The American Civil War

by John Keegan

The barely existent administrative machinery of the Confederacy could not in 1861 have mobilised an army to challenge the Union; fortunately for the cause of secession, the necessary men came forward unbidden. Many were members of militia units, whether long-established or recent; many were spontaneous volunteers. Not until April 1862 would the Confederacy have to legislate for conscription. The pattern of enlistment was similar in the North, initial and widespread volunteering in numbers, often centred on existing militia or volunteer units; in the headstrong days of 1860-61 the distinction between the two was easily blurred. Legislation attempted to regularise the popular response, if only to provide the money needed to pay and equip the patriot enthusiasts. On March 6, 1861, the Confederate Congress authorised the creation of an army of 100,000, much of which already existed. In May it increased the army’s size to 400,000, the War Department soon having to turn away half those coming forward, for want of weapons. Confederate efforts to organise were hampered by the weakness of the central government and the persisting primacy of the states, whose governors frequently sought to retain both weapons and soldiers within state borders. The Confederacy never did form a regular army; its fighting strength was composed of states’ forces, supervised by its War Department. The system that emerged in the North was similar. The regular army was scarcely expanded and its pre-war regiments were largely left in their pre-war stations, on the western frontier; the Civil War army was a federation of volunteers, organised on a state basis and bearing state titles. Thus Ulysses S. Grant, before the war a retired U.S. regular officer, originally commissioned into the infantry from West Point, was appointed in 1861 to command the 21st Illinois, a volunteer regiment, of his home state, and returned to the regular army, as a major general, only after his victory at Vicksburg in 1863.

  The Civil War system, if anything so complex and confused can be called a system, anticipated that adopted in Great Britain at the outbreak of the First World War. There the regular army was left almost intact at the outset, while expansion was organised through the Territorial Army, which descended from the volunteering movement of 1859, supplemented by a renewed volunteering impulse, which produced the “New” or “Kitchener Armies” of Pals and Chums battalions immortalised by their self-sacrifice in 1916 on the Somme, Britain’s Gettysburg. Both the American Civil War and the British Great War responses to military crisis had a common Anglo-Saxon origin, descending originally from Alfred the Great’s fyrd and the Norman posse comitatus of the English counties.

  President Lincoln’s initial response to Southern rebellion after the firing on Fort Sumter was, on April 15, 1861, to call into Federal service 75,000 state militiamen for “ninety days.” His federalisation of the militia, an entirely constitutional act under a law of 1795, had the same effect on the American North in 1861 as Field Marshal Lord Kitchener’s appeal for 100,000 men to serve for three years had on the British in 1914. Kitchener’s “First Hundred Thousand” were soon followed by a Second and a Third. Lincoln’s 75,000 were soon outnumbered by the offerings of the states. He had asked Indiana for six regiments; its governor promised twelve. Ohio’s governor, required to organise thirteen regiments, reported that “without seriously repressing the ardour of the people, I can hardly stop short of twenty.”1 Confronted with both a deadly military threat to the Union and an outpouring of Northern patriotic response to it, Lincoln on May 3 called for 42,000 volunteers for the army, to serve for three years, and 18,000 for the navy, at the same time authorising the enlargement of the regular force by 23,000. Congress in July not only retroactively legalised these executive decisions but actually sanctioned the enlistment of an additional million volunteers, to serve for three years. Within a year of the firing on Fort Sumter, the Union had 700,000 men under arms; the South may have had 400,000. Circumstances, however, make exact enumeration problematic. Some of the North’s original “ninety-day” men insisted on the letter of their enlistment and returned to civilian life when their time was up; so did some whole regiments. Even a number of three-year men, and regiments, took their demobilisation while the war continued, much later on.

