GDG- Re: Meade's pursuit

[Biggsk at aol.com]

Dennis Lawrence very kindly writes:

>>>I would love to read your work on the newspaper's  perspectives as I know 
how meticulous your research always is. And how  carefully you draw 
conclusions from it.>>>
That is very nice of you to state.  Thanks very much.  I know  there's some 
very serious heavy weight historians on this list that have more  than done 
their share of meticulous research.
 
Geez - maybe I will have to bump this project up somewhat.
 

>>>   Despite the public interpretation of  Gettysburg (and Vicksburg) do you 
not think that Lee and Davis saw the  implications of the military losses 
more clearly than the public?  Even  helped to spin a public reaction at odds 
with their personal evaluation.   Not that they were without hope, but 
understood how their situation had  changed because of the military defeats 
of the summer of  '63>>>
I would certainly agree with that since they were both there and read the  
reports of it later - and then had to deal with requests for replacing men and  
equipment that were lost.  Davis had the really bad picture having to deal  
with both main fronts while Lee was concentrated on his, but certainly was privy 
 to the gory details of the West being so close to Davis.  I don't think  
they had to spin anything though for between the press and letters home from  
their men in the field, the CS public quickly figured out that things were bad  
indeed.
 
Historian Richard Goff, author of the fine book "Confederate Supply," calls  
Gettysburg the "greatest supply disaster for the Confederacy in the war."   
Why does he state that?  For it expended the massive supply build-up that  was 
done for the campaign and created a  supply deficiency that the system  had to 
work very hard to rebuild.  An army expends more supplies in a  moving 
campaign than it does just sitting around, and this is what he  meant.
 
Yet, this type of stuff did not seem to get out to the public on the scale  
of what the ANV supply and ordnance officers saw via requisitions after the 
army  got back to Virginia, nor what Davis ad the SecWar had to deal with in 
terms of  making sure those got filled as best as possible.
 
The newspaper guys were not privy to that type of information unless one of  
their soldier correspondents wrote a long report for the paper that alluded to 
 these losses - and that did happen, but still not on the scale that the  
requisitions would show.  For the most part, they could only look at a map  of 
their nation, see how their biggest and best army got its nose bloodied up  
North but was still very much in the field doing its fine job as it always had  
with its great chieftain very much in charge of it.  They could, correctly,  
report that no harm had come to Virginia during this time and that Lee, being  
who he was, would make things better.
 
Then contrast that with losing Middle Tennessee (supplier of 50 per cent of  
the hogs to the CSA and Number 2 supplier of its horses) and the conclusion of 
 that campaign now placing a big Union army almost within eyesight of the  
railroad junction of Chattanooga (only 30 miles from the largest copper mine in  
the South) and therefore quite close to the massive industrial hub of  
Augusta-Macon-Atlanta-Columbus-Selma, which was the largest concentration of  
industry in the South not to mention the real breadbasket of the CSA - Georgia,  
Alabama and Mississippi  - and one can indeed see why a Southern newspaper  would 
not be feeling so good about things at the time.
 
Then, to make matters worse, they have just lost the Mississippi River,  
which is the most important commercial artery of America; an entire army and  
another smaller army down in Louisiana - and this now places another large Union  
army that can march east and threaten the same industrial-agricultural axis 
that  the one in Tennessee can.  There's only some 25,000 Confederates in this  
area that can resist such a move.
 
Davis, while realizing that Lee's army was hurt, now had to figure out just  
where he could get another 46,000 or so men to build and completely equip a 
new  field army to replace the two he just lost - and that was a much bigger  
challenge for him and the CS supply system to have to face.
 
So I guess what you state comes down to perceptions - the real damage done  
to the ANV as seen by Lee and Davis from being at Gettysburg and the  
supply/ordnance requisitions that emanate from the army versus the press/public  
perceptions of losing a whole bunch of territory, having even more important  
territory now under Union guns and the loss of two field armies to boot.   We can 
also mention that Lee did have some very good food acquisitions success  while 
on his raid, as several posters have stated here recently.
 
I see your point and I know that Davis and Lee saw it and yet I see what  the 
press was doing and how that bleaker picture really took it to Confederate  
morale.  The press reported their perceptions based on their read of the  map.  
They did have hope so long as their armies, what was left of them,  stayed in 
the field, but I would have hated to be a Southerner in July, 1863 and  wake 
up to read the compounding of bad news that they got for a couple weeks in  a 
row.
 
Greg Biggs