V
Amateurism and confusion characterized the development of strategies as well as the mobilization of armies. Most officers had learned little of strategic theory. The curriculum at West Point slighted strategic studies in favor of engineering, mathematics, fortification, army administration, and a smattering of tactics. The assignment of most officers to garrison and Indian-fighting duty on the frontier did little to encourage the study of strategy. Few if any Civil War generals had read Karl von Clausewitz, the foremost nineteenth-century writer on the art of war. A number of officers had read the writings of Antoine Henry Jomini, a Swiss-born member of Napoleon's staff who became the foremost interpreter of the great Corsican's campaigns. All West Point graduates had absorbed Jominian principles from the courses of Dennis Hart Mahan, who taught at the military academy for nearly half a century. Henry W. Halleck's Elements of Military Art and Science (1846), essentially a translation of Jomini, was used as a textbook at West Point. But Jomini's
24. Quoted in Jay Luvaas, The Military Legacy of the Civil War: The European Inheritance (Chicago, 1959), 18–19.
influence on Civil War strategy should not be exaggerated, as some historians have done.25 Many Jominian "principles" were common-sense ideas hardly original with Jomini: concentrate the mass of your own force against fractions of the enemy's; menace the enemy's communications while protecting your own; attack the enemy's weak point with your own strength; and so on. There is little evidence that Jomini's writings influenced Civil War strategy in a direct or tangible way; the most successful strategist of the war, Grant, confessed to having never read Jomini.
The trial and error of experience played a larger role than theory in shaping Civil War strategy. The experience of the Mexican War governed the thinking of most officers in 1861. But that easy victory against a weak foe in an era of smoothbore muskets taught some wrong lessons to Civil War commanders who faced a determined enemy armed (after 1861) largely with rifled muskets. The experience necessary to fight the Civil War had to be gained in the Civil War itself. As generals and civilian leaders learned from their mistakes, as war aims changed from limited to total war, as political demands and civilian morale fluctuated, military strategy evolved and adjusted. The Civil War was pre-eminently a political war, a war of peoples rather than of professional armies. Therefore political leadership and public opinion weighed heavily in the formation of strategy.
In 1861 many Americans had a romantic, glamorous idea of war. "I am absent in a glorious cause," wrote a southern soldier to his homefolk in June 1861, "and glory in being in that cause." Many Confederate recruits echoed the Mississippian who said he had joined up "to fight the Yankies—all fun and frolic." A civilian traveling with the Confederate government from Montgomery to Richmond in May 1861 wrote that the trains "were crowded with troops, and all as jubilant, as if they were going to a frolic, instead of a fight."26 A New York volunteer wrote home soon after enlisting that "I and the rest of the boys are in fine spirits . . . feeling like larks." Regiments departing for the front paraded before cheering, flag-waving crowds, with bands playing martial airs and visions of glory dancing in their heads. "The war is making us all tenderly
25. For a perceptive critique of the "Jominian school," see Grady McWhiney and Perry D. Jamieson, Attack and Die: Civil War Military Tactics and the Southern Heritage (University, Ala., 1982), 146–53.
26. Davis, Battle at Bull Run, 57; Wiley, Johnny Reb, 27; Hudson Strode, Jefferson Davis: Confederate President (New York, 1959), 89.
