Who's To Blame for the Failure of the 1862 Confederate Invasion of Kentucky?

Who's To Blame for the Failure of the 1862 Confederate Invasion of Kentucky?

  • Braxton Bragg

    Votes: 14 60.9%
  • Leonidas Polk

    Votes: 6 26.1%
  • William Hardee

    Votes: 0 0.0%
  • Kirby Smith

    Votes: 0 0.0%
  • Someone Else

    Votes: 3 13.0%

  • Total voters
    23

Anaxagoras

Banned
If you had to choose the single Confederate individual most responsible for the failure of the Confederate effort to gain control of Kentucky in the fall of 1862, who would it be? Bragg? Polk? Hardee? Smith? Someone else?
 
If you insist on finding fault, then it must be laid at the feet of Bragg as the overall commander. It was his watch, therefore everything that happened was his responsibility. Personally, I think there may be some virtue to the notion that he had nothing to gain and everything to lose, and that a withdrawal was prudent.
 
If you insist on finding fault, then it must be laid at the feet of Bragg as the overall commander. It was his watch, therefore everything that happened was his responsibility. Personally, I think there may be some virtue to the notion that he had nothing to gain and everything to lose, and that a withdrawal was prudent.

Except that Bragg wasn't the overall commander - Kirby Smith and Bragg were cooperating (supposedly), and Polk was an insubordinate cuss who disregarded that Bragg was his superior.


I agree with the last, but if we're looking at what made things go wrong, I blame Polk and Kirby Smith for making Bragg's position worse than it would be anyway.


But that brings us to the real culprit:

"I think the Union army had something to do with it." </George Pickett> (about another battle)
 

Anaxagoras

Banned
The buck stopped w/Bragg.

I'm far from a fan of Braxton Bragg, but I think that his subordinates had a responsibility to obey the orders he gave them, don't you? Polk basically staged a mini-mutiny and refused to do what Bragg ordered him to do because he disagreed with it. That not only cost the Confederacy an opportunity at achieving a victory over Buell's army (which would have changed the course of the whole campaign) but undermined Bragg's leadership.
 
When in doubt, always blame Braxton Bragg. He was that bad.

As was often the case, Bragg was let down by failures of mediocre (Smith) or bad (Polk) subordinate commanders, so he has some company in the stocks.

But it strikes me that Jefferson Davis shares some of the blame, too: He was the one that ultimately approved this campaign with a divided command.
 
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