The American Civil War

by John Keegan

  Scarcely through the medium of such tiny armies as had been hurried into the field. They were too small to do disabling damage to each other. They were too small altogether to dominate the vast distances and space over which the war was to be fought. The theatre of war constituted by the United and Confederate States was the largest single landmass over which any conqueror had ever attempted to impose his will, larger than Napoleon’s Europe, larger almost than Genghis Khan’s Eurasia. In the opening month of the conflict, such armies as had been brought into being were pinpricks on the map: McDowell’s 35,000 defending Washington, confronted by Beauregard’s 20,000 at Manassas Junction, twenty-five miles to the west; the geriatric Robert Patterson’s 15,000 at Harpers Ferry, opposing Joseph E. Johnston’s 11,000 Confederates in the Shenandoah Valley; McClellan’s 20,000 in western Virginia, easily outnumbering Confederates in a region that would shortly secede from the Confederacy as the new-fledged state of West Virginia; at Fortress Monroe, the great artillery fortification guarding the tip of the Virginia Peninsula, General Ben Butler commanded 15,000 men, watched by the Confederates Magruder and Huger at Yorktown and Norfolk, the Federal naval base which had fallen to Southern attack. Smaller Confederate forces, matched in places by Union handfuls, occupied positions in the West, particularly along the Mississippi and Missouri rivers: Memphis, Island No. 10, and New Madrid. Even in the barely inhabited regions of Arkansas and New Mexico tiny bands of supporters of one side or the other were taking to arms. A war which seemed at first to concern only the old thirteen colonies and the immediate trans-Appalachian region of post-independence settlement was developing into a war for the whole of non-British North America.

  It was the sheer size of the fragmented union—three thousand miles from ocean to ocean, over a thousand miles from Washington to the Gulf of Mexico—that so complicated the task of devising war plans. For the South the task appeared straightforward; simply to stand on the defensive and repel attacks wherever mounted, counting on Southern space and the absence of critically important centres of wealth and production to defeat Northern efforts to land crippling blows. President Jefferson Davis advocated such a strategy at the outset. It might well have worked, and would probably have averted Southern defeat well beyond 1865. Davis was prevented from implementing it for two reasons: one was the objection of local politicians and magnates to allowing Northern armies to penetrate their territories, even against the promise of eventual victory; the second was popular sentiment. Southerners, in reality as well as romantic belief, really did believe in their ability to defeat superior numbers of Yankees, whom they held to be an inferior breed. “The idea of waiting for blows, instead of inflicting them, is altogether unsuited to the genius of our people,” argued the Richmond Examiner in September 1861.1 Southerners wanted to invade the unseceding states and win victories on their soil, not just oppose Northern advances into the Confederacy. In retrospect the South’s strategy may be perceived as an amalgam of both strategies: opposing Union armies around the borders of the Confederacy and carrying war into the North when the chance offered. The South’s mistake was not to exploit the advantages geography conferred upon it. The South’s perimeter was very strong, penetrable only at a few widely separated points: down the Washington-Richmond corridor, up the Mississippi from New Orleans, down the Mississippi from the vicinity of Memphis. The South held the approaches to Richmond almost to the end, and opposed the descent of the Mississippi stoutly until 1863. Weakly, and fatally, however, it surrendered the mouth of the Mississippi far too easily, thus giving away one of the key entrance points to the Confederate heartland. Had the South, instead of sustaining the mass of its force in northern Virginia, conserved sufficient strength to create a mobile reserve in the lower states, ready to intervene against Union threats down or across the Mississippi, the integrity of its heartland might have been preserved for longer than it was.