Stephen A. Douglas
Louis A. Warren Lincoln Library and Museum
William H. Seward
Library of Congress
Free-state men ready to defend Lawrence, Kansas, in 1856
The Kansas State Historical Society
Stockpile of rails in the U.S. Military Rail Roads yards at Alexandria
U.S. Army Military History Institute
U.S. Military Rail Roads locomotive with crew members pointing at holes in the smokestack and tender caused by rebel shells
U.S. Army Military History Institute
B & O trains carrying troops and supplies meeting at Harper's Ferry
U.S. Military Academy Library
Railroad bridge built by Union army construction crew in Tennessee after rebel raiders burned the original bridge
Minnesota Historical Society
Blockade-runner Robert E. Lee, which ran the blockade fourteen times before being captured on the fifteenth attempt
Library of Congress
U.S.S. Minnesota, 47-gun steam frigate, flagship of the Union blockade fleet that captured the Robert E. Lee
Minnesota Historical Society
Above: Abraham Lincoln
Liouis A. Warren Lincoln Library and Museum
Right: George B. McClellan
Louis A. Warren Lincoln Library and Museum
Below: U.S.S. Cairo, one of "Pook's turtles," which fought on the Tennessee and Mississippi rivers until sunk by a Confederate "torpedo" in the Yazoo River near Vicksburg in December 1862
U.S. Army Military History Institute
Jefferson Davis
Library of Congress
Robert E. Lee
Library of Congress
Thomas J. "Stonewall" Jackson
Library of Congress
James E. B. "Jeb" Stuart
Library of Congress
Clara Barton
Library of Congress
Mary Anne "Mother" Bickerdyke
U.S. Army Military History Institute
Wounded soldiers and nurse at Union army hospital in Fredericksburg
Library of Congress
"Before" and "after" photographs of a young contraband who became a Union drummer boy
U.S. Army Military History Institute
Black soldiers seated with white officers and freedmen's teachers standing behind them
Library of Congress
sentimental," wrote southern diarist Mary Boykin Chesnut in June 1861. So far it was "all parade, fife, and fine feathers."27
Many people on both sides believed that the war would be short—one or two battles and the cowardly Yankees or slovenly rebels would give up. An Alabama soldier wrote in 1861 that the next year would bring peace "because we are going to kill the last Yankey before that time if there is any fight in them still. I believe that J. D. Walker's Brigade can whip 25,000 Yankees. I think I can whip 25 myself." Northerners were equally confident; as James Russell Lowell's fictional Yankee philosopher Hosea Biglow ruefully recalled:
I hoped, las' Spring, jest arter Sumter's shame
When every flagstaff flapped its tethered flame,
An' all the people, startled from their doubt,
Come musterin' to the flag with sech a shout,—
I hoped to see things settled 'fore this fall,
The Rebbles licked, Jeff Davis hanged, an' all.28
With such confidence in quick success, thoughts of strategy seemed superfluous. Responsible leaders on both sides did not share the popular faith in a short war. Yet even they could not foresee the kind of conflict this war would become—a total war, requiring total mobilization of men and resources, destroying these men and resources on a massive scale, and ending only with unconditional surrender. In the spring of 1861 most northern leaders thought in terms of a limited war. Their purpose was not to conquer the South but to suppress insurrection and win back the latent loyalty of the southern people. The faith in southern unionism lingered long.
A war for limited goals required a strategy of limited means. General-in-Chief Winfield Scott devised such a strategy. As a Virginia unionist, Scott deprecated a war of conquest which even if successful would produce "fifteen devastated provinces! [i.e., the slave states] not to be brought into harmony with their conquerors, but to be held for generations, by heavy garrisons, at an expense quadruple the net duties or taxes which it would be possible to extort from them." Instead of invading the South, Scott proposed to "envelop" it with a blockade by sea and a fleet of gunboats supported by soldiers along the Mississippi. Thus sealed off
27. Wiley, Billy Yank, 27; Woodward, Chesnut's Civil War, 69.
28. Alabamian quoted in McWhiney and Jamieson, Attack and Die, 170; Biglow in Nevins, War, I, 75.
from the world, the rebels would suffocate and the government "could bring them to terms with less bloodshed than by any other plan."29
Scott's method would take time—time for the navy to acquire enough ships to make the blockade effective, time to build the gunboats and train the men for the expedition down the Mississippi. Scott recognized the chief drawback of his plan—"the impatience of our patriotic and loyal Union friends. They will urge instant and vigorous action, regardless, I fear, of the consequences."30 Indeed they did. Northern public opinion demanded an invasion to "crush" the rebel army covering Manassas, a rail junction in northern Virginia linking the main lines to the Shenandoah Valley and the deep South. Newspapers scorned Scott's strategy as the "Anaconda Plan." The Confederate government having accepted Virginia's invitation to make Richmond its capital, the southern Congress scheduled its next session to begin there on July 20. Thereupon Horace Greeley'sNew York Tribune blazoned forth with a standing headline:
FORWARD TO RICHMOND! FORWARD TO RICHMOND!
