In defense of McClellan at Antietam: A contrarian view

[Lettow77]

Hey Lettow I have a Confederate question for you.  There is a Confederate officer, Lt. Col Alfred Robb of the 49th Tennessee of Clarkesville Tennessee, who I guess is somewhat of a hero since the South started naming things after him after he died after Fort Donelson.  Does a picture of this dude exist?  Since you are from Tennessee I thought maybe you might know something about him.

No picture that I know of- but he wasn't a hero, just a local big man. Lawyer and politician, representative in the Confederate house, political appointment of questionable military competence. One of plenty who died at the start in the west before letting us know just how incompetent they were, and notable for the civic achievements he did before the war rather than anything in it.

[derspiess]

Speaking of bad generals in the west, I'm a big fan of Pillow

[Lettow77]

 Zollicoffer gets my nod for most amusingly incompetent western Confederate commander. There are so many to choose from, though!

[jimmy olsen]

Some of these numbers should be easy to check I'd think.

The 3,300 rebels buried for instance, and the 5,000 captured. Those numbers alone would put Lee with at least 43,000 men present at the battlefield.

I kind of hope it does turn out that Lee had a lot more men then previously thought, because then it makes the battle even more epic.

[Valmy]

No picture that I know of- but he wasn't a hero, just a local big man. Lawyer and politician, representative in the Confederate house, political appointment of questionable military competence. One of plenty who died at the start in the west before letting us know just how incompetent they were, and notable for the civic achievements he did before the war rather than anything in it.

Got it.  Thanks for the info.

Nothing wrong with civic achievements

[Tamas]

No matter how one twists things, it is still a tragedy that the V Corps never was sent in at Antietam.  Had Porter gone in after the Bloody Lane was cleared things would have been different.

well they couldn't just have two armies worth of men in a single division and be effective.

[The Minsky Moment]

Plenty of eyewitness accounts support the 75,000 figure for Lee's army.

Really?  Who?

Perhaps the most detailed comes from Dr. Lewis Steiner of the Sanitary Commission, who happened to be in Frederick on Sept. 10-11 as most of the Confederate army marched out of town. Steiner tried to count every rebel that passed him and concluded by the end of the two days that he had seen some 69,000 Confederates.

Not really.
On Sept 11 Steiner reported seeing Hill's division march through with "about"  8000 men.
The previous day - Sept 10 - Steiner states as follows: "At four o clock this morning the rebel army began to move from our town, Jackson s
force taking the advance. The movement continued until eight o clock r. M., occupying sixteen hours. The most liberal calculations could not give them more than 61,000 men. Over 3,000 negroes must be included in this number."

What is clear is this: Steiner did not claim to "tr[y] to count every rebel that passed him" and since the march took 16 hours it would be implausible.  The 61,000 is representated as a maximum based on the "most liberal calculation" and includes 3000 "negroes" who presumably were not relied upon by Lee for front-line combat duty. 

DH Hill meanwhile, whose division was reported to contain "about 8000 men" by Steiner as it went through Frederick on the 11th, stated that on the morning of the 15th, his division contained about 5000 men, strung out over 5 miles, noting that " the straggling had been enormous in consequence of heavy marches, deficient commissariat, want of shoes, and inefficient officers."  I.e. the "straggling" is not an invention of un-named "historians"; it is referenced in the primary sources. 

This should not be really surprising; Lee had his troops and commands strewn all over the Maryland countryside in a ten mile radius.  For the Confederates, the challenge at Antietam was to concentrate their scattered and inferior forces in time before Lee could be crushed by the fully concentrated Union army.  They succeeded to doing so because McClellan was slow to attack.  And McClellan was slow to attack despite knowing the scatttered state of the CSA forces and despite knowing the short window of opportunity open to him because for some reason he believed the total CSA forces were not 40,000 (as claimed by Lee) or the 50-70K that may have been concentrated at Frederick 4-5 days earlier, but 120,000 (!)

Antietam wasn't the worst showing for McClellan, but it wasn't exactly gold-plating for his resume and it proved the proverbial straw that broke the camel's back

[Razgovory]

Speaking of bad generals in the west, I'm a big fan of Pillow

There's a big statue in Keytesville Missouri of Sterling Price.  Which is a bit odd considering that he did to Southern Missouri what Sherman did to Georgia and South Carolina except on a smaller scale and less successfully.  He did help the Union cause immensely in Missouri by drawing all the guerrillas to him where they would get slaughtered by the US cavalry.