  In practice, Southern leaders articulated strategies more explicitly than is usually credited. Southern strategy is misunderstood or overlooked in part because it was given no underlying theme at the outset, as Union strategy was by Winfield Scott with the Anaconda Plan. Yet there was a Southern strategy, or several variants of a single strategy, particularly associated with Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee, and Joseph E. Johnston. Davis’s strategy was essentially political, as befitted his role as president of the Confederacy. It was designed to take account of the popular choice to preserve the whole territory of the new polity, by denying access to Union invaders at every point around the South’s enormous perimeter. Its execution required the stationing of military forces at the borders and the waging of major defensive battles wherever invasion threatened. The first act of the Davis strategy was the first battle of Bull Run. Yet though a victory, the aftermath of Bull Run, and of similar battles that followed, revealed the strategy’s shortcomings. Though it solved an immediate problem, it did not deter a repetition, nor did it inflict disabling damage on the North, nor did it open up the prospect of any new strategic initiative. Indeed by 1862 it was made obvious that the North, despite Bull Run, was able to attack the South at any point it chose, a facility that would require the Confederacy to fight defensive battles in interminable sequence. Davis therefore refined his idea, proposing what would become known as the “offensive-defensive strategy.” Places and areas of secondary importance at the outer edges were not to be defended. Scattered forces were to be regrouped to operate on the South’s “interior lines,” moving by railroad to confront Northern armies as they appeared. One effect of this revised strategy was the virtual abandonment of the South’s West, in the trans-Mississippi region. Another effect, however, was to provide the South with larger striking forces that could be used to mount offensive operations as opportunity offered.

  This conception of the “offensive-defensive” was embraced by Robert E. Lee once he became Davis’s chief commander and led to his effort to carry the war into the North in 1863. His object was to win a great victory or series of victories that would dishearten his opponents and the North’s urban population. Lee, though it was part of his genius that his demeanour and pronouncements disguised his inner anxieties, had decided after the defeats in the Mississippi River system in 1862 that the South was losing the war and lacked the human and material resources to reverse the trend, unless by sensational events. By 1864, after the South’s defeats on Northern soil and the loss of more territory in the Mississippi Valley and around the coasts, it was obvious that Lee’s aggressive strategy was not working either, and the commander of the South’s only other large army, Joseph E. Johnston, operating in Georgia, had adopted another variant of the “offensive-defensive,” though with the emphasis on the defensive. His scheme was to take up a strong position and wait to be attacked. If bypassed, he retreated and repeated the process. Johnston’s strategy was self-defeating, since there was a finite limit to the amount of territory the South could surrender before it was completely overcome, almost the outcome he achieved as long as his command lasted.

  Little of that could be seen at the outset; in any case, the spirit of the seceding South was aggressive, not defensive. The view from the opposite direction was equally obscured. Those Northerners who had abandoned hope of conciliation, and some had wanted a fight even before Sumter fell, were baffled by the sheer strength of the South as to where to begin—Richmond, state capital of Virginia, to which the Confederacy’s capital had been transferred by vote on May 21, lay only 110 miles from Washington; but in July 1861 the Confederate outposts stood only 25 miles distant from the national capital. The waterways of northern Virginia were as much a deterrent as Confederate armed strength.

  The Shenandoah Mountains form a section of the Appalachian chain, which runs diagonally southwest-northeast from Georgia to New England, at a distance varying between two hundred and one hundred miles from the Atlantic. The Appalachians had for nearly two centuries formed the dividing line between English, later British, America and the French interior, a major military fr
ontier, never breached, only turned by the British capture of the Great Lakes region after the capture of Quebec in 1759. The Civil War revived the strategic significance of Appalachia, since the mountain barrier protected the Carolinas and Georgia from attack from the Midwest, not only because of the difficulty presented by its terrain but also because it was traversed neither by rivers nor railroads, the two principal means of movement for Civil War armies.

  West of the Appalachians the military significance of the continent’s great rivers became dominant. That of the Mississippi was self-evident. It provided the Confederacy, as long as it could be held, with an avenue of rapid north-south communication from Tennessee to Louisiana and a bulwark against any attack from the west that might be mounted. Its eastern tributaries, particularly those flowing through Kentucky and Tennessee, vast in width and carrying huge volumes of water, the Ohio, Tennessee, and Cumberland rivers, were of almost equal importance. They lent barrier protection; they both provided and denied means of communication. The area of confluence of the Mississippi, Tennessee, Cumberland, and Ohio rivers was a particularly vital sector, forming, if held by the Confederacy, an offensive salient into the Midwest; if it could be seized by the North, a major reentrant threatening an attack down the Mississippi towards Memphis, Vicksburg, Natchez, and New Orleans.

