Not hard, considering the caliber of Union talent in the East until late in the war. Either way, he's certainly not capable enough to salvage the complete debacle that the western front has become for the CSA ITTL. (or in OTL for that matter) There simply aren't enough men, trains, and guns in the Confederacy to pull it off.
Until Every Drop of Blood Is Paid: A More Radical American Civil War
- Thread starter Red_Galiray
- Start date
His ability was in execution of ambitious plans. Certainly a better choice for command than Hood. My idea here is that Jackson would secure tactical victories that do help the CSA's position in the West but that he's still outmaneuvered strategically
Tactical victories will just burn men and materiel the CSA doesn't have against a strategically vastly superior enemy that will quickly adapt to Jackson's willingness to do blatantly stupid things. Meanwhile the Eastern front is collapsing because Lee and company overextended well beyond the CSA's pathetic logistics and the entire raison d'etre of the Confederacy was just exposed as total bullshit in the most high-impact and demoralizing fashion possible.
Plus, I don't see Jackson making more than one win-on-points while relying on chutzpah before the USA figures out that he's a nut and sends someone like Sherman or Grant to crush him like a grape.
Speaking of the Western Theater, I think there is a chance that the Georgia Campaign will be a walk in the park for the Union. I don't think that Thomas would miss the opportunity at Snake Creek Gap, which would cut Johnston off from Atlanta since that was his original plan. I would, however, note that the oft-repeated idea that the Snake Creek Gap plan could have destroyed the Army of Tennessee was is a bit overblown. Johnston could have retreated using a more difficult eastern route. However, even if the Confederate army survived, it would have been in a very tight place after having been forced to concede both the railroad and the inside track to Atlanta to Thomas' army.
Yeah, we're not ready for Black officers in charge of white troops. Not yet.
The Louisiana situation is special since the gens de couleur libres were different from Black slaves in many regards, not only their skin color.
I think a degree of corruption is inevitable. The American Republic is in the path towards becoming the world's greatest economy, and that naturally creates extreme opportunities for graft and corruption. The goal here will not be exterminating it, but limiting corruption. Ultimately, I think the Southern Reconstruction regimes will be held together at least partially through graft, patronage and military force.
The racial implications of Union Mills are what has made this worse than Gettysburg for the rebels. But they have been mostly capable of pulling themselves together to continue resisting for at least a year more. Nonetheless, confidence in victory has been weakened far more. I wouldn't call this the beginning of the end, but the end of the beginning. With the campaign against Vicksburg well underway and the campaigns against Atlanta and Richmond about to start, the outlook is bleak.
I don't think Jackson would leave Virginia, and I agree with @Worffan101 regarding his lack of strategic ability. He was a good lieutenant to Lee, capable of executing his ambitious plans. But I don't think he was that great personally. When you're up against men like Frémont or Siegel, you're bound to look good, and in all his campaigns Jackson enjoyed many advantages like terrain or how his objective was merely distracting the Yankees, not defeating them.
Thanks for this tactical analysis! To add to this, we must take into account however the logistical and political situation in the aftermath of the Bragg's campaign. Thomas suffers from many of the problems that afflicted Rosecrans regarding the poor East Tennessee infrastructure and the continuous attacks of guerrillas, but since the guerrilla war is worse Thomas' army is in an even worse shape, bled white by bloodthirsty insurgents that he's ill equipped to deal with. Moreover, to help the Union's Eastern woes, many men were stripped from his Army and sent to the Army of the Susquehanna, limiting even more his ability to act against Johnston. Finally, there's the political issue that since Tennessee was liberated earlier its Reconstruction has started earlier, so Lincoln is pushing him to help along the Military Governor, Brownlow, in this task. Brownlow, being a radical, envisions changes far beyond what Johnson undertook OTL, but as he's threatened everywhere by partisans he requires Thomas' help to protect his regime and continue the program of emancipation and confiscation. All these factors complicate Thomas' task and somewhat equalize the field with Johnston.
You know this is making me wonder who Lincoln picks as his VP in the 64 election. Does he still go with the "we are all American's" Johnson style pick or is he radicalized enough that he goes with a Radical Republican?
In this case, I am assuming he'd be going with a conservative/moderate Republican instead of Johnson, then.
