Up With the Cross:

Snake Featherston

Banned
From Up With the Cross: The Tragic History of the Confederate States of America, by Albert Samuels:

Later generations of historians universally agree on the ultimate cause of the temporary collapse of the United States of America into two separate states in the 19th and part of the 20th Century. Namely that in terms of US expansion up to the Southron War of Independence the United States had expanded too much, too far, too fast. However while this is held to be the cause of the war, the war itself produced a split of the United States on a suitably named river in terms of the long and horrid legacy that it would lead to. The road to the collapse of the old United States of Yorktown and Chapultepec was paved on the suitably ghastly named area known as Chickamauga.

By a curious irony the Chickamauga region itself had been named after a secessionist movement within the Cherokee nation, a movement whose war within the Cherokee brought ruin and death to the Cherokee, and the Cherokee being bowed under by a harsher, more oppressive future. More prophetically the name Chickamauga itself in Cherokee means "River of Death", and a river of death it indeed proved. So it was that the most suitable place for the dark future that awaited the United States would come with the comedy of errors that produced the victory of the Southron armies in the Battle of Chickamauga. Waged for two terrible days, the battle was won by an overpowering strike by the troops of General James Longstreet, a strike that led to rolling up the ill-fated Army of the Cumberland and trapping it within the walls of Chattanooga.

It would be a worse fate, however, that befell this army when as the Siege had become truly perilous a fatal accident involving a spooked horse ended the career of the most brilliant of the Union generals, setting in motion the disaster of Chattanooga, which would be termed the graveyard of the Union. In the aftermath of Bragg's victory, won by the hardest, and with his army immobile on the relatively towering peaks of Lookout Mountain and Missionary Ridge, Ulysses S. Grant had been riding his horse near a train when the horse was spooked by its passage. The horse reared and fell on General Grant, inflicting fatal internal injuries that led to Grant's passing, delirious, five days later.

This, however, proved only the first stage in the ultimate disaster the Union faced, and the moment when the cause of the unified states of America began to become henceforth and forever lost, damning a continent to upheaval it could never have foreseen.......

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Edit: This is my intended counterpart/parallel to Up With the Star, where another small incident produces a great and terrible set of ripples across the course of history. In keeping with a theme this one is named after the Confederate version of The Battle Cry of Freedom, and in both universes there's a book with the same title as the TL.
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Snake Featherston

Banned
Foreword to Wauhatchie: The Night That the Union Fell, by David Archer, by Colonel James Morgan:

The Battle of Wauhatchie has become a subject of writings in US history outpacing that of any other action in the War of Secession. Launched ten days after Grant's death, General Thomas, appointed as commander of the Army of the Cumberland, had grown frustrated with the seemingly endless paralysis of will among his subordinates and men. He had embarked on a daring scheme that could have worked had fate conspired to favor it, but as ill-luck would have it General James Longstreet, whose controversial actions in regard to the command of Bragg's Army of Tennessee have cast a long pallor over this campaign in the histories written in the Confederacy, was on the field that evening.

In one of the only night actions of the war, General Thomas was struck by three musket balls in the face, thigh, and side, all of which together inflicted a fatal infection that killed him and his injury led to the failure of the attempt to open the Cracker Line. Longstreet, however, failed to inform General Bragg of the battle, its duration, course, outcome, or casualties, an action that led to the falling-out between the two men that culminated in Longstreet's Siege of Knoxville. The actual battle itself, as this book will show in lavish detail, was a confused action that even after Thomas's mortal injury was an extremely narrow victory, won by the CS Army's ultimately simply remaining where it was, not moving.

However in the process Wauhatchie's offing General Thomas and his replacement by General McCook in a desperate appointment to ensure that there was a commander, more than in terms of protocol or any other matter, ensured that the Army of the Cumberland would remain transfixed by a fatal paralysis of the will. Grant had died, Thomas had been slain, and with the failure by the narrowest of margins of the relief attempt, morale would collapse altogether. The final Siege of Chattanooga still, however, would last five more days after the battle, so it was not in any technical sense, again as Dr. Archer's book will show, a decisive victory in a tactical or a strategic sense.
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Free Lancer

Banned
Wow with Grant and Thomas dead that will lead a massive gap in leadership abilities and no time to bring up any sort of man that could have the strategic mind set to fill the positions.


The Copper heads are most likely going to have a field day with this and probably see a returned McClellan to a field position due to desperation.


Consider me subscribed.
 

