Robert E. Lee and the Blue Ridge Mountains

DaHound22

Banned
General Robert E. Lee has been quoted as saying "if I make it to the blue rodge mountains, I could hold out for 20 years". So, why didn't he? A guerrilla war would have been much easier to fight then the conventional war he did indeed fight. So, what gives? What could this have looked like?
 
The South was bled dry at that point. Wasn't it something like 30% of white southern males between 18-40 died? War weariness was setting in. We need to remember the Confederate armies were losing a lot of men to desertion. Going to guerrilla bands will see a lot of the army vanish as opposed to forming these small bands.

Furthermore, the areas best associated with a guerrilla war - mountainous, heavily forested, or wetlands territory that gives lots of places to hide - were exactly the areas of the South most pro-Union because the local economy was not slave based. There would be pro-Confederate feelings among some of the people, but substantial enough pro-Union sentiment would exist that it wouldn't really be safe. Too many people who would be willing to inform and cooperate with the Union.

Furthermore, the Confederate army needed supplies - ammunition and food. The Blue Ridge simply can't provide enough of either to keep any substantial force in the field (even as guerrilla bands).

It takes a lot for a guerrilla warfare program to be successful. And in the end, all you are really doing is trying to wear down the enemy so that a regular field army can join the battle at some point. That is not feasible at this point. No British or French army is going to arrive, and the Confederate field armies have been defeated.

At best you'd have some "bandit" bands marauding for one or two years that are eventually killed, or they go home. It's prolonging the war for no benefit at that point. The war was lost, and everyone knew it.
 
The South was bled dry at that point. Wasn't it something like 30% of white southern males between 18-40 died? War weariness was setting in. We need to remember the Confederate armies were losing a lot of men to desertion. Going to guerrilla bands will see a lot of the army vanish as opposed to forming these small bands.

Furthermore, the areas best associated with a guerrilla war - mountainous, heavily forested, or wetlands territory that gives lots of places to hide - were exactly the areas of the South most pro-Union because the local economy was not slave based. There would be pro-Confederate feelings among some of the people, but substantial enough pro-Union sentiment would exist that it wouldn't really be safe. Too many people who would be willing to inform and cooperate with the Union.

Furthermore, the Confederate army needed supplies - ammunition and food. The Blue Ridge simply can't provide enough of either to keep any substantial force in the field (even as guerrilla bands).

It takes a lot for a guerrilla warfare program to be successful. And in the end, all you are really doing is trying to wear down the enemy so that a regular field army can join the battle at some point. That is not feasible at this point. No British or French army is going to arrive, and the Confederate field armies have been defeated.

At best you'd have some "bandit" bands marauding for one or two years that are eventually killed, or they go home. It's prolonging the war for no benefit at that point. The war was lost, and everyone knew it.

Including Lee himself who felt nothing would come out of a guerrilla war except more destruction of Virginia.
 
Including Lee himself who felt nothing would come out of a guerrilla war except more destruction of Virginia.

This. Since the motivators of the war were largely economic the cost of a guerrilla victory was far higher than a surrender. If the South continued to fight there would be nothing left to save. Sherman proved that the North would be willing to burn every building and seize every piece of property in Confederacy if it meant victory.
 
Furthermore, the areas best associated with a guerrilla war - mountainous, heavily forested, or wetlands territory that gives lots of places to hide - were exactly the areas of the South most pro-Union because the local economy was not slave based. There would be pro-Confederate feelings among some of the people, but substantial enough pro-Union sentiment would exist that it wouldn't really be safe. Too many people who would be willing to inform and cooperate with the Union.
There were already guerrillas in a lot of these places. Specifically, guerrillas going around shooting anybody in a gray uniform.
 
Could some Confedrerates have held out in the Blue Ridge for a while, sure. Could they even had some sort of semblance a military structure, possibly. Would they have had an effect on the Union. Yes. The reality is that the Union would pass an even more punitive reconstruction than OTL. Furthermore any area with Confederate guerilla forces will learn the meaning of this Roman quote: "they have made a desert and called it peace". In any area with guerillas anything that can support them, farms, any sort of manufacturing, and sympathizers will be removed or destroyed.

Lee realized that the war was lost, and continuing would only bring to the south what Rome had brought to Carthage.
 
Could some Confedrerates have held out in the Blue Ridge for a while, sure. Could they even had some sort of semblance a military structure, possibly. Would they have had an effect on the Union. Yes. The reality is that the Union would pass an even more punitive reconstruction than OTL. Furthermore any area with Confederate guerilla forces will learn the meaning of this Roman quote: "they have made a desert and called it peace". In any area with guerillas anything that can support them, farms, any sort of manufacturing, and sympathizers will be removed or destroyed.

Lee realized that the war was lost, and continuing would only bring to the south what Rome had brought to Carthage.

Lotsa cash for informers, probably taken from the now dead sympathizer's property. While the South wouldn't burn, lots of farms would.
So essentially you have two choices: cooperate and be left alone or even rewarded, or end up loosing everything. But since this is the Confederacy, I'm surprised they made the right decision.
 
General Robert E. Lee has been quoted as saying "if I make it to the blue rodge mountains, I could hold out for 20 years". So, why didn't he? A guerrilla war would have been much easier to fight then the conventional war he did indeed fight. So, what gives? What could this have looked like?

I don't know what year he said that in, but the main reason the South didn't do that was because it would cost them legitimacy in the eyes of the world. And by the time that legitimacy could never be won, it was too late and would do nothing for the South but make things go even worse.

I'd imagine a guerilla war would look like an extended version of the low-level guerilla fighting in places like East Tennessee.

However, there were areas without strong Unionist support (like Appalachia) which could have been used for guerilla fighting. Take a drive through the South and you can see plenty of places. Middle Tennessee, for instance, is full of hilly, forested terrain, and had a decent majority in favour of secession (not as much as West Tennessee, far more than East Tennessee). The same goes for much of Alabama north of the Gulf Coast, which in turn is full of swampy, forested terrain. Arkansas, of course, the Ozarks. Georgia, yeah, good land too. Now yes, these areas not used for plantations tended to be full of poor whites who had much more divided loyalties, but the potential is there for small-scale operations to wear down the enemy.

Of course, counter-insurgency is equally doable in these regions, and eventually the local population is gonna get sick of things because the war is blatantly lost at that point.
 
However, there were areas without strong Unionist support (like Appalachia) which could have been used for guerilla fighting... eventually the local population is gonna get sick of things because the war is blatantly lost at that point.

The local population was already "sick of things". There was a full-scale guerrilla war against the Confederacy in Mississippi by lower-class white farmers who had lost all interest in being conscripted into the CS Army or having their crops and livestock eaten by soldiers.

(There's a major movie about this coming out later this year: The Free State of Jones.)
 
The local population was already "sick of things". There was a full-scale guerrilla war against the Confederacy in Mississippi by lower-class white farmers who had lost all interest in being conscripted into the CS Army or having their crops and livestock eaten by soldiers.

(There's a major movie about this coming out later this year: The Free State of Jones.)

Yeah, that, of course, but I'm not sure how common/widespread it was--was it at the point where large segments of the (white) population were in open rebellion like that throughout the South? So I'd bet the guerilla forces will melt away by 1866 at latest, either killed/imprisoned by locals or just simply gone home. At that point it would take monumentally stupid behaviour on the part of the US to prolong the "war" much longer.
 
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