying power in the north.
"God is on the side of the big battalions"
I'm thrilled the South lost and our Constitution was safe until lately. But I think Lee knew a protracted war would wear the Confederates down and the Union would not give up even with heavy losses. He saw if he could break the Union army at Gettysburg he could threaten Baltimore, Philadelphia and perhaps even New York.
Sure Lee could have back off at Gettysburg. But the Union would still have worn him down and won, imo.
Lee could threaten nothing as his army had no resupply of ammunition or men. So even a beaten army of the Poromoc would gain daily more men. So it was a failed plan from the beginning to invade.
Say Lee wins at Gettysburg. It ends the war sooner. His army couldn't threaten the defenses at Washington at full strength, so his goal of defeating Meade and marching on Washington was a losing proposition anyway. If he did march on Washington after defeating Meade, he would do so with a weakened army with very little ammunition, unable to overwhelm the defenses. That puts his army into the position of having to put Washington under seige...which allows Lincoln to simply have another Union army hit Lee's forces from behind, crushing them against the fixed defenses of the city. Lee loses.
Basically all of the Confederate generals performed poorly at Gettysburg.
Or, as George Pickett noted, "I always thought the Yankees had something to do with it."
@aaronfleming9426 The Yankees definitely performed very well, especially Buford, Meade and Hancock.
What percentage of Americans actually care? 0.0000001% is my guess, so that's 3 Americans?
Wish to God any commentator here had been in Lee's place, then we should have been relieved of Yankee depredations after the war, and would have remained a free people.
Why is no mention made of this...
Lee was very ill around the time of this battle, displaying symptoms of a heart attack, often taken to bed. With Lee down, Stuart on a glory hound galavant, and the number two general disobeying orders, what would you expect?
Stuart was executing the discretionary - and rather garbled - orders that Lee gave him.
What orders did Longstreet disobey? If anything, he was understandably reluctant to send his men on a suicide mission, and perhaps slow in executing the orders.
Lee wasn't really behaving differently at Gettysburg than previous battles. Same recklessness, same hubris, same poor staff work, same strategic cluelessness. If anything he was more detached and inactive than previous battles...he sent what, one single written order in three days? Perhaps that was the result of a heart attack.
Who lied to who for 161 years?
The federal government!if you are free you can absolve your union!and slavery was legal all throughout the war!😊
@@kevinbarrow5396 Of course it was. It required a constitutional amendment to get rid of and everyone in the 19th century, at least, knew it.
It was the south itself that gave the opportunity for the 13th amendment to pass. Which Lincoln worked hard to get through congress. Never happens without the war. But the south was afraid that if too many free states got admitted, abolition would happen. They seceded in 1860 not because the demise of slavery was imminent, but because they realized the longer they waited, the worse their position was going to be.
This gave Lincoln an opening he never gets otherwise.
@@kevinbarrow5396 Who went to war to keep slaves and who willingly gave them up when the war ended?
@lotswifemusic9965 it wasn't the north either!New Jersey refused to ratify the 13th amendment until 1905.so it wasn't the north!I'm sure you'd like to believe that!
@@lotswifemusic9965 nobody went to war to keep slaves!what a fool!
Vicksburg was the most important
Should've stayed loyal to the Union 😉
Gettysburg was the price the South paid for having R.E. Lee.
Shelby Foote quote.
Longstreet 's account is basically a "It wasn't my Fault' apology written some 30 years later, when Lee was no longer around to defend himself and designed to make him look good to Northerners. It is in the end the memoir of a bitter and resentful man in his old age
Lee was a tactician. He never formulated a working strategy. So invading the north without logistic to supply his troops with ammunition and men was a failure to begin.
His account was only written because of the attacks from Jubal Early who tried to exonerate Lee and blame Longstreet and to take focus off his failure on the first day Cemetery Hill.
Proof that Lee wasn't great.
TH-cam poop
You're welcome not to watch.
I only made it three and half minutes into this. So far, not one single accurate historical statement. Uh.... you do realize that Longstreet was a SUBORDINATE to Gen. Lee, right? That he was NOT in command?? Trash.
Longstreet was in command of a corps
Apparently you haven't learned how to listen accurately.
Jackson did die of his wounds.
He died of pneumonia!
Longstreet was the best and most under appreciated Confederate general.
Forrest and Taylor are up there...Cleburne was certainly an outstanding division and corps commander...