February 28, 1865---Those Roads Not Traveled

FEBRUARY 28, 1865:     

Nathan Bedford Forrest is promoted to Lieutenant General C.S.A.

The bizarre cold that has marked the winter of 1864-1865 shows no signs of relenting. Having begun in the weeks between Hallowe’en and the Union’s Thanksgiving Day, the exceptional cold will last until the last week of March.  April and early May will be cooler than usual, and the temperatures will not rise until the middle of the Month of Flowers. 

Still, the calendar says that time is passing, and Robert E. Lee knows that this winter, which has been his implacable foe and his best friend, will indeed, sooner or later, end.

The winter is his foe, because his army has been battered by the elements --- men have died of exposure, of starvation, of illness. Desertions are at an incredible level of over 100 per day in February. His remaining men are suffering from all the diseases of malnutrition and sicken beyond curing as their immune systems collapse. His men have dug through horse manure looking for undigested grains, they have eaten the rats with whom they share the trenches around Richmond and Petersburg, and they occasionally feast on the remains of sorry war horses who are too weakened to stay alive. 

The winter is his friend, because the cold has restrained Ulysses S. Grant from launching any kind of massive winter offensive. The Richmond-Petersburg pocket is an area approximately 40 miles long by 40 miles wide, crisscrossed with trenches, studded with obstacles, and bristling with cannon. He has perhaps 30,000 men total within this complex, a number which would ordinarily be barely enough to hold it. But the stringy remnant of the Army of Northern Virginia is all gristle and no fat.

Though the date is uncertain, it is sometime around the close of February and the opening of March that Lee begins to plan his own Spring offensive. He knows the Confederacy is tottering, but he has untrammeled faith in the ability of his men to fight. He also knows that if he can inflict just enough damage of The Army of The Potomac that a benumbed Union may accept peace terms favorable to the Confederacy. Lee is a consummate gambling man, and this is the jackpot bet of his military career.

Lee has three options:

The easiest and most attractive (and therefore the one he mistrusts most) is to remain where he is, holding the Richmond-Petersburg Line, and inviting Grant to enter the labyrinth of Lee’s earthworks. The ensuing battle, if Lee takes this option, promises to be an Armageddonlike contest. Lee has little doubt that he can inflict terrible damage upon Grant in such a case --- perhaps this plan will cost the Union as much as the Overland Campaign of last Spring.  Grant lost 33% of his army then, in just 40 days. This could turn the momentum of the war.

But Lee has to fear that it will likewise cost his own army dearly. The Overland Campaign bled The Army of Northern Virginia white. Lee lost 45% of his men in that same 40 days. He knows he cannot sustain such a loss again.  This could end the war. And not the way Lee wants.

If Grant gains any advantage in the trenches, Lee knows he will be finished. Lee is outnumbered by Grant at better than 3:1 at this point, and has no reserves at all, while Grant has a seemingly innumerable force and innumerable numbers to call upon. Locked in the trenches Lee will be ceding the offense to Grant who will have the option to move freely beyond the earthworks and beyond Lee’s range. 

Lee discards this option.

The second option has had to be discussed, but Lee rejects it out of hand. Failure, in the form of surrender, is no option for the silver-haired General. Not yet.

Lee discards this option.

Lee’s third choice is the gambler’s choice. Lee will simply march his troops out of the Richmond-Petersburg pocket and into open country. Once free to maneuver, Lee can engage Grant. Or he can head south to link up with Joe Johnston. Or, and Lee likes this choice, he can do both. Once in open country and with Johnston’s 25,000 men added to his 30,000, Lee will have a significant, blooded fighting force of hardscrabble veterans with which he can dance against Grant much as he did in the Overland Campaign. If Lee can inflict another Wilderness, another Cold Harbor on Grant, he can push the war to its final throw. Or, and this is another option, he can move westward into the mountains, shedding units as he goes, and maintain an insurgency that will force the Union to the negotiating table. Either way, he can win the war.

All he must do is join up with Johnston.  And Johnston is not far away. 

Lee likes this option. There is, however, one down side to Lee’s favored plan --- he must abandon Richmond and Petersburg. 

He begins drafting Orders, but decides to hold off a few days before talking to Jefferson Davis about leaving the Confederacy’s venerable capital city. Lee needs to see just how well Johnston’s reorganization of his North Carolinian army is proceeding. If Johnston cannot be at his side, Lee will need to make radically different decisions.

It is difficult to say precisely when the Civil War became unwinnable for the South. There is a tendency to see the Civil War as linear, a neat triangle wherein the South’s fortunes rose until Gettysburg at the midpoint of the war, and then declined afterward in a straight progression.

In one sense this is true. The South was never the same South after Gettysburg. Some crucial, if indefinable, element had been leached from the Southern compound by those three terrible days; a critical mass had vanished from the South’s makeup.

In some other sense this is not true. The South came closer to winning the war in the midsummer of 1864 than at any other time. This second view of the Civil War is cyclical, a succession of win-lose waves wherein the momentum of the conflict passed back and forth between the North and the South. In the midsummer of 1864, the Union’s energy was at its lowest ebb. Had the Confederacy gained its independence then, it might have been said that the North lost the Civil War rather than that the South won it. Not that it would have mattered in a practical sense; the C.S.A. would have achieved its goal.

But the war did not end in the midsummer of 1864. Sherman took Atlanta and then began his March. Grant penned Lee into the Richmond-Petersburg pocket. Actions in the other theatres became disjointed and intermittent, a series of schoolyard brawls that exerted no influence on the course of the larger war.

During this latter cycle of the war, Grant was able to sap the energy (if not the fighting spirit itself) from the Army of Northern Virginia. He was helped by two things --- first, by the brutally cold and harsh winter that, though not easy on his well-clad, well-fed men, was hell on the poorly-fed, poorly-clad Confederates; and second, by the ineptitude of the Confederate Congress, whom Robert E. Lee was later to lambaste for doing nothing to support and supply his army. But, one has to wonder, had Lee himself attempted a breakout from his own entrenchments much sooner than he did could he have seized the initiative back from Grant? 

And, for that matter, had Richmond rushed troops --- any troops they could find --- to intercept Sherman’s marching columns could they have disrupted  the seemingly inexorable destruction of the South and its associated erosion of Southern morale? In that regard, the several Confederate State Governors were essentially correct:  Richmond, if not Davis himself, had abandoned Georgia and the Carolinas.

Many Civil War historians speak of contingencies --- if this, then that. Had Lee moved before the winter set in completely he might have had to abandon Richmond and yet have maneuvered and fought Grant to a favorable outcome for the South. Had Sherman faced determined resistance in October 1864 rather than in March 1865, perhaps he would have called off his March. 

Or, had the South been less hidebound and intransigent on the matter of slavery perhaps it would have outfitted a slave army of several hundreds of thousands evening the increasingly long battlefield odds. 

No one can know what destinations one can reach on those roads not taken; and no one can know what might have occurred to the unjourneyed. 

What is clear is that as the long winter loosed its grip, the paths the Confederacy could trod were becoming fewer and fewer. The war was not lost to the South at Appomattox. It was lost before then. But the precise instant, the act, the decision that lost it, is not truly visible against the constantly moving background that produced it. Still, one has to wonder.