The Rebel Congress Must Not be
Allowed to Meet There on the
20th of July
BY THAT DATE THE PLACE MUST BE HELD
BY THE NATIONAL ARMY
Other newspapers picked up the cry of On to Richmond. Some hinted that Scott's Anaconda Plan signified a traitorous reluctance to invade his native state. Many northerners could not understand why a general who with fewer than 11,000 men had invaded a country of eight million people, marched 175 miles, defeated larger enemy armies, and captured their capital, would shy away from invading Virginia and fighting the enemy twenty-five miles from the United States capital. The stunning achievements of an offensive strategy in Mexico tended to make both Union and Confederate commanders offensive-minded in the early phases of the Civil War. The success of Lyon in Missouri and of
29. Charles Winslow Elliott, Winfield Scott: The Soldier and the Man (New York, 1937), 698; O.R., Ser. I, Vol. 51, pt. 1, pp. 369–70.
30. O.R., Ser. I, Vol. 51, pt. 1, p. 387.
McClellan in western Virginia seemed to confirm the value of striking first and striking fast.
Scott remained unconvinced. He considered the ninety-day regiments raw and useless; the three-year regiments would need several months' training before they were ready for a campaign. But Scott was out of step with the political imperatives of 1861. Public pressure made it almost impossible for the government to delay military action on the main Virginia front. Scott's recommended blockade of southern seaports had begun, and his proposed move down the Mississippi became part of Union strategy in 1862. But events ultimately demonstrated that the North could win the war only by destroying the South's armies in the field. In that respect the popular clamor for "smashing" the rebels was based on sound if oversanguine instinct. Lincoln thought that an attack on the enemy at Manassas was worth a try. Such an attack came within his conception of limited war aims. If successful it might discredit the secessionists; it might lead to the capture of Richmond; but it would not destroy the social and economic system of the South; it would not scorch southern earth.
By July 1861 about 35,000 Union troops had gathered in the Washington area. Their commander was General Irvin McDowell, a former officer on Scott's staff with no previous experience in field command. A teetotaler who compensated by consuming huge amounts of food, McDowell did not lack intelligence or energy—but he turned out to be a hard-luck general for whom nothing went right. In response to a directive from Lincoln, McDowell drew up a plan for a flank attack on the 20,000 Confederates defending Manassas junction. An essential part of the plan required the 15,000 Federals near Harper's Ferry under the command of Robert Patterson, a sixty-nine-year-old veteran of the War of 1812, to prevent the 11,000 Confederates confronting him from reinforcing Manassas.
McDowell's plan was a good one—for veteran troops with experienced officers. But McDowell lacked both. At a White House strategy conference on June 29, he pleaded for postponement of the offensive until he could train the new three-year men. Scott once again urged his Anaconda Plan. But Quartermaster-General Meigs, when asked for his opinion, said that "I did not think we would ever end the war without beating the rebels. . . . It was better to whip them here than to go far into an unhealthy country to fight them [in Scott's proposed expedition down the Mississippi]. . . . To make the fight in Virginia was cheaper and better as the case now stood."31 Lincoln agreed. As for the rawness of McDowell's troops, Lincoln seemed to have read the mind of a rebel officer in Virginia who reported his men to be so deficient in "discipline and instruction" that it would be "difficult to use them in the field. . . . I would not give one company of regulars for the whole regiment." The president ordered McDowell to begin his offensive. "You are green, it is true," he said, "but they are green, also; you are all green alike."32
The southern commander at Manassas was Pierre G. T. Beauregard, the dapper, voluble hero of Fort Sumter, Napoleonic in manner and aspiration. Heading the rebel forces in the Shenandoah Valley was Joseph E. Johnston, a small, impeccably attired, ambitious but cautious man with a piercing gaze and an outsized sense of dignity. In their contrasting offensive- and defensive-mindedness, Beauregard and Johnston represented the polarities of southern strategic thinking. The basic war aim of the Confederacy, like that of the United States in the Revolution, was to defend a new nation from conquest. Confederates looked for inspiration to the heroes of 1776, who had triumphed over greater odds than southerners faced in 1861. The South could "win" the war by not losing; the North could win only by winning. The large territory of the Confederacy—750,000 square miles, as large as Russia west of Moscow, twice the size of the thirteen original United States—would make Lincoln's task as difficult as Napoleon's in 1812 or George Ill's in 1776. The military analyst of the Times of London offered the following comments early in the war:
It is one thing to drive the rebels from the south bank of the Potomac, or even to occupy Richmond, but another to reduce and hold in permanent subjection a tract of country nearly as large as Russia in Europe. . . . No war of independence ever terminated unsuccessfully except where the disparity of force was far greater than it is in this case. . . . Just as England during the revolution had to give up conquering the colonies so the North will have to give up conquering the South.33
