Robert E. Lee Was Not Stupid

I am approaching the end of the Audiobook version of Jubilee by Margaret Walker. It has inspired me to surf the Web to learn more about the US Civil War.

One of the issues that is covered is: given the great Union superiority in manpower and industry, why did the Confederacy think it could win. The answer seems to be cotton. In 1860, two-thirds of the world's cotton was produced by the US. The English textile industry got all of its cotton from the US. All of that cotton was grown in the southern US. The Rebels just assumed that the British, desperate for cotton for their mills, would send the Royal Navy to break the Union blockade. In the end that didn't happen. English textile mills were shut down for about a year after they used up their pre-war stockpiles and were scrambling to find alternate sources of cotton, but find alternate sources they did, in India and Egypt. The Rebels had no Plan B for fallback.

Another issue that is covered is the wisdom of Lee's invasions of the North. Some historians argue that Lee was stupid to invade the North. The argument against invading the north seems to be that all the South needed to do to win was play defense to hold on to what it had at the beginning of the war, and Lee was very good at defense. But both times he invaded the North he was badly beaten, at Antietam and at Gettysburg.

Actually, Lee's invasions of the North were his own Plan B. To explain that, I need to refer to something that I blogged in April 2015. At the end of the Thirty Years' War, the Prussians said "Never Again!" and organized an army strong enough to make an invader think twice before invading. Now here is something I learned from this YouTube video. At the end of the Thirty Years' War, Prussia was small and economically weak, and its potential enemies, Austria, Russia and Sweden, all were major European powers. The only chance Prussia would ever have to win a war would be to take crazy risks and hit the enemy army hard when the enemy army wasn't expecting an attack. The Prussians never bothered planning for a war of attrition because they knew a priori that they never could win a war of attrition. This style of grand strategy worked so well (most of the time) for the next 200 years that in 1871 what used to be little puny Prussia now had become the German Empire, a Major European Power. Except that the German Army still thought like the old Prussian Army and didn't plan for wars of attrition, even though, as a Major European Power, Germany was now in a position to contemplate wars of attrition. This conceptual failure came back to haunt them in the Fall of 1914 and at the end of 1941, when their great offensive Plans A failed and they hadn't bothered to formulate a Plan B.

Back to Lee. Lee knew perfectly well that there was no way that the Confederacy could win a war of attrition against the Union, and without British intervention on the side of the Confederacy that was what the war had become by the middle of 1862. The only hope the Confederacy had to win was by imitating Prussia, and that is why Lee invaded the North. The only remaining question is why Lee kept fighting after Gettysburg, when he knew the war was lost. Maybe it was a matter of honor. Maybe he was hoping the politicians would come up with something,