  The seizure of the line of the Mississippi from Memphis to New Orleans would bisect the Confederacy, separating its western states of Arkansas and Texas from the rest, thus depriving the Confederacy of its largest stock of meat on the hoof and of draught animals, horses and mules. The diminution of its territory would also be a severe blow to its international prestige and domestic self-confidence.

  The final ingredient of strength in the South’s strategic geography was the impermeability of its seaward frontiers. From Chesapeake Bay, in the north, along the coasts of the Carolinas and Georgia, round Florida, and across the shores of Alabama and Mississippi to the mouth of the great river itself below New Orleans, there were almost no points of entry that promised success to an amphibious attack. The only routes inland by railroad ran from Norfolk, Virginia; New Bern or Wilmington, North Carolina; Charleston, South Carolina; Savannah, Georgia; Jacksonville and Pensacola, Florida; Mobile, Alabama; and New Orleans. All were strongly defended and all lay far from centres of Northern naval power. Moreover, in many cases the railroad lines of which they were the termini soon petered out inland or did not connect to long-distance routes.

  The inadequacy of the Confederacy’s railroads, while further arguing for its adoption of a defensive strategy, also complicated the North’s problems of framing an offensive plan. By 1861 the United States had become the land of the railroad par excellence; the railroad was replacing waterways as the medium which bound the country together. Of the 31,000 miles existing, however, only 9,000 ran in the South, and Southern lines followed infuriatingly unstrategic routes. The North possessed several long-distance east-west routes running parallel to the northern frontier of the Confederacy and so serving as lignes de rocade for the movement of armies between the Atlantic states and the Mississippi Valley. That from Philadelphia to Pittsburgh and its branch through Columbus, Ohio, and Indianapolis to St. Louis, Missouri, might, as were the German railroads, have been built by general staff diktat, so strategic was its function. The North’s lignes de rocade were, moreover, served by north-south feeder lines, as that between Indianapolis and Louisville, Kentucky, which ran straight into the zone of operations. The pattern, laid out to serve expansion westward and to gather in and carry the agricultural produce of the Midwest to the cities of the Atlantic seaboard, had direct if unintended military utility.

  The pattern of the South’s railroads, by contrast, had been determined by the needs of its exporters, particularly cotton exporters, and so ran outwards to the sea. There was only one trans-Confederacy line, that from Richmond to Corinth, Mississippi. Otherwise the systems were largely internal to the states and scarcely interconnected. The railroads of the Carolinas and Georgia were an almost self-contained network, laid out to carry cotton to the Atlantic coast; they had only one link with Florida’s two lines and barely any with Alabama’s. The Mississippi lines likewise had been built to bring cotton down country to Mobile and New Orleans and had but the scantiest connections with Tennessee and only two spurs, served by ferry, with Arkansas. Most defectively of all, the Virginia, Tennessee, and Mississippi systems connected to those of the Carolinas and the Lower South by only a single link, from near Chattanooga in Tennessee to Atlanta, Georgia. Buried as it was deep inside the Confederacy, the Chattanooga-Atlanta link was secure as long as the perimeter of the South itself remained inviolate. It would prove a magnet to Northern armies as the war progressed, however, and, if cut, the break would divide the South in two. The strategic geography of the South was thus intrinsically fragile, in a way that that of the North was not. The North had a few vulnerable points, Washington itself the foremost; but no single offensive success by the South could disable it as a combatant power. The South, by contrast, and despite its enormous size and strong frontiers—the sea, the Mississippi, the mountains—had to be held together as a unit if it were not to be dismembered.