31. Russell F. Weigley, Quartermaster General of the Union Army: A Biography ofM. C. Meigs (New York, 1959), 172.
32. Douglas Southall Freeman, Lee's Lieutenants: A Study in Command, 3 vols. (New York, 1943–44), I, 13; T. Harry Williams, Lincoln and His Generals (New York, 1952), 21.
33. London Times, July 18, 1861, Aug. 29, 1862.
Jefferson Davis agreed; early in the war he seems to have envisaged a strategy like that of George Washington in the Revolution. Washington traded space for time; he retreated when necessary in the face of a stronger enemy; he counterattacked against isolated British outposts or detachments when such an attack promised success; above all, he tried to avoid full-scale battles that would have risked annihilation of his army and defeat of his cause. This has been called a strategy of attrition—a strategy of winning by not losing, of wearing out a better equipped foe and compelling him to give up by prolonging the war and making it too costly.34
But two main factors prevented Davis from carrying out such a strategy except in a limited, sporadic fashion. Both factors stemmed from political as well as military realities. The first was a demand by governors, congressmen, and the public for troops to defend every portion of the Confederacy from penetration by "Lincoln's abolition hordes." Thus in 1861, small armies were dispersed around the Confederate perimeter along the Arkansas-Missouri border, at several points on the Gulf and Atlantic coasts, along the Tennessee-Kentucky border, and in the Shen-andoah Valley and western Virginia as well as at Manassas. Historians have criticized this "cordon defense" for dispersing manpower so thinly that Union forces were certain to break through somewhere, as they did at several points in 1862.35
The second factor inhibiting a Washingtonian strategy of attrition was the temperament of the southern people. Believing that they could whip any number of Yankees, many southerners scorned the notion of "sitting down and waiting" for the Federals to attack. "The idea of waiting for blows, instead of inflicting them, is altogether unsuited to the genius of our people," declared the Richmond Examiner. "The aggressive policy is the truly defensive one. A column pushed forward into Ohio or Pennsylvania is worth more to us, as a defensive measure, than a whole tier of seacoast batteries from Norfolk to the Rio Grande."36 The southern press clamored for an advance against Washington in the same tone that northern newspapers cried On to Richmond. Beauregard devised
34. See especially Russell F. Weigley, The American Way of War: A History of UnitedStates Military Strategy and Policy (Bloomington, 1973), 3–17, 96.
35. T. Harry Williams, "The Military Leadership of North and South," and David M. Potter, "Jefferson Davis and the Political Factors in Confederate Defeat," in David Donald, ed., Why the North Won the Civil War (New York, 1960), 45–46, 108–10.
36. Richmond Examiner, Sept. 27, 1861.
several bold plans for an offensive against McDowell. But the question became moot when Beauregard learned of McDowell's offensive against him.
The Confederates eventually synthesized these various strands of strategic theory and political reality into what Davis called an "offensive-defensive" strategy. This consisted of defending the Confederate homeland by using interior lines of communication (a Jominian but also common-sense concept) to concentrate dispersed forces against an invading army and, if opportunity offered, to go over to the offensive, even to the extent of invading the North. No one ever defined this strategy in a systematic, comprehensive fashion. Rather, it emerged from a series of major campaigns in the Virginia-Maryland and Tennessee-Kentucky theaters during 1862, and culminated at Gettysburg in 1863. It almost emerged, in embryonic form, from the first battle of Manassas (Bull Run) in July 1861, a small battle by later Civil War standards but one that would have important psychological consequences in both the North and the South.