Snake Featherston

Banned
Chickamauga to the surrender of the Army of the Cumberland:

The Chickamauga Campaign and its Chattanooga successor was a most unlikely victory, and certainly offers a subversion of any idea that victors necessarily are superior to the defeated side. Chickamauga itself had unfolded amidst some unbelievable degrees of contretemps among the Army of Tennessee's leader and his subordinates, with the CSA losing opportunities, most infamously at McCLemore's Cove, to expand dramatically the scale of its victory. In the two days that Chickamauga itself had unfolded, the arrival of James Longstreet had been critically delayed due to Robert E. Lee's reluctance to send CS troops outside of Virginia, and in the actual battle Chickamauga stands clearly as a battle that the losing side lost more than the winning side won.

The only reason that Longstreet had rolled up the entirety of the Army of the Cumberland had been a mistaken transfer of troops by General Rosecrans to fix a non-existent gap that had created a real one, setting in motion the famous Confederate drive. General Thomas's brilliant stand on Snodgrass Hill had limited the scale of the Confederate victory. It was after this one moment that fate finally went against an army which only a year prior had seen one general murder another general and the army itself witness a near-complete collapse of command. In contrast to Perryville, the disaster this time was general. Rosecrans suffered a total paralysis of will, the intended replacement and co-ordinator of all the Union Armies in the West died in a random accident, and General George H. Thomas's attempt to open a relief line ensured that after the sacking of one commander, the army had another dead on the field in a confused night action.

When morale in the Army of the Cumberland collapsed amidst its growing immobility and starvation, it would be the ill-starred McCook, defeated by Braxton Bragg in all the prior expeditions, an ad hoc appointee hastily promoted by the Union leadership to forestall any internal crisis of command by appointing a man from another army whose presence might lead to unwanted tension, who would ultimately surrender the men of the Army of the Cumberland to the Confederacy.

Around this time, the controversy over a massacre of USCT men by Confederate soldiers in the Trans-Mississippi led to this surrender marking a still-greater tragedy. In its refusal to grant to black soldiers equal treatment akin to white troops as POWs, the Confederacy ensured that the captured soldiers of the Army of the Cumberland would be doomed to a hellish imprisonment. With the loss of two of its most brilliant generals and the further gutting of its trained combat reserves, the Union army had suffered a disaster of equal magnitude to the Confederate defeat at Vicksburg. To further compound this, Bragg would move the rest of the Army of Tennessee to "aid" James Longstreet, who in a position where he could do nothing else graciously accepted Bragg's aid, adding the capture of Ambrose Burnside's troops after he had realized the fall of Chattanooga and the arrival of the entire Army of Tennessee would doom his soldiers no matter how long he held out.

The loss of this critical number of troops would play a role in the otherwise-seemingly curious question as to how a society in the midst of economic collapse and torn by multiple civil wars even at this point on its own soil, would ultimately manage to outlast a society on paper much wealthier and able to endure modern warfare than itself.

At the time, however, for the Union states, Chattanooga and Knoxville were a bolt from the blue of a magnitude that outstripped any of the previous defeats, even the bloodbath at Fredericksburg. For the Confederacy, this battle had become a mixed blessing, for it raised immeasurably the prestige of the controversial, waspish General Braxton Bragg.......
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Snake Featherston

Banned
Braxton Bragg and the Transfers of 1863:

The most significant change in the wake of the Southron victory in the Chattanooga-Knoxville Campaign was that Braxton Bragg was able to transfer Leonidas Polk to the West at long last, with Jefferson Davis, in the immediate afterglow of the shattering victories that were the greatest Southron triumphs of the war at that time, unable to resist Bragg's request. Polk, promoted to command Confederate armies in Louisiana and given the rank of full General, albeit beneath Edmund Kirby Smith, could hardly refuse the position in the wake of the victory. Likewise, with James Longstreet transferred, and Bragg the man of the hour, he transformed the Army of Tennessee more thoroughly in his own image. This, however, was an image that was a colossus with feet of clay at best.

Bragg, for all that his postwar memoirs blamed his failures on Leonidas K. Polk, had the mixture of failures of being a great planner, but a terrible executor. This mattered less when his troops faced much more inexperienced opponents hastily cobbled together into a new Union Army of the Ohio, which against veteran troops was unable to put up much in the way of serious resistance. Indeed, Bragg's chief foe to the end of the war was logistics, as the terrain between Chattanooga and out to Nashville did not offer much ground for a 19th Century army to maneuver or to exploit its victories in. Bragg's army would defeat a foe that suffered worse than his own army did from logistics and inexperience and lack of will to fight, yet never again would he win a victory of the Chickamauga scale, let alone Chattanooga, even when opportunities existed for him to have done so.

