While much is made of Lee's brilliance in the eastern theater of the war, the Union steadily tore the Confederacy apart in the west. Without the western Confederacy, Lee could not stand.
Would the war have ended sooner if Lee had been in the west holding back the Union and the western generals had been in the east? Would eastern losses have meant more for the confederacy than western ones?
Interesting thought...
Eons ago I wrote a paper, as part of my history degree, on this very subject and I have not read anything since that alters my thoughts of 25 plus years ago but they are just my views. As vamp has correctly mentioned the Western Confederacy was a vast area to protect/manoeuvre troops etc and Jefferson Davis who tried to micro manage everything failed by selecting appallingly bad generals. After Sidney Johnston was killed at Shiloh it was all down hill.
In late '62 Davis assigned Gen Joseph E. Johnston to command all Confederate troops between the Appalachians and the Mississippi River and to exercise control over the armies of Bragg and Pemberton. Davis intended that Johnston would order troops from one area to another depending on the Union threat. He and Davis hated each other and to make matters worse he was convinced Davis strategy to use one army to support the other could not work plus he was also convinced that Davis would humiliate him the first chance he got. So Johnston simply stopped communicating with Richmond, this in turn enfuriated Davis who then started to ignore Johnston and send orders directly to his subordinates a disastrous example of conflicting orders was Pemberton, in Mississippi had to decide whether to carry out Johnston's order to abandon Vicksburg and thereby save his army or obey Davis's orders to "Hold Vicksburg at all costs".
What a way to run a campaign!. As more and more areas of the West were lost to the invading Union army large traunches of railways were lost also making it virtually impossible to transport troops swiftly from one area to another. It did not appear on Davis's or Johnston's radar during the early stages of the war that the best way to transport troops in this area was by waterway exactly as Grant did. Johnston was no Lee and did not have his daring to take on an enemy of greater strength but also- unlike Lee- he did not have his President's support or confidence.
Gettysburg has been described as The Confederate Highwater mark, but most students of the war realise that was not the case, it was the fall of 1862 when Lee first crossed the Potomac, Braggs army was in Kentucky in an effort to impose Rebel rule and other Reb forces were pushing forward in Mississippi, but swiftly all of these efforts were stopped dead with Confederate defeats in Antietam, Perryville, Iuka and Corinth, an offensive across such a broad front was more of a high tide than Gettysburg. Gettysburg was in fact a mere splash in an ever reducing pond that was fast being emptied by the Confederate mismanagement of it's western theatre of operations. And there was nothing Lee could do to stop it, his outstanding victories in the East only achieved to keep Confederates hopes of independence alive for a few more months. The war was already lost courtesy of Johnston, Bragg, Pemberton and Beauregard all overseered by Davis who never got to grips with them or the strategy.
And if Lee and Johnston had swapped roles I believe that the pomposity of Beauregard and the incompetence of Bragg would at first had the same adverse effect on Lee's efforts who would eventually have had to replace both of them. But Who With?
Johnston would have been forced by Davis to invade the North (and twice- Never!) he would have preferred a defensive strategy which would have seen an earlier loss of Richmond than April'65 even with subordinates such as Longstreet and Jackson. Their frustration would have seen them conduct individual offensives and suffer subsequent defeats exactly as happened in the West rather than a joined up effort which was the key to Lee's success in the Old Dominion area of the war.
Subsequently with Lee in the West and Johnston in the East we would be reading of a few more Western Confederate battle victories but all indecisive, Lee could not have defeated and routed Grant and Sherman's armies. But five would get you ten that in the Eastern theatre we would be not be reading about the Gettysburg defeat in July '63 but rather the defeat and capitulation of Richmond.
Peter that's a few views you've had to your post and mine in particular is pure hypothesis, but as you posed the question you must have you're own view. I personally would be interested in what that is!
Reb.
