Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction

by Allen C. Guelzo

  The calls for militia, volunteers, and an expanded regular army created a parallel system in the Union armed forces, which would be composed of three kinds of military organizations. First, at the core of the army would be the old regular U.S. Army regiments, which enlisted men directly into service as long-serving professional soldiers, and which were known simply by their regimental numbers (i.e., 1st U.S. Infantry, 5th U.S. Cavalry). Second, rising into existence at the call of the various state governments would be the volunteer regiments, which were recruited by the states, marched under state-appointed officers carrying their state flag as well as the Stars and Stripes, and were identified by their state regimental number (i.e., 83rd Pennsylvania Volunteer Infantry, 1st Minnesota Volunteers, 20th Maine Volunteers, 19th Massachusetts Volunteers). These volunteers were a makeshift category, to save Congress the expense of permanently commissioning officers and mustering men into a dramatically expanded Federal service, which might prove legally difficult to disband once the wartime emergency was over.

  Unlike regulars, the volunteers remained state-based, and they signed up for two- or three-year periods, after which they returned to civilian life and their units evaporated without any further fiscal obligations. The British had invented the volunteer system during the Napoleonic Wars, also to save themselves the expense of permanent expansions of their army, and the United States had taken over the example in the Mexican War, where the bulk of the U.S. forces were volunteers. In a pinch, the president was always able to call upon the supposedly vast reservoir of state militia. However, only a few states actually had a reasonably organized militia system to start with (New York’s was the best, with about 45,000 men on its rolls, followed by those of Ohio and Indiana), so in practice militia units were usually employed only on emergency rear-echelon duties, to free up the volunteers and regulars.12

  This system might have been more confusing had it not been for the fact that the regular army regiments never numbered more than a handful compared to the vast outpouring of volunteer recruits (Pennsylvania alone raised 215 volunteer infantry regiments during the course of the war), and for the fact that the volunteer regiments were frequently commanded by regular officers who were commissioned into state volunteer service. At the beginning of the war, though, it caused no end of chaos. State volunteer regiments often chose their own uniforms and weapons, elected their own noncommissioned and company officers with minimal regard for their competence, and generally behaved little better than a mob of hunters at a turkey shoot. Regiments such as the 79th New York arrived in Washington garbed in Highland kilts; the 72nd Pennsylvania copied from the daring French-Algerian colonial troops known as Zouaves the dashing Zouave uniform, complete with baggy red trousers, a cutaway monkey jacket, and a red fez and turban; the 3rd Maine reported for duty in uniforms of gray. Regimental drill often had to wait until the newly elected officers could learn, from a variety of popular handbooks or from the presence of a few old regulars, how to give the necessary orders.

  Nevertheless, the volunteers were all that Lincoln at first thought he might need, for the president was sure that a show of resolute determination on the part of the federal government in raising an army would be all that was necessary to force the secessionists to back down. Still confident that Southern Unionism would reassert itself, Lincoln “questioned whether there is, to-day, a majority of the legally qualified voters of any State, except perhaps South Carolina, in favor of disunion.” At least, he added weakly, “the contrary has not been demonstrated in any one of them.” Only let the federal government show its resolve, and the rebellion would collapse before a rebirth of Union loyalty.

  In fact, almost the exact opposite happened. Virginia had called a state convention soon after Lincoln’s election to consider secession. The convention met on February 13, 1861, but debate on a secession ordinance dragged on for a month and a half before it was finally put to a vote on April 11, when secession lost, 88 to 45. The upper South, and especially Virginia, was not willing to go following the will-o’-the-wisp of secession, especially when it was led by the hotheads of South Carolina. Lincoln’s call for the states to put their militia at the disposal of the federal government laid an entirely different complexion over affairs, however. Virginia would not fight the Union for South Carolina, but it would not join with the rest of the Union in suppressing its fellow Southerners and denying the principle of secession. “The militia of Virginia will not be furnished to the powers at Washington for any such use or purpose as they have in view,” Virginia governor John Letcher replied to Lincoln’s summons.13 Forced by Lincoln’s proclamation to choose which master it would serve, the Virginia convention reversed itself and voted to secede on April 17; the state then proceeded to seize the undefended federal navy yard at Norfolk.

  Similar reactions set in across the upper South. In Maryland, pro-secession riots broke out in the streets of Baltimore a day after Lincoln issued his call for the militia, and a secessionist mob stoned the men of the 6th Massachusetts on April 19 as they changed trains in Baltimore en route to Washington. The panicky militiamen responded by opening fire, killing four civilians and wounding thirty-one. Maryland secessionists had been haranguing Maryland governor Thomas Hicks for a special session of the state legislature, which was strongly Democratic, but Hicks had so far stubbornly refused to yield to them. The Baltimore shootings momentarily unsettled Hicks and forced him to call a special session on April 26.

