As I understand it, the biggest problems with the third-day attack on Cemetery Ridge were the issue of ammunition and, more importantly, issues with Lee's command structure, which was much too hands-off. Alexander's bombardment was fairly well conducted as far as it went - failing to correct for high shots balanced out by the utter destruction the bombardment on the lower slopes of the ridge - but it was necessarily limited because basically everybody, from Lee to Longstreet to Pendleton to Alexander, screwed up and left the ammunition train for the artillery miles to the rear. The plan had been for the bombardment to have been more or less kept up by artillery pieces that rolled forward with the troops up to the Emmitsburg Road, but this was impossible on any real scale due to the critically low stocks of Confederate ammunition.
I agree with the above.
Realistically, though, I dunno about the possibility of cracking Cemetery Ridge that day. After all, there were plenty of Federal troops on hand, and if Meade and co. had demonstrated anything on the previous day, they were very adept at shuffling troops between various sections of the battlefield to where they were needed and plugging holes. The Army of the Potomac's soldiers were simply employed much more efficiently than the Confederate troops, due in large part to the magic of interior lines. Hunt's artillery still outnumbered the Southern guns and the Federals were much better trained and organized.
I'd also add that Meade was prepared for an assault in the center of his lines. His council of war on the 2nd reached the conclusion that the Union's flanks were secure; thus, if the Confederates were to attack again, Meade and his commanders were confident that he would attack somewhere closer to the center of his line. He had his reserves deployed closer to the 2nd Corps (Howard I think was in command on Cemetery Ridge) and awaited Lee's attack.
I personally think the simplest and easiest route to victory for the Confederates was to win the race to Little Round Top. The Union line already was much too far out of place early on July 2nd, and had a Confederate detachment reached the hill first, then the Yankees under Sickles (
or Sykes, I always mix them up; I think it was Sickles though It was, in fact, Sickles.) would have been threatened from virtually all angles; they would have no time to retreat, either, due to the impending attack by Longstreet.
I'm sure you guys have been to Little Round Top. If the Confederates take it (and they could have, virtually without a fight, except for poor luck), then the Union would only have two options: launch an immediate attack, or pull out from Cemetery Ridge. The former would have spelled disaster, because even at this time Union reserves were spread thin; they wouldn't have the support of the Union forces north of Little Round Top, due to Longstreet's attack; and, assuming the attack on Culp's Hill started earlier (which is quite possible in this scenario, considering Ewell hesitated due to the failure of Little Round Top), the Union would not have enough manpower to repel both his attack and Anderson's. Pulling out of Cemetery Ridge entirely would have been easier said than done, considering the structure of the Union line, and a Dixie assault would probably be launched to take advantage of the situation.
That's my two cents, anyway.
Right, so the South had a few problems.
The biggest one is that the Confederacy had to win the war on its own, a daunting task. Even in the face of Lee's greatest victories, Russell and Palmerston refused to actually fight against the Federals - doing so, they feared, would prolong the war and make it even messier than it already was for everybody involved. Seward encouraged this by threatening to unleash a "race war" in the event of intervention and claiming, with excellent reason, that a British intervention would only strengthen American resolve to fight on. Even when the British thought that Lee had won at Antietam, nothing moved except for a continued effort to build a coalition to back an offer of mediation, a step that occurred anyway when the news of the battle's true result came out and a move that, Palmerston and Russell steadfastly claimed, did not mean that the British were even remotely interested in backing the Confederacy by force of arms. Indeed, nothing brought up the issue of British intervention so dramatically as did the fact that Antietam was inconclusive, and when Gladstone made his Newcastle speech, it immediately became clear what intervention would actually mean, even if Lee had captured Washington (and it's not clear he could have done, even if he had scored a victory in Maryland): full-scale Anglo-American war. Without a negotiated or dictated peace in hand, Davis, Benjamin, Mason, and Slidell had little to no chance of attracting the aid of the United Kingdom.
I'd agree that Great Britain was very hesitant to provide support for the South, though France would have been a bit quicker to pull the trigger, considering their objectives in Mexico; plus, you know, its Napoleon III being Napoleon III.
