This would have never worked.

Your missing something. You can look at a lot of Lee’s frontal attacks and wonder what he was thinking. Well I know what he was thinking. The South had way less resources, industry and people and they knew the only way for them to win was to hit the North so hard it would demoralize them and force them to quit. If this did not happen then the slow grind of war would always favor those with the most resources and that’s exactly what happened. This was common knowledge I’m sure. It doesn’t take a genius to see this.

Same thing happened to the Germans in WWI and WWII.

Have any of you read Guns of the South? Sci-fi where a bunch of South Africans time travel to the civil war with AK-47′s and ammo to give to the Confederate army. Of course they win.

Anchorage system in place, materials stockpiled? Sure, assembly could have been done in an hour or so, with the right men. The first narrative you put up struck me as “Either there’s a lot left out, or someone is lying their asses off…”.

“[Forrest] had planned the crossing long before he reached the stream. He had sent in advance a detachment of his best-mounted troops with instructions to pick out some suitable place for a crossing, to fell four trees, two on either bank, leaving the stumps convenient for the support of cables, and to have cut, twisted together, and in place by the time he arrived a cable made of the heavy grape and muscadine vines which grow in great profusion and of unusual size and length in the fertile alluvial bottoms of the Missisippi country. These novel cables were all ready when he reached the stream. Twisted around and lashed to the stumps on either side, by their weight they curved down until they were only two or three feet above the water at the middle of the stream. Just under the middle the ferry-boat was anchored, and on either side of this a series of cypress logs were floated in and fixed at certain distances to add support where, by reason of the heavy weight of the flooring and of the troops passing over, it would sag in the middle. As the command approached within three or four miles of the Hickahala every gin-house and cabin was stripped of its flooring, and as each trooper rode up he brought on his shoulder his burden of planks.

“Within an hour’s time of the arrival of the head of the column at this stream, the planks had been laid and the entire command had crossed over, the troops dismounting and crossing over in single file, each leading his horse.

“Colonel J. U. Green, who commanded one of Forrest’s regiments, informs the writer that in crossing on one of these grape-vine pontoons the cables stretched or yielded until the center was well submerged before the last of the troops crossed over. Seven miles further north it became necessary to build a similar structure over the Coldwater, a stream twice as wide as the Hickahala, and here three hours were consumed in crossing. Notwithstanding all these hindrances, at dark, on the 20th, Forrest with his command had arrived at Hernando…”

So by Wyeth’s account that “hour’s time” didn’t include the preparation time for the stumps and cables, nor for the gathering of planks; and I imagine the cables in particular took a fair bit of time to make. On the other hand it did include the time taken for the crossing itself (two thousand men leading horses in single file). Still over-egged? Perhaps, but there isn’t too much room for that: the day’s journey, including both bridgings, was from Senatobia to Hernando (about 15 miles), and even the non-bridging part was so muddy that it wore out enough horses that a quarter of the men had to be left behind.

I think I’ve recounted the story of my experience with a pair of genuine Nigerian first-generation immigrants participating in an Army “Equal Opportunity Sensing Session” here, before. Highly educational, that was–And, possibly the closest I’ve ever come to participating in a race riot while I was in the Army.

Summary was that we had one of those typical group encounter sessions going on, and the guy who was leading it decided to get an affirmation from his “Nigerian Brother” who was in the audience. Said Nigerian really did not like American blacks, and he was at the end of his enlistment contract, out of patience, and he decided to burn all of his bridges and let the “black community” in our unit know his opinion of them and their lifestyles. It was not pretty.

I wasn’t paying attention to how he started it out, but when he got to the point where he was telling all and sundry that their ancestors had been sold to the white man as slaves because they were inferior and very poor slaves for their African owners…? Holy damn, but did the cognitive dissonance start to flow. The fact that the other Nigerian we had, a lieutenant, also agreed with him and was highly critical of what he saw around him? Dude… It was almost amusing how it went down. All the white senior leadership was edging towards the doors at the rear of the auditorium, the malcontents were in shock, and many of the rest of the junior enlisted were just milling around in confusion going “Wait… What? What the hell did he just say…?”.

You really do not want to get the full-bore, politically incorrect view of the slave sales from the African-who-did-the-selling perspective. You will probably not like the things they relate, and you really won’t like what they have to tell you.

I look back on that as one of the more surreal experiences that I went through while before the flag. It was, to say the least, an eye-opener. The utter lack of respect that a lot of Africans have for American blacks, especially the ones from the more organized tribal societies? It’s palpable, and you don’t want to be in the room when they express it towards those American blacks. I’m honestly surprised that there wasn’t real violence, that day. I put it down to the shock factor. Of course, we basically had to tell our Nigerian informant that he should stay at home and not come in to work for the remainder of his time with us, and that he could expedite clearing post while he was at it… If he’d have stayed, I think he’d have had to go into protective custody or get transferred.

Never going to forget looking over at all the other white senior NCOs, with all of us more-or-less mouthing “Did he really just say that…? Here? We’re all gonna die today, aren’t we…?”.

Off the top of my head, as a former combat engineer who would have been one of the guys tasked to do stuff like that “back when”, I gotta tell you it sounds really, really fluffed. A sixty-foot water obstacle at flood stage? In one hour, improvised materials?

