100 Mistakes That Changed History: Backfires and Blunders That Collapsed Empires, Crashed Economies, and Altered the Course of Our World

by Bill Fawcett

  Lee had led his army into Pennsylvania to find just that victory. He had planned to fight a defensive battle following the classic strategy of threatening the enemy in their own land and then forcing them to attack you to drive you out. Lee had scouted a perfect defensive position near the town of Cashtown. But this was not to happen: Both armies had stumbled into each other two days earlier near Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. Beginning as a meeting engagement by a few units, it had escalated until both entire armies now faced each other.

  The Union had stood to the defensive. In other times Robert E. Lee would have moved around it or withdrawn, but he needed to win. He was confident as well; in three years, the men of the Army of Virginia had worked miracles defeating larger armies time after time. He was counting on the high morale of his soldiers and the brittle morale the Union troops had so often shown to give him his victory. But times had changed, and the Army of the Potomac had matured. Its veteran corps were no longer prone to run when charged, and the firepower of its artillery was much more deadly than it had been even a year before.

  Lee could sense a victory was possible. Stuart had returned, and the Union forces had been battered. Lee’s losses were also large, but the morale of those left and their faith in him were high. As he rode along the Seminary Ridge, Lee described his plan for that morning. It would be a massive charge of the entire line against what he felt was a weakened Union Army that was just barely holding on. That was his first mistake. He had fought on his home ground too long. Men fight better in defense of their homes. It had given him an edge in Virginia, but now it was the Union soldiers who were defending their homes. This day they would not panic and break at the sound of the rebel yell.

  Longstreet pointed out to Lee that three of his divisions had attacked the day before and lost half their numbers. They simply were not going to be effective in another such attack. Lee had to agree, but in spite of that warning, he ordered the remaining six divisions to prepare to attack. But the commander of half the remaining soldiers jumped the gun. Confederate general Richard Ewell, whose corps on the first day of the three-day battle had driven back both the Yankee First and XI Corps, led his three divisions in an attack on the highly fortified Union position on Culp’s Hill hours before he was supposed to. If he had taken the hill, that might have allowed him to roll up the Union line or break through. The position was much too strong, and all Ewell took was a lot of casualties. His divisions were too damaged and disrupted to attack again that day.

  The Battle of Gettysburg

  The need for a victory remained and Lee, having broken the center of the Union’s position in the past, was determined to do it again. Even though he was diminished by two-thirds, he ordered Pickett’s Charge to continue. Part of Lee’s hope lay in the massed battery he had gathered. Ammunition for the cannons was limited, and all that remained was to be used for a grand barrage that would terrify and defeat the Union troops in front of General Pickett’s three divisions before their attack even began.

  Because they were firing mostly muzzle-loading cannons up a hill with direct fire, hitting a single thin line of Yankees behind a stone fence was difficult at best. The Confederate artillerists fired and endured counter battery fire until their ammunition ran low. But unfortunately for the men who were about to charge, almost all of their cannonballs flew high over the fence line, where the Union infantry waited in the rear. Horses and ammunition wagons were punished but not the men who would meet the attack.

  Lee also had a hidden card he was counting on. He had sent the recently returned J. E. B. Stuart to make an end run around the Union Army and attack the same part of the line as Pickett was, but from behind. If attacked from the front and the rear, there was no question that the Union line would shatter. With the Union Army split, it would turn and run as it had done so many times before. He would have the victory he needed.

  As the column of Confederate horsemen approached the back of the Union position, they were attacked by a regiment of Michigan cavalry led by the aggressive young general George Armstrong Custer. The Michigan unit was not large enough to defeat five times their number of horsemen, but they could delay them. Then more Union riders arrived, and it soon became clear to Stuart that he could advance no farther. He withdrew. There would be no attack from the rear to support Pickett’s division.

  When the artillery stopped firing, the order was given, reluctantly, by James Longstreet, for the charge. More than 10,000 men, virtually the last intact divisions in Lee’s armies, moved out. The First Artillery began to punish the neatly formed lines, then musket fire from the front and flanks. The entire charge started just before 4:00 PM and was over in less than an hour. Southern soldiers fell in droves and yet many came on, a handful reaching the stone fences that sheltered the Union infantry. Those few too died quickly or were captured. Only remnants of those brave divisions stumbled back. Pickett lost half of his men and all fifteen of his regimental commanders. Barely a quarter of those who had charged were able to return to the ranks. As Pickett’s men retreated, Lee ordered General Pickett to re-form his division. Pickett is said to have replied that he had no division left.

  In a desperate effort to win, Lee had expended his last reserve and fought a most uncharacteristic offensive, frontal battle and lost it. There was nothing left to do but retreat. Lee’s mistake cost the Confederacy its last chance at foreign intervention and independence. Perhaps he was just too confident that the soldiers who had given him miracle victories before would do so again. Most certainly, Robert E. Lee’s most dramatic and final mistake, on the third day of the Battle of Gettysburg, was to order Pickett’s Charge. The dramatic end result proved what Lee should have known all along: It never had a chance of success to begin with. With its failure, the Army of Virginia was never again able to take the offensive.

