The American Military - A Narrative History

by Brad D. Lookingbill

  Burnside's corps on the Union left concentrated on a stone bridge, which Confederate cannons and sharpshooters defended from the bluffs. After finally crossing it at 3:00 p.m., the soldiers raced to the outskirts of Sharpsburg. Lee held firm until General A. P. Hill's division suddenly arrived from Harpers Ferry and proceeded to batter the Union flank. Some of the yelling rebels wore captured blue uniforms, which prompted the confused federals to hold their fire and to pull back to the bridge. Vexed by the carnage, McClellan refused to commit his reserves for a decisive blow to the Confederate center.

  The Battle of Antietam marked the bloodiest single day in the history of the American military. A total of 12,800 Americans on both sides died, while another 15,000 suffered wounds. Even if a tactical draw, the outcome constituted a major setback for the Army of Northern Virginia. It arguably amounted to a strategic defeat for the South as a whole, because Lee failed to achieve his military objectives with the incursion. Though unmolested the next day, he withdrew across the Potomac to the safety of Virginia. Consequently, the Lincoln administration lost patience with McClellan and removed him from command of the Army of the Potomac.

  Military Necessity

  While Lincoln worried about the “inferiority of our troops and our generals,” the North experienced a growing sense of frustration and weariness. New recruits seemed more reluctant to volunteer during 1862, when the War Department began to issue requisitions to the states for 300,000 more men. Many states promised enlistment bounties of $100, while some resorted to militia drafts. Though morale among the rank and file appeared low, the Union army obtained 421,000 three-year volunteers by the fall.

  The states remained responsible for enlisting volunteers, although the federal government enacted measures to assist them with professional military education in the future. Congress approved the Morrill Land Grant College Act, which donated public lands to states willing to establish a least one educational institution that, among other things, included instruction on “military tactics.” The grants that started under the Lincoln administration underwrote state-by-state efforts to provide officer training at new agricultural and mechanical colleges.

  The Lincoln administration reiterated that the military objective of the Civil War was to save the Union but not to end slavery. Nevertheless, the commander-in-chief backed a deportation plan for compensating loyal slaveholders and for sending all freedmen to “a climate congenial to them,” that is, Africa or Central America. Though abolitionists protested, the federal government weighed various colonization schemes. Congress passed a series of Confiscation Acts, which seized chattel slaves aiding the rebellion. Other laws ended slavery in Washington D.C. and in the territories. Northern anxieties about race and equality, however, complicated the constitutional questions about antislavery policies in wartime.

  As Union columns penetrated the South, thousands of slaves fled farms and plantations. When they arrived in military camps, field commanders disagreed about their status. Some called them “contraband of war” and made them unofficial soldiers. Others simply set them free.

  Pondering the military implications of emancipation, Lincoln privately decided to make it a goal of the war. It gave the federal government the double advantage of taking a labor force away from rebel states and, in turn, employing the fugitives against their former masters. Eliminating slavery damaged the cornerstone of the Confederacy while bolstering the cause of the Union. Likewise, Republicans in office appealed to moral principles to justify the sacrifices in blood and treasure. As Confederate leaders sought foreign recognition, both Great Britain and France were unlikely to support a slaveholder's war against emancipation.

  Lincoln issued a preliminary Emancipation Proclamation on September 22, 1862. Acting with his inherent powers as commander-in-chief, he said that all persons held as slaves in rebelling states or districts on January 1, 1863, would be “then, thenceforward, and forever free.” While reaffirming an intention to compensate slaveholders loyal to the federal government, he directed all military personnel not to repress slaves “in any efforts they may make for their actual freedom.” His executive order would endow the Civil War with a larger purpose, which made the Union armies and navies responsible for the spread of freedom in the South.