I could maybe see someone getting across something like that with modern prefab equipment in that time, but having to cut, sawyer, and transport it all? I’m gonna call “bullshit”. Maybe a full dawn-to-dusk day with all the willing hand labor you could want, but the described bridges strike me as being really implausible in pre-heavy equipment days, especially in those quoted timeframes.

I can’t say for sure without seeing more information, like what the bridge sites looked like and how high and fast the water was running, but both of those described feats strike me as being highly implausible as described. I think someone either egged the pudding as they wrote that encomium, or they got their facts seriously wrong.

Either way, it wouldn’t surprise me. Military history is filled with “historians” that have no clue about what really went on, or how things were actually accomplished. I think it was Wellington who quipped something like “The history of a battle, is not unlike the history of a ball. Some individuals may recollect all the little events of which the great result is the battle won or lost, but no individual can recollect the order in which, or the exact moment at which, they occurred, which makes all the difference as to their value or importance.”. You go back and interview the participants after the fact, and you’re going to get a different perspective and timeline from every one of them, and most will be highly inaccurate.

I took a bit of a look into Lee’s engineering accomplishments, and while they seemed like good solid work, I didn’t see anything in the ‘wait, can that actually be real’ class.

The biggest hypocrisy is over the issue of — Who Enslaved the Slaves?

We know the answer to that question. It was fellow Africans selling into slavery the other tribes they had defeated in battle. Of course, the alternatives to selling their defeated foes to slave traders were to use them as their own slaves or to kill them — both of which were common practice.

We also know that slavery was the standard practice for the human race for millenia, essentially until the development of fossil-fuel steam engines in the 1800s. We know that slavery in North America was a side-show compared to the order of magnitude larger slave trade to English, French, Spanish plantations in Central & Southern America. Further, we know that Trans-Atlantic slave trading was itself small beer compared to the much larger slave trade from East Africa to the Middle East & beyond.

Spare a thought for the impoverished Europeans who escaped from the vile conditions in Europe to the New World by becoming indentures labor — treated worse than slaves because slaves cost money. And what about the Chinese & other Asians brought to the US to build the railroads — and treated as expendable because they were easily-replaced contract labor instead of expensive slaves?

The sad fact is that African slavery does continue today, in places like Libya which Hillary Clinton destabilized. And there is the functional equivalent of slavery in the Uighur work camps of Western China. But woke Westerners prefer to rail against a past they cannot change than to get off their asses and do something positive about today’s injustices.

Yes, the hypocrisy is deep, among whites as well as blacks.

Norman, that’s good engineering, but one hour? Three hours? Stretchers.

“A mile north of Senatobia on the morning of the twentieth he struck the flooded Hickahala Creek–bankfull, sixty feet wide in the current. …he turned his cavalry into bridge-building engineering troops. The raw materials of his bridge were trees of the forest used for the supports of his suspension span; the wild grapevines festooning the trees, cut down and woven together to form the suspension cables; a small flatboat found at the crossing, used for a float or pontoon to support the center of the span where it hung lowest, and two bundles of poles, tied together with grapevines, placed as pontoons on either side of the flatboat; and, finally, the plank floors taken up from the ginhouses for miles about…to form the floor of this remarkable span–homemade, using the materials of nature which came to hand, and completed…in an hour.

“Six miles beyond the Hickahala lay the Coldwater river, twice as wide, with banks brimfull, a booming current… there was nothing for it but another and bigger bridge, made of the same sort of materials and finished in three hours.”

That was Forrest’s work, as described in the book “First With the Most” by Robert Selph Henry.

By the way, it’s no surprise that Lee chose to fight on the same side as most of his friends and neighbors, nor particularly discreditable; it’s just the idea that “honor” demanded it that leaves me scratching my head: I’ve heard of various codes of honor, but none that will tell you which side to take in a civil war.

As to why the North didn’t just let the South go: as far as I can tell, it was because they felt that the South wouldn’t just be content to leave, but instead would try to build up a slaver empire which could rival the North’s power: they had Cuba and Mexico in their sights, and conflict over the western territories of the US would be likely; better to put a quick end to this nonsense than to let the struggle drag on. In things like the Fugitive Slave Act and the Dred Scott decision, the South had shown itself wanting to not just preserve slavery but extend its reach. When they fired on Fort Sumter rather than patiently negotiating the issue, that was the last straw.

The other bit of hypocrisy is when the Unionists go on and on about the nobility of their cause, when the brute fact is, they mostly didn’t give a rat’s ass about the slaves and gladly looked the other way when it came to the post-war Jim Crow laws that came in, while simultaneously locking the blacks that moved north into what amounted to servitude not too far removed from what they had to put up with in the South under slavery.

And, of course, there are the multitudinous hypocrisies of the blacks, who go after the slave owners and ignore the fact that they were only freed because other white men chose to fight over the issue of slavery. The white male is excoriated because some of their historical antecedents owned slaves, but nothing at all is ever mentioned of the (admittedly few…) black slave owners, or the men who gave their lives to end the practice. All that’s ignored, in favor of tagging every white male, even the ones whose ancestors weren’t even on this continent during the era of slavery, with the onus of having been a part of it all.

All told, I’ve little patience for any of them. It happened well over a century ago, and all of the participants and victims are dead and buried. Let it go, and quit living in the past.