Bluesman

DEFINITELY was DOOMED, but it wasn't yet DEAD. It was in the field and fighting, and as long as that was true, it was more-or-less a stalemate, and the theatre was still 'in-play'. Once that piece was removed from Jeff Davis' chessboard, though, the war was absolutely going to end with Union victory, PERIOD - there was simply no other possible outcome. Therefore, I believe the war was DECIDED that day.

No doubt. There was simply NO WAY for Hood to have beaten all that was arrayed against him (oh, and Sherman completely ignored him and marched the opposite direction into history, destroying the innards of the South with each mile, like a blue glacier). But the question wasn't so much could Hood have WON in his area of responsibility; he couldn't have. It was a matter of Hood being able to LOSE, and he managed to do exactly that. His army was beaten in a battle that need never have been fought: the Federals had no intention of keeping that ground anyway, and left as soon as their guns had cooled. STUPIDSTUPIDSTUPID, and it was a death-blow to the Confederacy, because, as I said, that army simply ceased to be useful, and the theatre of operations closed down and left the ANV as the only army worthy of the name in the entire Confederacy. (To be sure, there were still Confederate forces in the field and fighting, but no ready-to-use manuever force that could counter the hammer-blows that kept taking the Confederacy apart in a very workmanlike and procedural fashion.)

I wasn't aware that it was that critical and close, either, until I read 'Bloody Roads South', about the Wilderness through to Petersburg. It's one of history's great 'what-ifs', and I think what's most important to know about it is the effect a defeat of that magnitude would've had on the North: MASSIVE casualties in a battle at least as artful as Chancellorsville that would've pointed up the brilliance of Lee and the (apparent) definciencies of Grant, almost certainly leading to his relief as general-in-chief. If Grant had been mauled to the extent of losing a third or more of the Army of the Potomac JUST BEFORE the election (and that defeat would've been the end of the campaign, closing out 1864 with nothing else to come in the East), what with Lincoln's championing of Grant when almost everybody else wanted to throw him overboard - it was curtains for the Republicans, and the war would've ended with the North withdrawing and the Confederacy as an established fact.

So, Lee need not have utterly destroyed Grant's army. He just needed to defeat it badly and inflict massive losses and end the campaign. Once Grant was compelled to take his army, defeated ONCE AGAIN by a masterful battle of manuever by the genius of an outnumbered but brilliant Lee, back north of the river and out of Virginia, AGAIN...the war ends with a Confederate victory because the new administration would've been inaugurated in January, before the Federal armies could go into action again and redeem the disaster.

Correct: the decision wasn't reached in Virginia. It was in the WEST that the war went off the rails for the Confederacy.

I also believe that had Lee managed to destroy and not simply defeat and repel McClellan, it would've assured Confederate independence.

I think Lee sensed it, too, and that one last disastrous battle was an attempt to make a big-dice-roll gamble to try to win the war in one big 'go', all at once, in one last day of desperate fighting. Lee knew the chances would get slimmer and slimmer with the passage of time, and he had to either win soon, or watch the possibilities get narrowed down to nothin' over the years.

He'd been victorious is each of the previous week's battles, and it was against a thoroughly-beaten general with a retreating army that he was going into that last attack, so he might've thought that they were fragile enough to shatter with a good, hard shove to topple 'em over. But that's not what he gave them: it was a bunch of disjointed, uncoordinated assaults into the teeth of the Federal's greatest strength advantage: massed, heavy artillery against troops in open terrain.

And I think the ONLY reason he tried it is because if it had by some miracle worked, the Confederacy would've won the war on the spot.

__________________
"The quickest way of ending a war is to lose it, and if one finds the prospect of a long war intolerable, it is natural to disbelieve in the possibility of victory."
- George Orwell