There, however, would always be something incomplete even in these victories, and the question of Bragg's responsibility for the great Southron triumph would dog the internal dissensions of the Confederate States of America for the unhappy life of that republic. Indeed, in the later contests of rival generals, the clash between Johnston Men and Bragg Men would prove the closest thing the CS military produced to political parties......
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Snake Featherston

Banned
The war in the East, October-November 1863:

With Rosecrans sacked, Grant dead, and Thomas killed on the battlefield, as well as the captures of two prominent Union forces, the great Confederate triumphs in the West had their own impact on the East. For one of the first times in the war, the Army of Tennessee had gained prominence over the Army of Northern Virginia. By comparison to Bragg's army's smashing triumphs (whatever the arguments then and later over Bragg's actual responsibility for them), the flop that was the Bristoe Campaign and the maneuvers in the Mine Run campaign proved quite embarrassing indeed for Robert E. Lee's army. Indeed, that the Army of Tennessee had done this meant the army that had won the biggest victories was now a second-string to an army that had snatched defeat repeatedly from the jaws of victory. The psychological impact this had on Lee's army and the impact this had on the 1864 battles would be controversial then and later, pro-Bragg and pro-Western Southron historians attributing Lee's poor performance against Meade to jealousy of Bragg's accomplishments, where pro-Lee historians instead credited Meade as having improved the Army of the Potomac and being more cautious than his predecessors. US historians instead credited Meade with Meade's victories.

Likewise, the triumph of Longstreet at Chickamauga, Wauhatchie, and his role in the capture of Burnside's corps were to lead to the emergence of a pro-Longstreet faction then and later in both the CS Army and CS politics. However when he returned to Lee's army, Longstreet was conspicuously loyal to General Lee, and the victories he'd won instead embellished his reputation already consolidated at Second Manassas further.
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jeckl

Nice Snake, will this be the tl, where the CSA, collapses due to the Bull Weevil and then the US occupies it, thus destroying it's own chance at becoming a great power?

Also i have any ways wanted to see an Anglo-Confederate war over the West Indies.
 
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Snake Featherston

Banned
jeckl said:
Nice Snake, will this be the tl, where the CSA, collapses due to the Bull Weevil and then the US occupies it, thus destroying it's own chance at becoming a great power?

Also i have any ways wanted to see an Anglo-Confederate war over the West Indies.
Click to expand...

It will certainly be the TL where the CSA collapses and turns the USA into Israel and Palestine up to 121, yes. Whether the Boll Weevil is the cause of the collapse or just the final straw that breaks the camel's back.....
 

Snake Featherston

Banned
The Union High Command in December, 1863:

In the wake of the loss of Generals Grant and Thomas, and the crippling manpower losses sustained in the Tennessee front, General Henry Halleck faced a number of major decisions with regard to the command in this vital theater, as well as in all the others. With the Union having a potential set of reservoir of manpower from the scattered troops of Grant's old army, he began to turn to using USCT as garrison and occupation forces, so as to raise a larger number of white troops to replace the Army of the Cumberland. This was coupled with attempts to use the conscription law of 1863 to raise more manpower for the army. Due to the losses sustained in Bragg's campaign from Chickamauga to that point the Union would be able to form an army 35,000 strong of badly uneven quality. Those forces belonging to Grant's old Army of the Tennessee were of high quality, capable and well-trained.

Those troops raised by conscription or motivated by not wishing to be conscripted were rather lower in quality and staying power, as well as in morale and motivation. While ordinarily the raising of veteran troops would strengthen the new levies, all soldiers in the new Army of the Ohio faced morale difficulties, and the ordinary hazing that happened between veteran soldiers and new ones became as such less ordinary and more a subject of dissension and bitterness in the ranks. To command the new army, Lincoln and Halleck promoted to Major-General of regular soldiers one James McPherson, who would be the last commander of the Army of the Tennessee, and faced challenges more trying than those faced by any other general in blue during the course of the war.
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Snake Featherston

Banned
Union strategy, 1864:

The new strategy for the Union in 1864 would be one whose overall permutations were somewhat incoherent and self-contradictory. On the one hand the troops in East Tennessee and the Mississippi Valley were to hold to the strategic defensive. On the other hand two columns were to strike, one from Arkansas, one from Baton Rouge, in an attempt to roll up the Confederacy in the Trans-Missisippi. General Meade would prepare for an offensive to be launched in May against General Lee, but when Meade discovered Lee's plans for an offensive he prepared a more risky gambit influenced by the Bristoe and Gettysburg Campaigns.