  Steadfastness in service was also undermined by the temptation to desert. In the richer North, where bounties were paid to encourage joining up, many volunteers took advantage of the opportunity to take the bounty, decamp, and join up again, often several times over. As the bounty at its largest was as much as $1,000, calculated desertion could be a profitable practice. In the South, after the first heartfelt year, desertion was more often a matter of necessity. Small farmers and landless labourers, informed by the mail of family hardship, would leave the ranks, often with a sincere intention to rejoin, in order to get in the harvest or put in a spell of breadwinning. Small slaveholders might be impelled to return home for fear of leaving their womenfolk unprotected on isolated farms where male slaves remained the only men out of uniform. Whatever the reason, and whatever the difference of motivation, North or South, desertion at any time could rob the armies of as much as a third of their strength.

  In 1861, however, desertion was a problem to trouble governments in the future, not the present. At the outset the embryo armies of both sides were most concerned to provide weapons and munitions for their soldiers, to find means of clothing and feeding them, and to furnish them with officers. Equipping its army was a particularly severe problem for the South. Although the Confederacy benefited in the first months after secession by the seizure of Federal arsenals, most of the weapons acquired were old-fashioned muskets, flintlock and unrifled. Such weapons could be adapted, by reboring the barrels and altering the firing mechanism to accept the percussion cap; the chief source of armament, however, lay in Europe. It was a principal purpose of Confederate blockade-running, and of its overseas procurement programme, to buy weapons abroad. The favoured arm was the British Enfield rifle, closely similar to the Federal Springfield.

  The South, by its acquisition of the machinery at Harpers Ferry, supplemented by that of existing arsenals at Richmond and Fayetteville, North Carolina, was able to begin domestic weapon manufacture in 1861. The equipment of its artillery was more difficult. Capture of cannon at Fort Sumter and the federal naval base at Norfolk yielded some equipment, but fortress cannon were too heavy and immobile to fit out large numbers of field batteries. The deficiencies were made good from the inventories of pre-war volunteer units, foreign imports, and the output of the Tredegar Iron Works at Richmond, which was to become the arsenal of the Confederacy. The South also proved adept at improvising munition production. Two of the ingredients of gunpowder, charcoal and sulphur, were readily available. The third, saltpetre, or nitre (potassium nitrate), was not. Josiah Gorgas, appointed the chief of ordnance in April 1861, set out to fill the deficiency by finding sources of supply within the Confederacy. One of his subordinates identified such a source in limestone caves in the southern Appalachian Mountains; others were found in the contents of chamber pots and on the walls of stables and cow byres, scraped for the deposits yielded by the urine of horses and cattle. Against every probability, the South never risked defeat through shortage of powder, most of which was produced at a purpose-built mill located at Augusta, Georgia.

  In the summer of 1861 the North faced a problem of equipment and supply quite as severe as the South’s, with these differences: first, it possessed a manufacturing base not only vastly exceeding the South’s in size but adequate, once mobilised, to supply all the Union’s military needs; second, production could be supplemented by imports, since Northern harbours were not subject to blockade, almost the whole of the American merchant marine remained under Northern control, and, most important, Northern credit abroad remained strong; third, credit also remained strong at home, thanks to skilful financial management. The secretary of the Treasury, Salmon P. Chase, pioneered the practice of selling government bonds—in effect war debt, to be repaid in better times—directly to small investors. At the same time the Treasury persuaded Congress to legalise the issue of paper money; the Confederate Treas
ury almost simultaneously began to issue paper dollars, with disastrous results; by the end of the war, with inflation calculated to have risen to 9,000 percent, Confederate paper dollars were worthless. The Union paper dollar held its value because the Treasury instituted a rigorous system of war taxation, which imitated that imposed in Britain during the Napoleonic Wars. The American military system was a historical derivative of the British. American war taxation, consciously or not, mimicked the emergency measures introduced in Britain to finance Nelson’s fleet and Wellington’s army. It went further. Not only were luxuries and incomes taxed, so were services, business transactions, and inheritance. By 1865 the United States was the most comprehensively taxed polity in the world. The yield covered war expenditure—about three billion dollars—handsomely, and kept depreciation below 90 per cent. The war taxes, including income tax, were all rapidly discontinued after 1865.