  Yet in the summer of 1861 it was the South’s strength rather than its vulnerability that weighed on those Northerners seeking to devise a war plan. They could not see how to begin. Lincoln, who started by expecting, wrongly, that his generals would form his mind, tentatively suggested on April 25 that the first steps were to safeguard Fortress Monroe, at the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay, to assure the safety of Washington, to blockade the Southern ports, and then attack Charleston, South Carolina. The strategic sketch revealed that at the outset he was thinking exclusively of a war to be fought in the east and of a victory to be gained by military means alone. His postmaster general, Montgomery Blair, soon afterwards suggested a military-political approach. Like some others in the Federal government, he suspected that the South was not solid for secession and that the Confederacy might be undone by undermining rebellion. In a letter to the governor of Massachusetts on May 11, he proposed the organisation of a Union Army of the South, with its own commander, staff, and troops, to be concentrated at Hampton Roads—the tip of the Virginia Peninsula—to “menace Newport and Richmond.” Its appearance, he argued, would provoke a popular revolt against the standard-bearers of Southern revolt and return Virginia to the Union—presumably, in his imagination, bringing the rest of the Confederacy with it. There were others in the North, including the president himself, who recognised the significance of pro-Union sentiment in the South; none of importance, however, shared Blair’s belief in the possibility of using it to collapse the Confederacy from within and his plan remained private to himself.

  George McClellan, a West Pointer who had returned to Federal service after a spell as a railroad executive and who early distinguished himself in the opening skirmishes for control of the borders, proposed an alternative strategy in late April 1861. His plan, like Blair’s, took account of Southern pro-Union sentiment but in more realistic fashion. Since western Virginia was solidly loyal, he suggested transporting an army of 80,000 troops, to be raised in the Midwest, across the Ohio River and marching it up the Great Kanawha Valley to capture Richmond. Alternatively, such an army was to be transported across the Ohio at Cincinnati or Louisville to capture Nashville in Tennessee. McClellan’s plan showed geopolitical understanding. The Kanawha is a major waterway of the Ohio River complex and the backbone of the region which, by popular sentiment, seceded from the Confederacy to become the state of West Virginia, a process begun in August 1861. Nevertheless, his idea was both too complex and took too little account of loyalties in the Upper South. It is most unlikely that a march from the region of the Great Kanawha Valley by an invading army could have overcome the resistance of solidly secessionist populations, supported by field armies, in either Tennessee or Virginia proper. Successful operations inside the Confederate heartland would have to await victories on its perimeter that w
ere not achieved until later in the war.

  Lincoln’s difficulty was that he had no strong, unmuddled mind to advise him and that, while he himself was wholly unmuddled, he lacked the military experience necessary to put his ideas for winning the war into action. Lincoln arrived, indeed, at the presidency almost without a personal entourage or following. He was completely an outsider in Washington, despite having sat as a congressman for Illinois, his state of residence, from 1847 to 1849. Mid-century Illinois, though by then a settled state with a growing metropolis at Chicago, was entirely agricultural, with many farms but few towns. He had been raised on a farm, in poverty, and lacked formal education. Although he passed the bar exam and practised successfully as a lawyer, his law was almost entirely self-taught and his knowledge of public affairs was acquired as a state assemblyman (1834-42) and as a captain of militia in the Black Hawk Indian War. He possessed nevertheless strong political ideas, grounded in his belief in the importance of popular self-government and developed in the speeches he made against the talented Stephen Douglas in the contest for the Senate in 1858. Lincoln, though without a good speaking voice, had remarkable powers of oratory, and his side of the Douglas-Lincoln debates, which he largely devoted to an attack on slavery as an institution, was widely reported and won him a national reputation. In the American party system, he began as a Whig; but when that historic party split over the issue of slavery, he joined, in 1854, the new Republican Party, in which, largely thanks to his reputation as a speaker, he secured in 1860 the nomination to stand as its presidential candidate. When elected, exclusively on Northern votes, he arrived in Washington without any direct knowledge of how government was administered; of the prosecution of war he had no knowledge whatsoever. Nevertheless, common sense and his powerful mind provided him with a foundation of well-judged fundamental ideas, which, soon after First Bull Run, he summarised when he wrote to Halleck to say, “I state my general idea of this war to be that we have the greater numbers and the enemy has the greater facility of concentrating forces upon points of collision (because of his interior lines); that we must fail, unless we can find some way of making our advantage an over-match for his; and that this can only be done by menacing him with superior forces at different points, at the same time; so that we can safely attack, one, or both, if he makes no change; and if he weakens one to strengthen the other, forbear to attack the strengthened one, but seize, and hold the weakened one, gaining so much.”2