  55

  RACIAL BIGOTRY

  Last Chance Lost

  1864

  The Confederacy’s last chance for victory in the American Civil War was not lost on the battlefield. The mistake that ensured the South would lose occurred in a meeting room in Richmond, the Confederate capital. The Confederates were being ground down by the sheer number of Union soldiers arrayed against them. For years, Robert E. Lee had won almost every battle, and still the Union pressed on every front. The entire Mississippi River was in Union hands. The problem was manpower. The Union could replace its losses and still have enough manpower to work in its factories. The South was desperately short of both soldiers and skilled workers. Even Lee’s victories had cost them heavily, and there were simply no more replacements to be found.

  In January 1864, two of the most important men in the Confederacy proposed a solution to the manpower problem. These were Secretary of State Judah Benjamin and General Patrick Cleburne. The two men proposed a plan in which slaves who volunteered to fight for the Confederacy would be given freedom for themselves and their families when the war was won. There were already perhaps 30,000 men of color serving with the Confederate Army, often as servants, but many were of mixed blood. What the two men proposed was also an answer to Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation.

  This letter, from the highly respected veteran General Patrick Cleburne, was sent first to the general commanding the Army of Tennessee, General Thomas, in March 1864. It was then forwarded to the Confederate Congress. It eloquently argued for the enlistment and freeing of black soldiers:

  Moved by the exigency in which our country is now placed, we take the liberty of laying before you, unofficially, our views on the present state of affairs . . . We have now been fighting for nearly three years, have spilled much of our best blood, and lost, consumed, or thrown to the flames an amount of property equal in value to the specie currency of the world. Through some lack in our system the fruits of our struggles and sacrifices have invariably slipped away from us and left us nothing but long lists of dead and mangled. Instead of standing defiantly on the borders of our territory or harassing those of the enemy, we are hemmed in today in
to less than two-thirds of it, and still the enemy menacingly confronts us at every point with superior forces. Our soldiers can see no end to this state of affairs except in our own exhaustion; hence, instead of rising to the occasion, they are sinking into a fatal apathy, growing weary of hardships and slaughters which promise no results . . .

  The President of the United States announces that “he has already in training an army of 100,000 negroes as good as any troops,” and every fresh raid he makes and new slice of territory he wrests from us will add to this force. Every soldier in our army already knows and feels our numerical inferiority to the enemy . . . Our single source of supply is that portion of our white men fit for duty and not now in the ranks. The enemy has three sources of supply: First, his own motley population; secondly, our slaves; and thirdly, Europeans whose hearts are fired into a crusade against us by fictitious pictures of the atrocities of slavery . . . Like past years, 1864 will diminish our ranks by the casualties of war, and what source of repair is there left us? . . .

  The Constitution of the Southern States has reserved to their respective governments the power to free slaves for meritorious services to the State. It is politic besides. For many years, ever since the agitation of the subject of slavery commenced, the negro has been dreaming of freedom, and his vivid imagination has surrounded that condition with so many gratifications that it has become the paradise of his hopes. To attain it he will tempt dangers and difficulties not exceeded by the bravest soldier in the field . . . The slaves are dangerous now, but armed, trained, and collected in an army they would be a thousand fold more dangerous; therefore when we make soldiers of them we must make free men of them beyond all question, and thus enlist their sympathies also . . .

  Many of the officers who were fighting supported such a plan. General Robert E. Lee supported the enlistment of black men into the ranks. This solution solved many problems. It would have provided tens of thousands of new Confederate soldiers when they were desperately needed. By giving a way out to those slaves willing to fight for it, the Confederacy would have taken away from the Union Army a major source of recruits. The people of the Union were tired of the war and the high casualties. Draft riots were common, and after three years of conflict, recruiting was difficult. More than 100,000 black volunteer soldiers were serving with the Union Army by the end of the Civil War. Many of them were runaway slaves, and they relieved the pressure that conscription caused. Had these men seen a way to freedom that did not require a dangerous flight and risk to their families, many might well have fought for the Confederacy instead. That would have meant as many as 50,000 more Confederate soldiers and 50,000 fewer Union soldiers as well.

  Beginning to free the slaves would also have gone a long way toward getting recognition from Britain and France. It had always been to the economic advantage of both European nations for the Confederacy to win since the South was their main supplier of tobacco and cotton, while the Union was their chief competitor for manufactured goods. But the question of slavery, which had been long banned by both countries, forced them to maintain a distance.