  Wartime financial policy could not, however, at the outset equip the Union armies. The necessary material had not been manufactured and so was not available for purchase. There was much else that was lacking, including the tens of thousands of horses and mules necessary to work as draught animals for artillery batteries and transport wagons; the animals existed but had not yet been brought into government service. It was the inanimate necessities which in 1861 were more necessary of procurement—not only muskets and cannon, but uniforms, belts, pouches, packs, boots, tents, saddles, harness, and the hundred and one things a properly organised army needs in order to operate: medical stores, kitchen equipment, blankets, veterinary necessities, telegraph cable, an almost endless list. Mid-nineteenth-century armies hovered on the brink of true modernisation, half belonging to the military past, when martial vigour and numbers were alone thought to count, but already entering the military future, when technology would predominate. The underdeveloped South was linked to the past, the North was being transported by the industrial revolution into the future. The South would perform prodigies of improvisation to sustain its war effort and, despite shortages of almost everything, was not ultimately defeated by want of essentials; nevertheless, the Confederacy led at best a hand-to-mouth existence. The North, by contrast, was propelled into dominance of the world’s economy by the war. An apparently open-ended boom, created by the demand for war goods and including agricultural products—wool for uniforms, leather for boots, and grain and meat for rations—as well as manufactured items would drive the United States economy to the first place in the world by 1880. Much of the expansion of output was in categories of product to be expected—track for the U.S. Military Rail Roads, armour plate for river gunboats—but much was not. As James McPherson emphasises, two of the most creative innovations stimulated by war demand were the adoption of standard sizes in men’s clothing manufacture and of the Blake-McKay machine for sewing soles to uppers in boot factories.2

  After the initial crisis, the equipment of regiments receded in urgency. By 1862 most, South as well as North, had acquired a musket per man and a set of uniforms. Finding officers to supervise and lead their soldiers remained a difficulty as America possessed no officer class, as existed in the historic kingdoms in Europe. The idea of an officer class was indeed at odds with the founding ethos of the great republic, which had outlawed ranks and titles of nobility in its defining documents. The idea of election, so strong in American life from the Revolution onwards, was widely thought by the militiamen and volunteers of 1861 to apply to military as well as political affairs. Election of officers was common practice in the new regiments, but many of the chosen, though big men in civil life, proved incompetent in war. What neither militiamen nor volunteers understood was that close-formation fighting—and the Civil War was to be one of the last in which superiority in close formation determined the outcome—was a highly technical business. Officers had to know how to form their soldiers in ranks, how to manoeuvre the ranks in the face of the opposing enemy ranks, and when exactly to give the order to fire. Too soon and fire was “thrown away;” too late and the enemy might get his volley in first. The Springfield rifle took half a minute to reload. Ranks which had fired too early, and failed to damage their opponents, could be devastated by better-commanded troops while they fumbled with cartridge and ramrod.

  “Big men”—local worthies, political fixers, who knew how to talk men into volunteering—usually lacked any knowledge of how to manoeuvre the regiments they had raised when the enemy was encountered. The predicament of their followers was actually worse than that of volunteers of 1914 who, armed with a magazine rifle, were capable of covering their front with a volume of fire sufficient to keep the enemy at a distance; by 1914, moreover, riflemen were taught to lie down on the battlefield, unless they were attacking. The riflemen of 1861, equipped with a single-shot weapon, were expected to stand up, shoulder to shoulder, concentrating their firepower in a carefully timed volley, since only thus could they hope to overcome their opponents.

  Mastery of the tactics of close-formation fighting could only be learnt by repetition. To their credit, some of the new regiments of 1861 drilled themselves hour after hour at the outset; a few set up “schools” or “camps” of instruction, to which officers and sergeants went before recruits were inducted. Drilling, however, could not teach inexperienced troops mastery of battlefield craft. That skill required years, not weeks, of practice; or else battlefield experience, which in mid-1861 was not yet available. The only soldiers with the requisite understanding of manoeuvre and fire were the Northern regulars, who were too few to train the volunteer and militia units, and the graduates of America’s military colleges.