  The Emancipation Proclamation freed no slaves initially, because any executive order from Lincoln was inoperative in the Confederacy. It promised freedom only to slaves in rebel hands, not to those within areas already subjugated by Union might or inside the “border states” of Maryland, Delaware, Kentucky, and Missouri. By setting a deadline, however, it created an opportunity for the secessionists to rejoin the Union and to retain “domestic institutions.” The order took effect as scheduled, making it a “fit and necessary war measure” in suppressing an armed rebellion. Though warranted by “military necessity,” it also invoked “the considerate judgment of mankind and the gracious favor of Almighty God.” Its implementation produced no immediate results, except to arouse potential slave insurrections.

  Irrespective of the shortcomings, emancipation mobilized blacks to join the armed forces of the Union. On May 22, 1863, the War Department established the Bureau of Colored Troops. More than 180,000 African Americans donned uniforms, making them a vital source of manpower at a time when voluntary enlistments in the North were waning. In fact, approximately 80 percent of the black soldiers and sailors hailed from slaveholding states. Placed under the command of white officers, the rank and file encountered prejudice and scorn. They served in segregated regiments, inherited degrading assignments, and received lower pay – $10 per month in contrast to the standard $13. When eventually assigned to combat arms, they fought in 39 major battles and 449 smaller engagements. Hoping to strike a blow against the Confederacy, a black soldier told his commander: “We expect to plant the Stars and Stripes on the city of Charleston.”

  Meanwhile, riding with guerrillas offered a popular form of military service among young and restless males of the South. In fact, Confederate leaders authorized the formation of partisan “rangers” for homeland defense. From Missouri to Virginia, they spent much of the war tearing up tracks, blowing up bridges, and holding up trains. As the mayhem spread, their ruthless actions provoked deadly reprisals. While disrupting Union operations behind the lines, the bands of guerrillas drew manpower away from the organized corps of the Confederacy.

  With manpower in the South dwindling, the Confederacy enacted a conscription law on April 16, 1862. All white males between the ages of 18 and 35 were required to serve for three years. Before the Civil War ended, the top age for conscription increased to 50. However, substitutions permitted some civilians to stay home. Despite later revisions to the measure, it retained loopholes and exemptions that led to complaints about “a rich man's war and a poor man's fight.” Instead of improving end strength, conscription tended to alienate and to divide the Confederates.

  A year later, attrition spurred Washington D.C. to replenish Union forces with conscription. On March 3, 1863, Congress passed the Enrollment Act, which made able-bodied males between the ages of 20 and 45 liable for a federal draft. A number of married men obtained deferments until younger, unmarried males first received calls. Governors, judges, and federal officials were exempted altogether. For a fee of $300, civilians in the North legally dodged military service by paying for a substitute. Conscripts accounted for less than 10 percent of the rank and file, because widespread opposition in the states impeded the enforcement of draft laws.

  After the announcement of a draft lottery in New York City, the streets and docks erupted in violence on July 13, 1863. In particular, Irish laborers associated conscription with policies that seemed arbitrary and undemocratic. Mobs assailed offices, factories, and homes, but they directed their fury at African Americans. While lynching more than a dozen blacks, they burned down the Colored Orphan Asylum. During the riots, at least 120 people died. Lincoln sent Union regiments to restore order.

  In addition to issues of race
and class, the Civil War raised awareness about the significance of gender. Women in both the North and the South sewed uniforms, composed poetry, and raised money for the war effort. With the mobilization of the armed forces, many saw that few men remained at the home front. Several found themselves managing farms, plantations, shops, and schools. Some followed the armies from Virginia to Texas, offering to spy or to cook without pay. Wives, sisters, and daughters even dressed as men and “fought like demons.”

  In their most visible role, scores of women volunteered to serve as nurses. Thousands staffed hospitals, infirmaries, and clinics across the nation, although many casualties died before reaching them. They helped to treat gangrene, septicemia, pyemia, and osteomyelitis, which often resulted in amputation. Out of necessity, they encountered piles of arms and legs, corpses covered with flies, smells of rotting flesh, and sounds of suffering humanity. The “ambulance corps” administered first aid and evacuated the wounded from the front lines. Known as an “angel of the battlefield,” Clara Barton oversaw the distribution of medicines and supplies in field hospitals and later helped to found the American Red Cross. In Richmond, Virginia, Phoebe Yates Pember was a “matron” of the hospital wards of Chimborazo. Whatever their sectional orientation, female nurses advanced the professional status of working women.

