Aftermath at Gettysburg

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South took a chance and it didn't pan out

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“General I have no division.”

A friend of mine from Marksville wrote that book.

I worked with him at USL in the 70's.
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He wrote sixteen books and a dozen scholarly articles on Gettysburg and the Civil War. His A Strange and Blighted Land. Gettysburg: The Aftermath of a Battle was voted #12 in the Top 50 Civil War Books ever written. Greg died at age 62 in February of 2009.

LINK

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The craziest thing is that if the South wins decisively at Gettysburg, the war is likely over in a matter of weeks if not days. Lee went all-in, and went bust.

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The south never was going to win the war.

As the great Shelby Foote said, “the north fought that entire war with one hand behind its back. If the south had won at Gettysburg, the north would have pulled out that other arm”

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South took a chance and it didn't pan out. With Vicksburg falling as well, it was over.

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Yep

Think of a stool with 3 legs

Gettysburg and Vicksburg both getting chopped off within days of each other

It was all over after that

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The craziest thing is that if the South wins decisively at Gettysburg, the war is likely over in a matter of weeks if not days. Lee went all-in, and went bust.

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In a fun game of what if, do you think we would still have 2 countries had Lee won?

I think no, the South didn’t have industry, infrastructure to remain independent.

Lee won huge victories at Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville in the months prior to Gettysburg ; yet he couldn’t lay siege to DC.

Unless Lee destroyed Meade’s army he wasn’t going to lay siege to DC.

Now politically Lincoln may have had to cut a peace deal, but a win at Gettysburg that wasn’t the destruction of Meade’s army wasn’t good enough.

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The craziest thing is that if the South wins decisively at Gettysburg, the war is likely over in a matter of weeks if not days.

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I doubt it. Had Lee won, he still would've suffered enourmous losses that he would have to recover from. He wouldn't have been able to march on DC immediately. That would've given the Union the time they needed to reconstitute a defense of the capital.

Not to mention Bragg's (Longstreet's) failure to eliminate Rosecrans' Army at Chickamauga later that summer. Chattanooga falling at the end of 1863 spelled the end of the Confederacy as it was open ground from there to Atlanta.

Combined with the fall of Vicksburg, the body of the Confederacy was being sliced and diced behind Lee's Army of Virginia.

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As the great Shelby Foote said, “the north fought that entire war with one hand behind its back. If the south had won at Gettysburg, the north would have pulled out that other arm”

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Is this when the rich people would start sending their children to fight in the war instead of immigrants right off the ships?

You know the say “when seconds count, the police are minutes away”. It’s like that. The confederacy doesn’t have to take and hold Washington to win. Congress was very split on supporting/opposing the war. Lincoln’s opponent in the upcoming election was running on a platform of peace. If the Confederacy takes Washington, the Union will give them peace. The Confederacy could never win a protracted total war of attrition, but they didn’t need to do that to win. They just needed to be a substantial enough threat to Washington to make peace more politically viable than war.

Lee’s army crushing the Union at Gettysburg and arriving at the gates of Washington to face a well-dug in but green Union army with those Western reinforcements months away, would likely force a treaty long before the Anaconda Plan could win. A win by Lee at Gettysburg would put the Confederacy “seconds” away from victory while the only armies capable of truly defeating them would be “minutes” away. The confederacy didn’t have to actually sack Washington to get the political victory they desired.