  The annual intake at West Point was small; classes were fewer than a hundred strong, often many fewer, and the output, after four years, fewer still. In 1861 there were 239 cadets at West Point, of whom 80 came from the South; 76 resigned or were dismissed for refusing to take the oath of allegiance to the Union. The South was overrepresented among officers of the army; 313 resigned their commissions to “go with their states,” leaving 440 West Point graduates in Union service. Others rejoined one army or the other from civilian life after the outbreak, but the total of graduates of serviceable age was under 3,000, so the pool was too small to provide professional leadership on the scale required. West Pointers returning to duty from retirement were usually appointed commanding officers of volunteer or militia regiments, as was Ulysses S. Grant in Illinois. Many rose quickly to general rank, 300 in the Union army, 150 in the Confederate. The Civil War was, on the level of high command, to be a West Point war.

  Numbers of trained officers in the South were amplified by the graduates of private military colleges, distinctively Southern institutions. The two best-known were the Virginia Military Institute (VMI), founded in 1839 at Lexington, and the South Carolina Military Academy, Charleston, to become celebrated as the Citadel. VMI graduates numbered 455 in 1861, but counting those who had attended without graduating there were 1,902 available altogether. Of these, 1,791 fought in the Civil War; VMI provided one-third of Virginia’s field officers (majors and colonels) in 1861. The Citadel and VMI were not, however, the only sources of privately trained officers in the South. Others included the North Carolina Military Institute at Charlotte (1859), the Arkansas Military Institute (1850), and the West Florida Seminary (1851). Alabama had three small military colleges: the Southern Military Academy at Wetumpka (1860), the La Grange College and Military Academy (1860), and the Glenville Military Academy (1858). There were three in Mississippi: the Mississippi Military Institute at Pass Christian, Brandon State Military Institute, and Jefferson College, Natchez. The date of founding of the Alabama and Mississippi military colleges is significant. They probably represented the working of war fever in the Deep South during the last days of peace; they may have been little more than military boarding schools. The University of Alabama formed a cadet corps in 1860. Universities, however, were not characteristic Southern institutions, despite the existence of such ancient foundations as the University of Virginia and the C
ollege of William and Mary, at Williamsburg. Rich Southern boys went to Princeton; few went to Harvard or Yale.

  The United States Naval Academy, located at Annapolis, Maryland, was judged to be in too exposed a position and was transferred to the Atlantic House Hotel at Newport, Rhode Island, on May 9, 1861, to be safe from the risk of Confederate attack. The Confederacy founded its own naval academy on March 23, 1863; it had its premises at first aboard the CSS Patrick Henry in the James River, below Richmond, later ashore nearby at Fort Darling; the outline of the earthworks, still to be seen, suggests dank accommodation.

  The Confederacy started to establish a navy as soon as war broke out, seizing warships of the national navy wherever they lay in Southern waters, commandeering or chartering civilian vessels and starting the construction of its own. Creating an army to defend the seceding states was, however, the more vital task. It began even before the firing on Fort Sumter, though not in any logical way. As in the North, two powers, central and state, were at work, and often in conflict, and three principles of military organisation: the regular army, the state militia, and the emergency volunteers, exactly as in Britain during the Napoleonic Wars. On February 28, 1861, the Confederate Congress authorised President Jefferson Davis to accept state troops, or volunteers who had state governors’ consent, for one year’s service. This was the beginning of what Professor Peter Parish has called the “provisional” army of the Confederacy. On March 6 the Confederate Congress enacted the creation of a regular army, but its size was set at only 9,000 and little more was ever heard of it. On the same day the “provisional” army was considerably expanded, Congress authorising the president to appeal for 100,000 volunteers to serve for twelve months, and to accept the service of state militias for up to six months. On May 6 he was empowered, without waiting for the approval of the states, to take units into Confederate service for three years or the duration of the war, if less. In August, with 200,000 men under arms, he was authorised to call for another 400,000 volunteers.