What If: Lee goes West

What if General Robert E Lee was sent to fight in Tennessee? Say, after his loss at Gettysburg? How would he affect things and how would things change in Virginia?
 
The problem was the West was really a sideshow to the East. Lee was needed to try and hold back Grant, I doubt anyone else could have done as well as Lee did...
 
Lee's great battlefield successes came when he understood his army, understood his geography, and/or faced opponents with poorly conceived operational plans. Depending how much time he has to develop in the role, you may see a Lee in the west that operates more like a Lee during the Seven Day's Battles/Anteitam/Gettysburg than you would a Lee that operates like he does at Second Manassas/Fredericksburg/Chancellorsville/Overland Campaign.

He's likely more successful than Bragg was but it's difficult to see him being a successful as he was in his role in the Army of Northern Virginia. And then you have the question of who takes over the Army of Northern Virginia and whether this leads to more political interference by Davis in its operations and command structure. It's possible the CSA's war efforts are actually less successful under these conditions.
 

SsgtC

Banned
And then you have the question of who takes over the Army of Northern Virginia and whether this leads to more political interference by Davis in its operations and command structure. It's possible the CSA's war efforts are actually less successful under these conditions.
Longstreet maybe? He was the CSA's most senior Lt Gen and Lee's second in command of the Army of Northern Virginia. Other options may be Joseph E. Johnston or P.G.T. Beauregard.
 
These scenarios keep coming up because Davis never solved the problem of who was to command the Army of Tennessee, the "other" Confederate field army, after A.S. Johnston's death. Lee was the only Confederate army commander who was both a success at the military operations and had the confidence of Davis. The problem is that there is only one Lee, so that moving Lee to the Army of Tennessee now means that you have a command problem to solve with the Army of Northern Virginia. And the Army of Northern Virginia was the more important of the two, and in the theater Lee was more familiar with and Lee was more familiar with working with that army.

So using Lee anywhere other than where he was used IOTL was sub-optimal, and for that reason I have a problem with Civil War wargames where that is a good move (at a minimum the rules should not allow that). Even if you give Lee overall command of all Confederate armies earlier than in 1865, it doesn't change much because he still stays with the ANV as the de facto if not de jure commander, what you really wind up gaining, which admittedly is not nothing and Lee is a buffer between Davis and Beauregard and JE Johnston, both of whom Lee had higher opinions of than did Davis.

The good news for the CSA is that the two Army of Tennessee commanders they used most often, Bragg and Hood, should both have been excluded from consideration off the bat on health grounds, Bragg due to mental Health and Hood due to physical injuries. People in the mid-nineteenth century wouldn't be expected to understand that and Bragg at least looked good on paper, and neither were total disasters. However, it should be easy to at least improve on Bragg and Hood just by moving in someone in decent mental and physical health. JE Johnston, the obvious alternative especially since his own tenure was quite credible, was unavailable in 1862 due to his own injuries. There were only two Confederate field armies, so we can't be sure how well any of the other generals would have done in army command, excepting Beauregard's brief tenure at what became the Army of Tennessee.

The most obvious POD for sending Lee West is as a butterfly to JE Johnston not getting wounded at Seven Pines. Even better, have the attack succeed and JE Johnston saves Richmond in 1862, no he does not retreat and abandon the city. Davis' confidence in JE Johnston improves and he remains in command of the Virginia army. Instead of replacing Beauregard with Bragg in the West, he sends Lee to that command. Lee seems to have been kept on the shelf anyway before Seven Pines in case a command change was needed at one of the two armies. It happened that the Eastern army vacancy came up first/ was more urgently needed to be filled and Lee was better suited for the eastern army anyway.

Now if done this way, the CSA probably does get more out of it than the iOTL arrangement. Virginia is a more suitable theater for the sort of holding operation and delaying tactics that JE Johnston was likely to do. The West was too large for one field army to cover, so the tactics needed was to hit one of the federal armies hard with a counter-attack, which in fact Bragg kept trying to do and even JE Johnston tried to do at least once. But Lee was more likely to pull this off and would have had more clout to get the subordinates he needed to pull this off. But this is offset by Lee going to a smaller command and army, and one he is less familiar with, so unless there are substantial butterflies it is far from a war winning move, and could lose the more more quickly if the eastern commander turns out to be not competent.
 
These scenarios keep coming up because Davis never solved the problem of who was to command the Army of Tennessee, the "other" Confederate field army, after A.S. Johnston's death. Lee was the only Confederate army commander who was both a success at the military operations and had the confidence of Davis. The problem is that there is only one Lee, so that moving Lee to the Army of Tennessee now means that you have a command problem to solve with the Army of Northern Virginia. And the Army of Northern Virginia was the more important of the two, and in the theater Lee was more familiar with and Lee was more familiar with working with that army.

So using Lee anywhere other than where he was used IOTL was sub-optimal, and for that reason I have a problem with Civil War wargames where that is a good move (at a minimum the rules should not allow that). Even if you give Lee overall command of all Confederate armies earlier than in 1865, it doesn't change much because he still stays with the ANV as the de facto if not de jure commander, what you really wind up gaining, which admittedly is not nothing and Lee is a buffer between Davis and Beauregard and JE Johnston, both of whom Lee had higher opinions of than did Davis.

