"Did Longstreet come west intending to replace Bragg?" Topic

"….I think the answer to this question is clearly, no. While he evinced no great admiration for Bragg, James Longstreet clearly thought that the proper man to command the Army of Tennessee was Joseph E. Johnston. Virtually all of Longstreet's arguments were pitched to this end. He flirted with other solutions, including suggesting that Lee come west and offhandedly suggesting that he and Bragg trade places, but the only man he consistently and repeatedly put forward was Johnston. Was this merely adroit maneuvering, a smokescreen on Longstreet's part to provide cover for his own ambition? For that to be true, Longstreet would have to be certain that Davis would never place Johnston in command of the Army of Tennessee – thus clearing his own path.

The great flaw in that line of reasoning is obvious: On December 27, 1863, despite admitted misgivings, Davis appointed Johnston to command of the Army of Tennessee.

I think Occam's Razor applies here: Longstreet liked, admired, and valued Johnston as a man and a soldier. Johnston shared similar views about how the war in the West should be conducted. Those facts are straightforward. Too much Herculean mucking around in Longstreet's psychological stables looking for unhealthy ambitions and resentments doesn't make for good history…"
Main page
link

But… what if he did?.

Amicalement
Armand

Hmm. Perhaps the right phrasing is "so what if he did?" Generals are ambitious. That's a given. And it's sometimes suspected that they don't always cooperate with their peers as a result. But Longstreet was working under Bragg, and he could hardly expect to be given Bragg's job unless his own work was superior. If Longstreet was doing the best job he could, does it really matter whether he hoped to step into Bragg's boots?

I think the author had it right. Longstreet would rate higher in Confederate history if he'd been killed during the war--never criticized Marse Robert, and never turned Republican. My pick would be for that wound in the Wilderness to have been fatal. But I don't think that would have been Lee's pick.

Longstreet was sometimes quarrelsome and never a respecter of persons. But the troops under his command were trained, organized and disciplined. Longstreet moved Heaven and Earth to see they were as well fed, clothed, armed and shod as the state of his nation allowed And when he attacked, he held nothing back.

Sensible people put up with a lot to have a general like that on the payroll.

I don't know if Longstreet had that on his mind in the way west, but after meeting Bragg he sure seems to have wanted the job. That friction got in the way of his doing a good job. He didn't shine during the fighting around Lookout Mountain or Knoxville.

Yeah, criticizing Lee and joining the Republicans made him the butt of the Lost Cause folks. Mosby turned Republican but never said anything bad about Lee and got away with it. Also he was lower down the food chain.

Longstreet's attacks: broke Pope's flank at Bull Run II, almost broke Meade's flank Gettysburg day 2, Pickett's charge (under protest), broke Rosecran's center at Chickamauga, stopped Hancock's breakthrough and then rolled him up at the Wilderness. He had his bad days and wasn't good at independent command, but when he was on, look out.

Longstreet was the best Corps commander in the war.
'Old Pete' was adored by the troops under his command and Lee placed him before Jackson as Ist Corps commander ANV, an excellent recommendation you might say.

I certainly think Longstreet had hopes of replacing Bragg when he went West, and when he found that it wasn't going to happened, he soon turned surly. He later wrote that he wanted it, but only if he had time to settle into it and for the army to get used to him before he had to fight a big battle, but by the time he got there the battle was already in progress, and Bragg screwed it up; so after that he preferred to see Johnston or Lee in Bragg's place. That was written well after the fact, however.

But… would he give a good work or not?… could he change the waves of war there?…

Amicalement
Armand

Longstreet wanted to get out from under Lee's command. But after being with Bragg he began to think things weren't so bad with Lee after all.

could he change the waves of war there?

Longstreet had two spells of independent command, one in coastal North Carolina in early 1863 (why he missed Chancellorsville) and later in 1863 at Knoxville. He didn't shine in either case. This leads me to believe that he was an excellent corps commander but no great shakes as army commander.

But … we all agree that he could made a much better work than Bragg?

Amicalement
Armand

Maybe. Bragg could make a decent plan. He became cautious in the face of the enemy. His main problem was a complete inability to get along with many of his officers. They tended not to follow his orders, including those times Bragg was right.

Longstreet would have taken over the fractious army. Maybe there would have been less rancor. The moaning continued when Johnston and Hood were in command, if at a slower lower decibel level. Longstreet was cautious when in top command.

Thanks!

Amicalement
Armand

As D. H. Hill pointed, out: Bragg couldn't trust his subordinates to obey his orders and follow his plans, and they couldn't trust him to give sensible orders and come up with realistic plans -- and a lot of it boiled down to poor intelligence. Bragg's cavalry did not do a good job of serving as his eyes and ears, not like Stuart did for Lee, so his plans were often based on poor or faulty information.

One example of what was wrong in the Army of Tennessee: They had two cavalry corps, one under Forrest and the other under Wheeler. That's one reason the cavalry scouting wasn't up to JEB Stuart's level. There was an amazing amount of internecine strife, enough to make the officer corps of the Army of the Potomac look like a band of brothers.

According to Cozzens, Bragg finally figured out what Rosecrans was up to when he got hold of a 3-day old Chicago newspaper. This info didn't come from his cavalry. The result was Chickamauga.

The info that Bragg got from the newspaper, however, was not accurate -- it was disinformation probably planted by Rosecrans, saying that he intended to move to Bragg's right and hook up with Burnside in East Tennessee, when in fact he moved to Bragg's left into northern Georgia. According to D. H. Hill, Bragg only found out that Rosecrans was crossing the Tennessee River downstream from him when a civilian brought in the information, and even then he wasn't sure he believed it.

The problems wasn't so much that Wheeler and Forrest were independent of each other and didn't like each other; it was that both were more inclined to raiding than to scouting. Wheeler, especially, was incompetent. He had been promoted way over his head. But Bragg liked him, probably because, unlike his other generals, he didn't argue with him.

If anything, I think Longstreet went west hoping that Johnston could replace Bragg. I think James Longstreet knew he was never going to get independent command of a major Confederate army. But Longstreet leading a corps under Johnston, a more defensive-minded commander than Lee, might have made Confederate prospects for success very interesting.

Bragg logistically undermined Longstreet's East Tennessee campaign, so hardly a fair assessment to say that Longstreet was unsuccessful in independent command. A better assessment of Longstreet's potential for independent command is the strategic fear his corps instilled in the Federal command while taking up quarters in the mountains of Tenn. and VA over the winter.