  Hicks soon recovered his Unionist composure and designated the rural town of Frederick as the meeting place for the session, rather than in the agitated atmosphere of the state capital at Annapolis. In the peace and detachment of Frederick, Hicks was able to keep the legislature from bolting down the secession path. When the state legislature tried to reconvene in September to reconsider secession, Federal troops, now securely in control of the state, arrested twenty-seven state representatives and prevented the legislature from meeting. New state elections that fall installed a Unionist in the governor’s chair and a Unionist majority in the legislature, who in turn sent Thomas Hicks to Washington as a U.S. senator.14

  However, on May 7 the Tennessee legislature followed the example of Virginia rather than Maryland and voted to secede without even bothering to call a special convention into being. The Arkansas state convention passed a secession ordinance on the same day, and on May 20 North Carolina also seceded. In short order, Tennessee, Arkansas, Virginia, and North Carolina then joined the Confederacy, and to cement Virginia’s loyalty to the new Southern republic, the Confederate government chose to move its capital from Montgomery to the Virginia capital of Richmond, only 100 miles south of Washington. Lincoln could now look out of the White House windows and see the new Confederate flag waving naughtily from housetops across the Potomac in Alexandria.

  No more cheering were the deliberations Lincoln faced about what to do with the army of militia and the volunteers he had called into being. Lincoln’s choice for secretary of war was a political hack from Pennsylvania, Simon Cameron, who quickly proved utterly inadequate to the task of managing a wartime army. Even if Lincoln had appointed a professional soldier to the post, the results might not have been much better. The dispersion of the regular army all over the frontier meant that virtually none of those officers had ever commanded any large military formations. Jacob Dolson Cox was appalled to find that the regular army officers whom he met knew little, read little in military science, and were woefully unprepared for the actual conduct of a war. When Cox complained to one regular whom he knew, the commonsense reply he got was: “What could you expect of men who have had to spend their lives at a two-company post, where there was nothing to do when off duty but play draw-poker and drink whiskey at the sutler’s shop?” The result, as Cox could see, was that the regular army was almost useless for the war that was now breaking out, or at least not much more useful than the host of amateur military and militia units across the country. The regulars’ “advantage over equally well-educated civilians is
reduced to a practical knowledge of the duties of the company and the petty post,” complained Cox, “and in comparison with the officers of well-drilled militia companies, it amounted to little more than a better knowledge of the army regulations and the administrative process.”15

  As it was, what little strategic wisdom there was in the regular army was divided into two conflicting schools of military thought. At the head of one of these schools stood the figure of Napoleon, or at least Napoleon as interpreted by one of the more popular of Napoleon’s former staff officers, Antoine-Henri Jomini. French military practice, as a legacy of the Napoleonic wars, was considered the most advanced in the world, and a 105-page summary of Jomini’s Treatise on Grand Military Operations was mandatory reading at West Point until 1832. Jomini believed in the virtue of the military offensive: the general who wanted a truly decisive victory (like those of Napoleon) must take the war to the enemy as Napoleon did, by cutting the enemy’s communications, turning the flanks of his armies, or, if all else failed, making a concentrated frontal assault on the enemy’s defenses. Jomini acknowledged that the offensive was more costly in lives in the short run. Since it was more likely to achieve a decisive result more quickly, more lives would be saved in the long run.16

  In Europe, almost all the tactical experience of the major national armies seemed to bear Jomini out. The allied British and French attack at the Alma River in 1854 during the Crimean War and the headlong French attacks upon the Austrians at Solferino in 1859 all seemed to testify that it was the army of the offense that won European battles, and at lightning speed. This was enough to convince many prewar American officers. The reigning American tactics handbooks—such as Winfield Scott’s Infantry Tactics (1835) and William J. Hardee’s Rifle and Light Infantry Tactics (1855)—borrowed heavily from Napoleonic sources and stressed the virtue of quick, aggressive offensive movements on the battlefield. Scott himself had put the offensive to the practical test in the Mexican War by driving an outnumbered American army straight through the gates of Mexico City on the momentum of a Napoleonicstyle campaign.17

  Beside the example of Scott’s campaign operations in Mexico was the practical example of Zachary Taylor’s field tactics at Buena Vista, where Taylor stood his army on the defensive and allowed Santa Anna to bleed his Mexican army to death in repeated assaults on Taylor’s position. In fact, most of the great victories in American military history had been defensive ones, with Andrew Jackson’s crushing defeat of the British at New Orleans in 1815 being the most famous and most politically potent example. The prolonged defiance of the Russian naval base of Sevastopol during the Crimean War was an updated notice that once a defending force had been allowed to fortify itself, head-on assaults were unlikely to budge it.

  The politics of the defensive, whether on the level of grand strategy or of battlefield tactics, may have been more important to Americans than the real military value of the defensive, since the American republic retained a horror of supporting a large professional army (not only did a professional army remind Americans of British occupation during the Revolution, but a standing army represented the principle of power, the eternal enemy of republican liberty, and required heavy taxation to maintain). “The [American] government was conceived in the spirit of peace,” wrote one British observer, “and framed more with a view to aid and encourage the development of the peaceful arts, than to promote a martial spirit in the people, or to throw the destinies of the country into a military channel.”18 So long as American armies were more likely to be made up of civilian volunteers and state militia, it was easier and safer to put nonprofessional soldiers of that sort on the defensive, rather than risking them on the offensive, where discipline, coordination, and mobility had to be of the highest order.