Changing the late-1862 Confederate grand offensive into Kentucky and Maryland from bloody stalemate to dramatic victory requires a great deal more than "for want of a nail"-type stuff. Lee's special order's importance is greatly overexaggerated by Turtledove types, for one thing. But regardless of the actual outcome of the Battle of Antietam itself, one would need to then get Lee to crack the Washington fortifications to capture the city (that may not even have been his goal, much less a military possibility), and Bragg would need to win big in Kentucky, something I think we can agree was pretty unlikely, and Lincoln and Seward and all the rest would actually have to have given up, and I honestly can't see that happening either. I mean, if you really wanted to, you could write a timeline that featured successive Confederate victories through the fall of 1862 culminating in a capture of New York or Philadelphia in the spring of the following year, with all Federal comers vanquished, but such an occurrence would be so dramatically improbable as to be something of a . One runs into similar problems in 1864 during the election. Even McClellan distanced himself from the Copperheads, and may have found himself impeached had he won the election following on drastic Union defeats on the battlefield and subsequently gone beyond his campaign promises in offering peace (he only would commit to negotiation, not a serious action on that negotiation, in his 1864 platform).
I don't think its possible to envision a scenario arising out of the Kentucky offensive. I mean, if Bragg lost to
Buell of all people, what are the odds that he'd remain in Kentucky if a more stubborn Union offensive was made? Granted, it'd push the war front northward by a vast margin, but the Yankees were already pushing down the Mississippi; and there was no way Bragg could openly fight Halleck's death stack moving south towards Corinth.
A Dixie victory at Antietam, while more likely, would also have been difficult to achieve. First and foremost, Lee's main concern was that the Yankee garrison in Harper's Ferry put up a much more stubborn fight than Lee had anticipated; if you wanted to change the outcome of the battle, you'd need to have Hill's troops take the town much quicker than they did in real life.
Even then, the Union army still vastly outnumbered the Confederates. I'd say you'd have to overemphasize the caution of McClellan if the Southerners were to win this one. Honestly, I never think of Antietam in a "What If?" victory scenario for the Confederacy. There's just such little chance of success with that campaign.
So whatever: assume the Confederacy somehow manages to secure its independence following an improbable run of victories on the battlefield. Okay: so what? The interest of Britain in supporting such a state is going to dramatically decline in the following years as Europe heats up (one way or another) and it becomes unprofitable to spend on the defense of Canada from a hostile United States, just as Britain began to draw down its Asiatic and Mediterranean commitments in the next few decades in OTL (and, in all probability, TTL). And France may make for a worse neighbor than the United States in Mexico, as Confederate diplomats had realized as early as the fall of 1862 in OTL. The overall American superiority in manpower, cash, industry, and the like is not going to be dented. By the 1880s at the latest the Americans are going to make another go at it, and it's hard to see the outnumbered and friendless Confederacy triumphing yet again.
Well, France's commitments are going to be drastically altered from OTL if the Confederate experiment succeeds and Mexico becomes a French puppet. At the same time, the UK and France are going to be increasingly estranged, although they were historically. Now, the 1864 war is probably going to happen more or less the same way with few variations except for the course of the war itself and the dates. Butterflies aren't going to be enough on that time-scale to impact things like the composition and tactical instrument of the Habsburg army, for instance, but they could very well lead to an Austro-Prussian explicit partnership against an overweening France instead of the enmity that developed historically in 1865. A Franco-Italian alliance against Prussia and Austria is certainly a potential scenario for war in the late 1860s. Alternatively, Bismarck might decide that a France that is more distracted by the New World might make a better partner than it was historically, and continue on more or less the same path (probably winning the Austro-Prussian War equivalent anyway, although messing with that could make for lulsome second-order butterflies) but with slightly less risk of a Franco-Prussian War equivalent.
I'll write up an alternate timeline should the South had won the Civil War; its a much too complicated task for me to summarize here
The pressure on the Confederacy to split apart would be very intense, but I think that, save in the eyes of modern Old South romantics and pro-traitor libertarians, a utopian states' rights Confederacy with various states going more or less their separate ways won't happen. The power of the central government in the CSA was explicitly stronger in their Constitution than was the American federal government, and Richmond only got stronger as the war went on. Resistance to Richmond would be crushed bloodily like it was historically in northern Alabama, Knoxville, and North Carolina. Besides, the ever-present threat of Washington would be quite the incentive to hang together, lest they all hang separately. And I think that they would be consigned to the gallows together - just a decade or two later than they ought to have done historically, and doubtless under the eye of a president much less interested in reconciliation than was Lincoln.
I agree that the discussion is better suited to the alternate history thread, and it'd be nice to have most of it moved there. :3
I agree with this as well.
Sorry to post this in a thread where it technically doesn't belong, but I wanted the conversation to continue. If Bird could move all these posts to the Alt History thread, that would be awesome.
). Just depends. Just sayin'.