Depends on the political environment around the elections. I didn't find the time to mention this, but McLean has already died so Lincoln has no VP. The opposition party is practically dead by now because everyone sees them as collaborators and traitors, so there is no need to appeal to conservatives in the North. Nonetheless, I think Lincoln would still want someone that shows his commitment to unity and healing. A Southern Unionist may be a good choice then, since Reconstruction will be build upon them and their loyalty must be rewarded. However, with the opposition so badly whipped, Lincoln's main threat may come from the left, that is, the Radicals, so selecting one to appease them may be on the table too.
Not officially at least. But as IIRC there's been some discussion I wonder if there will be any circumstances where during a chaotic battle a small unit of white troops will get separated from its main body, and end up being forced to 'cooperate' with a nearby unit of black troops to avoid getting entirely isolated.
Ah, I see, makes sense. This leaves me thinking about the fall campaign of 1863. Of course, Grant is going to have to root A.S. Johnston out of Vicksburg, but what does this leave the other armies doing? On the Virginian and Georgian fronts, both Federal armies, owing to casualties and detachment of troops, have been equalized with their foes. This may result in a Confederate offensive to kinda keep the Union force off-balance. Not necessarily to inflict casualties, but to delay the Union armies by having them moved in reaction to the Confederate offensive rather than move forward.
An example of this is the Bristoe Station Campaign: after Longstreet leaves to join Bragg, Lee attempts to cut Meade off from the rear with a wide turning movement. Lee hopes to inflict favorable losses on Meade, but when the opportunity fails to arise, Lee does not allow a general engagement. Outside the relatively small battle at Bristoe Station, neither side found favorable conditions for a battle, so an entire month is wasted waltzing around Virginia. In this case, I could see Breckinridge hoping to stall the Union armies via an offensive on the Thomas' overstretched army while Lee keeps Reynolds busy at Virginia.
Longstreet goes to join Joe Johnston for an ITTL version of Chickamauga or attack East Tennessee. In the meantime, Lee tries to lure Reynolds to the cross the Rappahanock River to the northern side of the Rapidan before trying to cut Reynolds' rear off. The only problem is that I don't think Joe Johnston would be approving of an offensive campaign, even one with limited goals. While I understood his desire for a Fabian strategy, he really does not seem to grasp the importance of sacrificing troops for the sake of political or military success. I think his style of war was far too simplistic, demanding that the enemy either does exactly what he wants them to or does something really stupid. If something ever went wrong with his plans, he does little to fix them and simply gives up with the plan.
Ok something is wrong with the alert system because just through sheer coincidence did I see this story at the top of the "Before 1900" forum page and would've continued to think the story is dead because I haven't been getting ANY kind of alert for this one even though I have it on watch and notifications enabled.
I've had that happen from time to time with this and a couple of other threads, it's annoying as hell. I just check the 'Watched Threads' tab every so often to see if anything updated without throwing an alert.
Did it show up in "watched threads"? I find a lot of my watched threads there even if I never got an actual alert.
The problem I find is that if you don't open a thread after it throws an alert and/or accidentally don't read all the way to the end (if there's a page break after your most recently read post), then the system assumes that you don't want alerts any more. Which is dumb. It ought to simply keep throwing up alerts after a grace period and have a better interface for removing your thread watches (I can't find any master list of watched threads any more).
The best way is to simply use watched threads to keep up instead of alerts, that way you always know any given thread is active. I use it so much that it is the first suggestion on address bar when I type 'alt', once you get used to always checking it then you never miss anything from a thread you watched.
What are you talking about? Watched threads is right there on the top of the page under what's new.
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Ah, see, I didn't see that because (having used the board for many years) I expected it to be under the user tab where it had previously been. I do note with irritation that it's still not easy to batch unwatch threads from there...
I don't look into that too often
the notification system really needs some work, as wellas the layout for the different tabs. Oh well anyway this is one of the great stories on this site a real treat to read and I'm glad that it isn't dead. but now I have to catch up with what I missed *sigh*Something I've noticed in regards to the updates is if you don't go to the very last page of a thread before leaving it the system doesn't like to notify you of updates to it. No idea why it does that but that's where for me at least any issues with no notifications come from.
I think it depends. A unit being mauled up enough that a black officer has to take over, and then the survivors like him enough to just keep him in command, that's possible, I think.