  As voluntary female associations proliferated, no other civilian organization achieved the prominence of the U.S. Sanitary Commission. Recognized by the War Department in 1861, its 7,000 local auxiliaries distributed clothing, food, bandages, and medicine. Though its national officers were typically males, Dorothea Dix became the first superintendent of female nurses. In addition to fundraising through “Sanitary Fairs,” it dispatched inspectors to military camps to lecture soldiers about latrines, health, diet, and cleanliness. With bacteriology largely a mystery, diarrhea and other maladies threatened to incapacitate armies in the field.

  Though commensurable with the standards of the time, the comparative mortality rates for the opposing armies remained shocking. Evidently, two soldiers died of disease for every one killed in action. One of every six wounded graybacks perished. However, only one of every seven wounded bluecoats suffered the same fate. Likewise, the percentage of Confederate soldiers who died of disease was twice the percentage of Union soldiers. Lacking the service networks of their northern counterparts, the southern military operated more or less in the medical “Dark Ages.”

  Tragically, both northerners and southerners mistreated war prisoners. Conditions in the stockades appeared poor, though they worsened as shortages of food, clothing, and medicine became more acute. The resource advantages of the Union offered a better chance of survival for rebel captives compared with federal prisoners held in the Confederacy. Prisoner exchanges and paroles stopped in 1863, when Secretary of War Stanton insisted that Confederates not abuse or kill black soldiers in captivity.

  The next year, the Confederate prison in Andersonville, Georgia, degenerated into a death camp. More than 33,000 Union soldiers crowded into an enclosure of approximately 16 acres, where a contaminated stream served as both a sewer and a water supply. At the cemetery, the prisoners' graves numbered 12,912. The commandant of Andersonville, Henry Wirz, was later hanged for war crimes.

  Given the scale and the scope of military operations, the Lincoln administration grew concerned about the conduct of the war. The War Department tapped Dr. Francis Lieber, a professor at Columbia College in New York and a renowned German American jurist, to serve on an advisory board. With a combination of political philosophy and moral realism, he helped to craft General Order 100 for the president’s endorsement. On April 24, 1863, the War Department disseminated the Lieber Code as the “Instructions for the Government of Armies of the United States in the Field.”

  The Lieber Code demanded the humane and ethical treatment of combatants and noncombatants in wartime. It stated that “men who take up arms against one another in public war do not cease on this account to be moral beings, responsible to one another and to God.” Its greatest theoretical contribution, however, was the identification of “military necessity” as a general legal principle governing actions. It explicitly forbade killing prisoners of war, except in such cases that the survival of the soldiers holding them appeared in jeopardy. Consequently, it offered a precursor to the first Geneva Convention, which promulgated international rules for the treatment of the sick and the wounded in 1864.

  Advance and Retreat

  The federal government counted on the armed forces to reverse the rebel momentum. The Confederate tide rolled in thousands of places, which involved separate theaters to the west and to the east of the Appalachian Mountains. Soldiers marched and countermarched month after month, struggling to find their footing in the battlegrounds for the Union.

  Confederates led by General Braxton Bragg invaded Kentucky during 1862 and installed a sympathetic government in Frankfort. Cavalry units cut railroad lines and bedeviled hapless bluecoats, melting back into the countryside after their raids. Planning a counterstroke, Buell placed his Union army between Bragg and the Ohio River. On October 8, 1862, they fought the Battle of Perryville to a standoff. The federals counted 4,200 killed, wounded, and missing, while the rebels suffered 3,400 in losses. Afterward, Bragg withdrew to eastern Tennessee.

  A few hundred miles away, General William S. Rosecrans commanded dispersed federals in northern Mississippi. While blocking a rebel thrust into western Tennessee, “Old Rosy” prevailed against combined armies at key railroad junctions. In the two battles of Iuka and Corinth, Union and Confederate casualties numbered 3,300 and 5,700, respectively. After Lincoln dismissed Buell, Rosecrans reorganized his command into the Army of the Cumberland.

