Anything But Time

This is Steven Petrick Posting:

Napoleon said that his generals could ask him for "anything but time." In battles, the fate of a battle can spin on a few moments of time.

To take that perennial favorite, Gettysburg, what would have happened if Longstreet had attacked the Union left two hours earlier on the second day? This could have happened, but the officer sent to guide the Corps on its march was not experienced in this type of assignment, and though he had traveled a good part of the distance the night before, now he had to do it daylight. The result was that he got lost, and much of the Corps had to counter-march, resulting in time being lost.

There would have been two significant changes right away.

The first is that Sickles Corps would still have been on Cemetery Ridge rather than deployed forward. Longstreet's attack would either have been the original planned assault, or would have been launched as Sickles was advancing his corps, either could have resulted in a collapse of the Federal left.

The more telling thing, however, is that the Union Fifth Corps would not have been present. It was still on the march at that time. It was Strong Vincent's Brigade of that Corps that held the Round Tops (Famously with Chamberlin's 20th Maine on the left, and thus the left flank of the entire Union line).

That time lost on the march changed the chances of a Confederate breakthrough. It still took hard fighting by the Federals to stop that breakthrough, but if the Union Fifth Corps had not yet come up, the reserves that were needed to halt Longstreet's attack would not have been there.

With all the other things that went wrong for the Confederacy during those three days, the delays that allowed the Fifth Corps to arrive may have been the most decisive in denying the South a telling victory, one that would not have won the war for them outright, but would have gone a long way to creating conditions in which the war might have gone on for another year or two, and might have cost Lincoln re-election. That was the only real chance of Southern victory (Lincoln failing to retain office), and a resounding victory at Gettysburg might just have created that circumstance by forcing the Union to pull troops from the Western Theater, which would have delayed the Union campaigns in that theater. Perhaps long enough to have decisively altered the outcome of the war.

Lee doubtless wanted those lost hours back, as did Longstreet, but time once spent is forever beyond the recall of any mere mortal.