  This preference for a strategic defensive posture in American wars was reinforced by the fact that West Point, the American military academy, was organized and run by the Army Corps of Engineers, so the education given to officers there was naturally inclined toward such defensive studies as fortification and military engineering. Then in 1832 a young meteor named Dennis Hart Mahan was promoted to the professorship of civil and military engineering at West Point, and through his classroom teaching and his publications he soon persuaded the new officers of the U.S. Army that the Napoleonic lust for the offensive had to be qualified by a realistic appreciation for the risks the offensive might run. Like Jomini, Mahan encouraged future generals to maneuver—but not, like Jomini, in order to gain advantage for an attack. Instead, fully aware that American armies were bound to the use of militia and volunteers, the principal object in Mahan’s teaching was to seize and occupy enemy territory, and eventually force the enemy to launch an attack on one’s own defensive fortifications. That required intensive training in the construction of major fortifications and instruction in the creation of temporary fieldworks on the battlefield, and that was what Mahan and West Point offered. The result was, as Jacob Dolson Cox remembered, that “the intellectual education at the Military Academy was essentially the same… as that of any polytechnic school, the peculiarly military part of it being in the line of engineering.”19

  Mahan took an academy that had been designed mostly for the defensive protection of American territory through the construction and garrison of fortification, combined it with a military tradition shaped by political mandates from Congress to favor a defensive mission, and raised the art of defense to an American science. “It has not been the policy of the country to be aggressive towards others,” wrote navy secretary Gideon Welles, “therefore defensive tactics, rather than offensive have been taught, and the effect upon our educated commanders in this civil war is perceptible.”20 The American regular army officer in 1861 was thus presented with a series of contradictions: tactics books that encouraged officers to take the offensive and make the enemy’s army their objective, and a professional military culture that looked to occupy enemy territory and fight a defensive war from behind fortifications.

  In addition to these theoretical concepts, the officer of the Civil War era also would have had to come to terms with three new considerations. The first of these was supplies. From the Napoleonic Wars at the turn of the century up till the Crimean War, the size of modern armies had mushroomed from the 5,000–6,000-man forces that served under George Washington to mammoth field armies of 80,000–100,000 men, which in turn required equally mammoth numbers of horses and mules for transportation and, in the case of mounted infantry and cavalry, for combat operations. Keeping both the human and animal forces fed and armed was an increasingly difficult task and probably would have been impossible had it not been for the development of railroad technology.

  Even as the railroads permitted the accumulation of ever-larger armies, they tightened a leash that limited the distance armies could afford to maneuver away from those railroads. As one British military theorist put it, war had become “not like two fencers in an arena, who may shift their ground to all points of the compass,” but more like “the swordsmen on a narrow plank which overhangs an abyss.”21 At the same time, the increasing value of supply lines and railroads meant that more attention had to be paid to protecting those lines. Strategically, that meant that a general ought to take his army only along roads, rivers, or rail lines where his supply cord could not be cut, and ought to use the vulnerability of his enemy’s supply lines to force him to surrender territory and advantage.

  Linked to the problem of supply was the concept of lines of operations. No matter how different in size two armies might be, the only thing that mattered was the size of the force each army could bring to a battlefield at a given moment (i.e., even an army that is numerically inferior to its opponent can still achieve victory if it can manage to pick off small sections of the enemy army and defeat them piece by piece). Consequently, Mahan impressed on his West Point pupils the vital importance of operating defensively on “interior lines” and forcing the enemy to operate on “exterior lines.” (What this means is that in a
ny given strategic situation, an army occupying the interior of a position only has to move the chord of the arc surrounding that position to get from one end of it to the other; a commander on the exterior of a position has to occupy as well as move around the circumference of the arc, which forces him to spread his troops more thinly to cover the greater distance, and take more time in moving from point to point along the arc.) By taking up “interior lines,” a numerically inferior army could defend itself more easily, and could move to strike at exposed positions along the enemy’s arc faster than the enemy could reinforce them.

  For an attacking army, the best way to overcome the advantage of interior lines was to outflank the enemy’s lines entirely by means of turning or flanking movements. Hence, Civil War battles often found themselves determined by how successful one army was at getting hold of the other’s flank and compelling a withdrawal, rather than by head-to-head attacks.22 On the other hand, turning movements were frequently stymied by a physical problem that had never bothered Napoleon: the thickly wooded terrain of North America. Napoleon could fight Wellington across a series of neatly tended farms, but battle in the American Civil War had to deal with the fact that much of the American landscape was tangled, heavily forested, and poorly mapped. Many a clever turning movement floundered off into nowhere, slowed or lost by woods, badly mapped roads, and rivers.