But out and out, well, that's not a easy thing.
The white civilian population of the South are approaching levels of paranoia and fear that I think hits the point of unsustainable emotional exhaustion. The spectre of race war is becoming so real to them that, surely, many of them would have to conclude that if it doesn't strike them by the end the fighting stops, then it would have to have been made up all along.
There's a lot of danger here, with a people so fearful and ready to lash out at people who do mean them no harm, but I think there is also opportunity in the exhaustion and desperation of said people once the fighting is over, but it requires a delicate touch.
One can imagine a leader of the African-American community starting to consider at this time what the peace is going to be like, and knowing that the South is full of people who know nothing other than a hierarchy of races and have contempt of black people as their inferiors, even those that are so poor that they have no actual reason to want to support slavery. She might hit on an idea; It isn't because of Reason that poor whites support slavery, they do so because of emotion and cultural context. Southern culture submerges whites from birth into a pot of rhetoric that constantly mocks, dehumanises, and vilifies black people as animals that need to be tamed. You can't rope something in that situation into a genuine philosophical argument where your presentation of facts and logic can get through to them. What might happen if you instead changed the pot, changed the context which they are forced to operate in regarding black people?
She might be able to appreciate in ways that the male-dominated Union government can't that the women of the South are at least as important to deradicalise as the men, because they are the ones that are raising the next generation, many of them doing so on their own because of the death of their husband in the war. These women likely already have their worldview shaken by the fact that, when there was at least nothing to stop "Lincoln's hoard of Negros" from committing every ravage on defenceless southern women like newspapers have hysterically warned about for years, they ended up...doing pretty much what would be expected by a white occupying force. This weakening of the ideology they've been raised on should have pressure gently applied to it. This leader, coming from a history of learning how to draw relatively openminded whites to support abolition, might come to think that she doesn't have to go on the offensive with rational arguments about why blacks and whites are equal; for many (not all, but many), as long as they agree to keep conversing with her and treating her as a person who deserves respect, a position of racism is eventually, through a change in their habits of thinking, going to become unsustainable.
A lot of poor white women are going to be in desperate straits as a result of the war, with an economy shattered and with hungry mouths at home to feed. If the federal government decides that investing into getting the South working again is crucial to papering over the worst of radical sentiment, she might make the suggestion that programmes for women to receive support can be made conditional on them having to work alongside black women. I suspect at this point that making former confederate men work with black men is too much of an ask, and is ripe to cause a violent incident. She might take charge in schooling the black women in these programmes on what she understands about rhetoric; keep a relaxed, friendly posture, don't get aggressive, don't argue with them directly, keep cool-headed if they start hurling insults, but always insist that they remain respectful on a basic level (in any case, they're free to leave and not receive assistance if treating black women as their equals is so intolerable for them). Those white women that stick with it are likely to get their upbringing ground down by having to daily work with, converse with, and even take orders from black women. Familiar small talk at work because conversations over lunch, conversation over lunch becomes invitations to dinner at home. Even as they try to stick to everything they were taught, it'll eventually hit them that continuing to do so in the face of all evidence before their own eyes would be ridiculous.
Of course, it won't work to deradicalise everyone, and we can hardly expect every black person to have the deep wells of patience needed for such a process. But so long as it can help to put white supremacy below the critical mass it needs to reassert itself back over the South, it is worth a try. And I can think of at least one person in the federal government who would be sympathetic to its goals and its methods.
"When the conduct of men is designed to be influenced, persuasion, kind, unassuming persuasion, should ever be adopted. It is an old and a true maxim, that a "drop of honey catches more flies than a gallon of gall." So with men.
If you would win a man to your cause, first convince him that you are his sincere friend. Therein is a drop of honey that catches his heart, which, say what he will, is the great high road to his reason, and which, when once gained, you will find but little trouble in convincing his judgment of the justice of your cause, if indeed that cause really be a just one.
On the contrary, assume to dictate to his judgment, or to command his action, or to mark him as one to be shunned and despised, and he will retreat within himself, close all the avenues to his head and his heart; and tho’ your cause be naked truth itself, transformed to the heaviest lance, harder than steel, and sharper than steel can be made, and tho’ you throw it with more than Herculean force and precision, you shall no more be able to pierce him, than to penetrate the hard shell of a tortoise with a rye straw.