The good news for the CSA is that the two Army of Tennessee commanders they used most often, Bragg and Hood, should both have been excluded from consideration off the bat on health grounds, Bragg due to mental Health and Hood due to physical injuries. People in the mid-nineteenth century wouldn't be expected to understand that and Bragg at least looked good on paper, and neither were total disasters. However, it should be easy to at least improve on Bragg and Hood just by moving in someone in decent mental and physical health. JE Johnston, the obvious alternative especially since his own tenure was quite credible, was unavailable in 1862 due to his own injuries. There were only two Confederate field armies, so we can't be sure how well any of the other generals would have done in army command, excepting Beauregard's brief tenure at what became the Army of Tennessee.

The most obvious POD for sending Lee West is as a butterfly to JE Johnston not getting wounded at Seven Pines. Even better, have the attack succeed and JE Johnston saves Richmond in 1862, no he does not retreat and abandon the city. Davis' confidence in JE Johnston improves and he remains in command of the Virginia army. Instead of replacing Beauregard with Bragg in the West, he sends Lee to that command. Lee seems to have been kept on the shelf anyway before Seven Pines in case a command change was needed at one of the two armies. It happened that the Eastern army vacancy came up first/ was more urgently needed to be filled and Lee was better suited for the eastern army anyway.

Now if done this way, the CSA probably does get more out of it than the iOTL arrangement. Virginia is a more suitable theater for the sort of holding operation and delaying tactics that JE Johnston was likely to do. The West was too large for one field army to cover, so the tactics needed was to hit one of the federal armies hard with a counter-attack, which in fact Bragg kept trying to do and even JE Johnston tried to do at least once. But Lee was more likely to pull this off and would have had more clout to get the subordinates he needed to pull this off. But this is offset by Lee going to a smaller command and army, and one he is less familiar with, so unless there are substantial butterflies it is far from a war winning move, and could lose the more more quickly if the eastern commander turns out to be not competent.

I basically agree you'd need Lee assigned to the west early enough to impact the development of the AoT for his talents to really shine there and that JE Johnston's tactics would be a good fit for conditions in the east, although I wonder if long term Davis wouldn't be strongly tempted to replace JE Johnston with someone that promised to be more aggressive. One also wonders if Lee would have as much clout as he had if he was operating in the west - this could impact his ability to replace particularly troublesome subordinates in that theater.
 
The retreat from Gettysburg ended on July 14, 1863, and thus Lee would be available to command the Army of Tennessee then. By then the Army of Tennessee was resting after the disastrous retreat from Tennessee.

The Army of Tennessee was in shambles after the Tullahoma Campaign: desertion spiked after the abandonment of Tennessee and there was a command shake up with Hardee leaving and DH Hill and Hindman entering.

Assuming Lee arrived by late-July to assume command, Lee has just a few weeks to familiarize himself with a new army, staff, geography, and subordinates before Rosecrans launches his campaign for Chattanooga.

In addition Lee would have to deal with more incapable and incompetent Corps commanders and poor quality cavalry. Joe Wheeler certainly did not prove himself to be worth a damn as a cavalry Corps commander and Forrest proved that he was not suited for traditional cavalry operations. To make things worse, the Army of Tennessee’s command culture was absolutely toxic: with commanders blatantly ignoring orders they disliked/disagreed.

While Lee will certainly perform better than Bragg, Lee is severly handicapped in this situation, and any benefit of Lee’s presence would likely begin to be impactful at the spring of 1864 after a reformation and command shake up of the Army of Tennessee.

In Virginia, Longstreet was the most senior officer in the Army of Northern Virginia. If Longstreet has his way, McLaws is his most likely replacement. Longstreet’s replacement of Lee is more likely to negatively harm the prospects of victory for the Army of Northern Virginia. Longstreet and A. P. Hill had a mutual dislike of one another, McLaws is not exactly fit for Corps command, and Longstreet doesn’t exactly have the best performance at independent command. I can’t see how Longstreet would perform better than Lee against Meade’s thrust in 1863 and the (presumably) Overland Campaign in 1864.
 

Anaxagoras

Banned
One of the keys of Lee's success was the ability to get the most out of his subordinates, to win their respect and support, and to clamp down on their rivalries. Bragg was the opposite of this and it was one of the most importance factors in his failure as an army commander. Lee would have been able to work very well with Hardee, whom he knew well from pre-war years and who was a skilled corps commander. However, I doubt that even Lee could have gotten much out of Polk, who was a dismal commander and never met a superior officer he didn't despise. The difference is that, while Davis never listened to Bragg's request to shuffle Polk out of the army (just as he later didn't listen to Johnston's request for command changes), he might have listened to Lee.
 
The other thing that a J.E. Johnston not being wounded scenario helps with is that Lee doesn't end up with the very subordinates that he had reassigned to the AoT to be rid of in the first place. He might be able to get rid of Polk, but he doesn't have a bottomless drawer of good officers to pull from. And if he pulls them from the AoNV he runs the risk of critically weakening it.
 
Davis actually suggested Lee do some workings on the Tennessee front. He leikly would do better than his OTL counterpart. This was just before the Gettysburg Campaign and Longstreet (the probable replacement) wanted to do a defensive strategy thinking the iron was hot in the Maryland campaign and now the South lost it's chance for a counterattack. So he might resist Meade or whoever for a year, but not suffer OTL Gettysbrug disaster. By this time, Northren pressure would force Lee to be recalled back to Virginia. In short, for one year the South does better everywhere than OTL.
 
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