  Davis also reorganized the Confederate forces, sending Johnston to Chattanooga to head the Western Department and Bragg to Murfreesboro to command the Army of the Tennessee. After Rosecrans maneuvered southward from Nashville, the Army of the Cumberland faced the Army of the Tennessee astride Stones River. During the evening of December 30, their bands played a series of northern and southern tunes. When they struck up “Home Sweet Home,” nearly 78,000 opposites in uniform sang together through the night.

  At dawn on December 31, the Battle of Stones River began. Rosecrans sent his soldiers against the rebel right, while Bragg ordered a thrust against the federal right. Because of the deafening roar of artillery and musketry, soldiers picked cotton from stalks and stuffed it into their ears. The fiercest fighting occurred at an angle in the federal line inside the Round Forest. By January 3, 1863, each army had lost roughly a third of its effectives. In the aftermath, Bragg decided to withdraw southeast to Tullahoma, Tennessee.

  Commanding the Department of the Tennessee, Grant inched federal forces overland to Vicksburg, Mississippi. “I gave up all idea of saving the Union,” he later recalled, “except by complete conquest.” Confederates concentrated on defending Chickasaw Bluffs, which loomed about 3 miles north of Vicksburg. Grant's subordinate, the indefatigable Sherman, resolved to make war “so terrible” that the rebels would realize “they are mortal.” On December 29, 1862, Sherman ordered four divisions to attack the high ground. After suffering 1,800 casualties, he withdrew up the Mississippi River in disappointment.

  In early 1863, Grant's command became bogged down in the tangled bayous, woods, and deltas north of Vicksburg. Along the Mississippi and Yazoo River swamps, the death rate from typhoid and dysentery mounted. Eluding Union patrols at every turn, Forrest conducted dazzling raids that threatened Grant's supply lines. In Washington D.C., rumors circulated that the commander was drinking again.

  To command the Army of the Potomac, Lincoln turned to Burnside in late 1862. Known for his stylish side-whiskers, he marched 113,000 men “on to Richmond” as winter came. Reaching the Rappahannock River in the bitter cold, he waited for the arrival of his pontoons – flat-bottomed boats anchored in a line to support a floating bridge. With 74,000 men, Lee concentrated the Army of Northern Virginia across 7 mile
s of hills near Fredericksburg. He placed Longstreet's corps on Marye's Heights west of the town, while Jackson's men scaled Prospect Hill to the south. Rather than preparing entrenchments, the Confederates utilized the high ground to give their cannons and their rifles an edge against the Union. Swampy ground and rough terrain limited the avenues for an attack against the defensive line. Braving sniper fire along the river, Burnside's engineers eventually assembled six bridges under the cover of fog. His artillery shelled the town, while his infantry began crossing the Rappahannock.

  On December 13, Union troops entered and occupied Fredericksburg. Formed into three “grand divisions,” one wave surged forward and crashed into the Confederates on the flank. At midday, Jackson drove them back with unyielding cannonades. The main force of federals raced toward Marye's Heights, where Longstreet's riflemen waited along a 4-foot stone wall at the base. From the top, Confederate artillery covered a half-mile stretch of open ground. Burnside decided to test the strength of enemy dispositions, sending his infantry against the belching guns. He ordered 14 assaults, which melted in the deadly barrage. By nightfall, the stone wall remained in rebel hands. Piles of bodies littered the ground in front of it. The Army of the Potomac lost 12,000 men in the Battle of Fredericksburg, while the Army of Northern Virginia suffered 5,300 casualties.

  As morale in the Army of the Potomac faltered, Burnside attempted to regain the initiative on January 20, 1863. He ordered the “Mud March,” which involved an aborted movement up the Rappahannock to flank Fredericksburg. His maneuvering achieved nothing. As his division commanders grew insubordinate, he offered his resignation to Lincoln.