Such is man, and so must he be understood by those who would lead him, even to his own best interest." - Abraham Lincoln, address to the Washington Temperance Society in 1842.
There's a lot of danger here, with a people so fearful and ready to lash out at people who do mean them no harm, but I think there is also opportunity in the exhaustion and desperation of said people once the fighting is over, but it requires a delicate touch.
One can imagine a leader of the African-American community starting to consider at this time what the peace is going to be like, and knowing that the South is full of people who know nothing other than a hierarchy of races and have contempt of black people as their inferiors, even those that are so poor that they have no actual reason to want to support slavery. She might hit on an idea; It isn't because of Reason that poor whites support slavery, they do so because of emotion and cultural context. Southern culture submerges whites from birth into a pot of rhetoric that constantly mocks, dehumanises, and vilifies black people as animals that need to be tamed. You can't rope something in that situation into a genuine philosophical argument where your presentation of facts and logic can get through to them. What might happen if you instead changed the pot, changed the context which they are forced to operate in regarding black people?
She might be able to appreciate in ways that the male-dominated Union government can't that the women of the South are at least as important to deradicalise as the men, because they are the ones that are raising the next generation, many of them doing so on their own because of the death of their husband in the war. These women likely already have their worldview shaken by the fact that, when there was at least nothing to stop "Lincoln's hoard of Negros" from committing every ravage on defenceless southern women like newspapers have hysterically warned about for years, they ended up...doing pretty much what would be expected by a white occupying force. This weakening of the ideology they've been raised on should have pressure gently applied to it. This leader, coming from a history of learning how to draw relatively openminded whites to support abolition, might come to think that she doesn't have to go on the offensive with rational arguments about why blacks and whites are equal; for many (not all, but many), as long as they agree to keep conversing with her and treating her as a person who deserves respect, a position of racism is eventually, through a change in their habits of thinking, going to become unsustainable.
A lot of poor white women are going to be in desperate straits as a result of the war, with an economy shattered and with hungry mouths at home to feed. If the federal government decides that investing into getting the South working again is crucial to papering over the worst of radical sentiment, she might make the suggestion that programmes for women to receive support can be made conditional on them having to work alongside black women. I suspect at this point that making former confederate men work with black men is too much of an ask, and is ripe to cause a violent incident. She might take charge in schooling the black women in these programmes on what she understands about rhetoric; keep a relaxed, friendly posture, don't get aggressive, don't argue with them directly, keep cool-headed if they start hurling insults, but always insist that they remain respectful on a basic level (in any case, they're free to leave and not receive assistance if treating black women as their equals is so intolerable for them). Those white women that stick with it are likely to get their upbringing ground down by having to daily work with, converse with, and even take orders from black women. Familiar small talk at work because conversations over lunch, conversation over lunch becomes invitations to dinner at home. Even as they try to stick to everything they were taught, it'll eventually hit them that continuing to do so in the face of all evidence before their own eyes would be ridiculous.
Of course, it won't work to deradicalise everyone, and we can hardly expect every black person to have the deep wells of patience needed for such a process. But so long as it can help to put white supremacy below the critical mass it needs to reassert itself back over the South, it is worth a try. And I can think of at least one person in the federal government who would be sympathetic to its goals and its methods.
"When the conduct of men is designed to be influenced, persuasion, kind, unassuming persuasion, should ever be adopted. It is an old and a true maxim, that a "drop of honey catches more flies than a gallon of gall." So with men.
If you would win a man to your cause, first convince him that you are his sincere friend. Therein is a drop of honey that catches his heart, which, say what he will, is the great high road to his reason, and which, when once gained, you will find but little trouble in convincing his judgment of the justice of your cause, if indeed that cause really be a just one.
On the contrary, assume to dictate to his judgment, or to command his action, or to mark him as one to be shunned and despised, and he will retreat within himself, close all the avenues to his head and his heart; and tho’ your cause be naked truth itself, transformed to the heaviest lance, harder than steel, and sharper than steel can be made, and tho’ you throw it with more than Herculean force and precision, you shall no more be able to pierce him, than to penetrate the hard shell of a tortoise with a rye straw.
Such is man, and so must he be understood by those who would lead him, even to his own best interest." - Abraham Lincoln, address to the Washington Temperance Society in 1842.