Specifically Meade preferred to wait with his 120,000 troops to meet Lee's offensive and defeat it before assuming his own offensive, thereby assuring the initiative. Meade's case for this strategy was immeasurably strengthened by his victories at Gettysburg and Bristoe, as well as by the conduct of Gettysburg and his victory there having been a primarily defensive one. As events proved, Meade's judgment was unexpectedly vindicated, and it would be Meade's Army of the Potomac that provided what moments of glory the Union cause would have in the year 1864 for this reason.

Thus, Union strategy evolved into three separate, distinct strategic directions: in the Trans-Mississippi, Generals Curtis and Banks would launch a great joint offensive, which would mark one of the biggest offensives in a theater primarily marked by irregular guerrilla warfare. The offensive into Arkansas was directed at the state capital and to securing the base of local loyalists, the offensive into Louisiana for bolstering the Union Louisiana government. In the Mississippi Valley, fortifications such as Vicksburg, Port Hudson, Island No. 10, Fort Pillow, and such like were to be garrisoned by USCT, troops who provided a great deal of the necessary manpower for the Union army in these vital, but unglamorous, roles, and the goal was a strategic defensive, holding onto territory already gained. In the East the Union Army adopted a variant of a defensive-offensive solution, but here the strategy was to prove the most successful for reasons that the USA could not predict in terms of planning. General Halleck would remain US General-in-Chief for the duration of the War of Secession.
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Snake Featherston

Banned
CS strategy, 1864:

By comparison to the USA, CS strategic thinking and co-ordination remained under-developed. There was no official CS general-in-chief, the CS department system remained more curse than blessing, the CSA had the difficulty of a government whose sole functional bureau was ammunition in an age when armies marched on their stomach, and an issue that none of the CSA's full generals co-operated with each other. General Beauregard would remain in occupation of the lines around Charleston, waging the longest battle and campaign of the CS War of Independence, but General Bragg gained from his smashing victories at Chattanooga and Knoxville a vastly expanded Department. Bragg also gained from this department for the first time a stable commissary, as well as the negative of having to defend a broader area encompassing Georgia and parts of Florida. However Bragg's solution was simply to put the existing troops of those Departments on their existing roles.

With his army bolstered in numbers in the wake of its victory to 70,000, having a consistent commissary, a consistent supply of ammunition, and facing a smaller, weaker opposition, General Bragg was in an enviable situation. He would plan in the wake of reclaiming Chattanooga, Knoxville, and the Tullahoma Region for a renewed attack in the region of Stone's River and Murfreesboro, to further regain more Southron territory occupied under arms.

In the Trans-Mississippi, the Confederate Army passed to Departmental control under Edmund Kirby Smith, with his direct zone of responsibility being Arkansas, while General Polk commanded the CS forces that would meet the Red River Offensive. These forces suffered all the ordinary issues of backwater forces fighting for a resource-poor side.

In Virginia Lee's Army of Northern Virginia, bolstered to 65,000 strong, due to some deserters returning to the ranks of a cause that seemed again on an upward swing (and was), was to face Meade's 120,000 men dug in a strong position north of the Wilderness of Spotsylvania. Dubbed the Scott Line, after the former US General-in-Chief, this was a formidable line including strong artillery positions, abbatis, trenches, and a line carefully selected to making outflanking it nearly impossible. Lee for his part was committed to seeking a great decisive battle once again, and due to the position he faced and a deadly underestimation of how intact the Army of the Potomac's morale was would plan for a set of powerful frontal attacks in order to rupture the US line and then to roll it up altogether. Had Lee appreciated that the Army of the Potomac's morale was remarkably unruffled by the disaster in Tennessee, his decisions would have been both different and exploited the real weakness of Meade's position, his cavalry's poor positions in terms of guarding both his supply lines and his base of retreat. While attempts to attack this would have been overextended and too little manpower to accomplish any kind of decisive strategic victory, the result would have been indisputably superior to what actually would have occurred.

However Lee's plans were structured on both his tendency to underestimate his enemy, to incline directly to the offensive, and to the view that in the wake of the disaster for Union arms in Tennessee, the much more ill-starred Virginia army would have fatal damage in morale terms. Thus were the seeds of the 1864 offensive sown.
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Free Lancer

Banned
Well from the looks of it the USCT is going to become more integrated into the US military when the push comes to shove with and when the army of Ohio finally moves into combat and doesn't perform like the Army of Tennessee did

And with more reliance placed on the USCT will most likely lead to more southern war crimes against them which will undoubtedly lead to reprisals by the Lincoln administration.

And with the entire eastern theater depending on Meade in the light of disasters in the west...... I eagerly look forward to the next update.
 
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