  The mistake was simply to not even consider offering freedom to the slaves in exchange for fighting for the Confederacy. The reaction of the Southern press and politicians was loud and emotional. The idea was universally condemned by the Confederate Congress and the Davis administration. Racism and the desire to not let the war force what the Union Army was now striving to achieve overcame even desperation. By June 1864, Richmond was under siege, and by November, Union general W. Tecumseh Sherman’s independent army was cutting a swath through the heart of what remained of the Confederacy. There simply were not enough men to stop Sherman, but it did not have to turn out that way.

  On the bright side, had the South implemented the policy suggested by two highly respected leaders in the Confederacy, we would possibly have had two separate and weakened nations, rather than one fifty-state unified superpower.

  56

  AIDING THE ENEMY

  The Ultimate Weed

  1876

  So what is a story about a common plant doing in a list of 100 of the world’s greatest mistakes? If you live anywhere in the southern United States, where there are no hard frosts, you already know the answer.

  Kudzu is a vine that originally grew on the rocky mountainsides of Japan. There it had to struggle with poor soil and cool weather. This made it an aggressive and hardy plant. In good soil and warm weather kudzu grows incredibly fast, often several inches per day. The joke in the southern United States today is that you have to close your windows at night to keep the kudzu from growing in overnight.

  Kudzu was first introduced into North America in 1876. It was popular with a small number of gardeners, and just a few plants were grown until the 1920s. In those days, the ecological concern was not global warming, but soil erosion. This was the era leading into the Dust Bowl and anything that held the soil in place was popular. It also helped the plant’s popularity when it was discovered that kudzu was suitable for grazing as well. Its only drawback was that it could not survive a hard frost.

  In the 1920s and early 1930s kudzu was the wonder plant. There were kudzu cookbooks and even kudzu clubs. Competitions were held to find new ways to use the tough vines and the broad leaves of the plant. In the early 1930s the U.S. government work programs paid workers to plant almost 2 million acres with kudzu. Then one day someone looked around and realized that wherever kudzu grew it killed off every other plant. The vine will climb and steal the sunlight from the tallest tree and grow so thickly not a single blade of grass survives. It was not saving the soil; it was threatening the entire ecology. Since that revelation, the government has spent tens of millions of dollars trying to kill off or slow the spread of the vine they had formerly been paying to have planted.

  Today, even after years of eradication efforts, kudzu covers 7 million acres of land. Its range is limited only by frost and snow. A patch was even found in Canada in July 2009. The plants were growing in an area where Lake Erie kept the soil warm all year round. Kudzu has changed the face of the South. Drive along any highway, and you will see an area where the blanket of Kudzu leaves crawls like a green flood completely covering forests and fields. The killer plant can be easily recognized as it covers even the highest branches with its broad leaves. Today, kudzu is becoming a problem outside of the United States. The invasive plant is now being fought in northeastern Australia and northern Italy. Kudzu is a mistake that just keeps on growing and growing and growing some more.

  57

  EVERYONE LOSES

  Little Big Horn

  1877

  The honor of the first mistakes in this series of errors that doomed a people goes to Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer. If there were a single cause for the many lapses in judgment that led to the death of Custer and nearly 300 troopers of the Seventh Cavalry, it was frustration. Just plain, simple frustration.

  Custer could not get the enemy to face him, and he needed a victory. George Armstrong Custer was an unquestioned Civil War hero. His greatest moment came when Jeb Stuart was leading the bulk of the Confederate cavalry behind the Union lines at Gettysburg. Stuart was going to attack from behind the same units and artillery that Pickett’s Charge would face. General Custer led his Wolverine Cavalry against ten times their number. It held Stuart up until more Union horses arrived and the Southern riders were forced to retreat. Had Stuart’s attack succeeded, Gettysburg might well have been a Southern victory and so Custer’s courage may have saved the Union. This and the fact that he was the youngest brigadier general in the Union Army helped the young officer develop an ego and ambition. General Grant had become president and other war heroes saw their chance. What Custer needed was a win that would get national coverage and advance his political prospects. But the Indian war dragged on, and the great victory he needed eluded him.

  Custer commanded the Seventh Cavalry in the Dakotas. The different style of fighting employed by the tribes, hit-and-r
un tactics and withdrawals when confronted by a strong force, gave him the wrong impression of their determination and courage. He felt they were cowards who would run when faced with any serious opposition. Subsequent encounters encouraged this view.

  After months of trying unsuccessfully to bring the tribes in the Dakota territories to battle, a strategy was devised to force a battle. The plan was that the army would invade in three columns from three directions. The three were to converge and force the “hostiles” ahead of them until they could be beaten by the combined forces. The Seventh Cavalry was one of those columns. It was commanded by Lieutenant Colonel Custer, who like most officers had taken a demotion from general when the U.S. Army downsized after the war.

  The plan quickly fell apart. The northern force was met, stopped, and driven back. So the other two columns continued with the invasion. Once the three columns were riding across the Indian lands, they were out of contact with one another and the telegraph. This meant that Custer did not know of the northern column being driven back or that the third column was delayed. He did not know he was unsupported. What he was mostly concerned about was not support but that the hostiles would once again slip away.