The American Civil War

by John Keegan

  To turn this general idea into a practical plan of action required much thought and planning and the carrying of support in the cabinet and the higher ranks of the army. The difficulty there was that the army’s higher ranks contained few officers who had any grasp of the necessities of war, let alone experience. Winfield Scott, the general in chief, was enfeebled by age and infirmity. Among the cabinet officers, some were competent and energetic men, particularly Edwin Stanton, secretary of war from January 1862, who was extremely efficient and a great prop and support to Lincoln, though he, if anything, was hyperactive. Salmon Chase, the Treasury secretary, a public financier of exceptional ability who raised the money to fight the war without debasing the currency, was highly capable and incorruptible but running the Treasury was a full-time job, though Lincoln loaded him with many others. Blair, the postmaster general, who belonged to a leading Washington political family, was notably efficient and fulfilled many functions beyond that of supervising the Federal postal system. Gideon Welles, secretary of the navy, was excellent at his job; but naval strategy, though vitally important to the Union’s war effort, was not going to win the war on land. William Seward, secretary of state, who also acted as the cabinet’s man of reason, was the nearest thing Lincoln possessed to a chief executive. He was sensible and highly capable and had the gift of talking Lincoln out of ill-judged schemes. Yet on none of these men could the president really rely for guidance. Many of them were possessed by rivalry and several could not prevent themselves from calculating their chances in the 1864 presidential campaign. They quarrelled and intrigued and manoeuvred for political position. Lincoln had to placate and cajole to keep them sweet and effective, meanwhile having to come to his own decision about what best could be done if the Union was to be restored.

  Without dependable assistance from colleagues or soldiers, Lincoln sought guidance where it could be found. At the outset he set himself to reading books on military science, in which predictably he found little help. As it happens, however, the higher direction of war and the higher calculations in politics, at which Lincoln already excelled, ran through the same channels. It was along those lines that he proceeded. He quite quickly shed his belief, then very widely held, that the war could be ended by a single great victorious battle. Instead he came to see that the Union would have to achieve victory at many widely scattered points. He had the inspiration, however, to perceive that victories, if widely scattered in space, ought to be concentrated in time, since simultaneous defeats were very disheartening to an enemy. McClellan, who anyhow shrank from the test of the battlefield, was dilatory in his methods and allowed long intervals to elapse between inflicting blows on the enemy. Grant, by contrast, believed in “winning and moving on” to further victories. From exposure to the methods of McClellan and Grant, Lincoln learnt the vital importance of choosing the right subordinates, not simply those who could draft inspiring plans but those who also deliver results. He never learnt the importance of visiting armies in the field, from which he might have discovered a great deal. He never visited the armies in the West, as even Jefferson Davis managed to do. He did learn, and perhaps knew instinctively, the importance of war oratory. He may thus have influenced another war leader, Winston Churchill, who was undoubtedly inspired by Lincoln and who achieved much of his notoriety by his mobilization of the English language and sending it into battle, as the great American broadcaster Edward R. Murrow recognised in 1940. Churchill, like Lincoln, had great difficulty in identifying and appreciating good military subordinates. He was hampered, however, by his preconceptions about war, of which Lincoln had none, and he enjoyed war, while Lincoln and, so surprisingly, Grant detested it. Churchill, a hardened warrior who had himself shed blood, declined in his powers as leader as his war progressed. Lincoln, the military innocent, grew in stature and competence until eventually he came to dominate the war as no other individual did. At the same time, he had to deal with his generals, which in practice meant, for the first three years of the war, to tell them what to do, meanwhile having to come to his own decision about what best needed to be done if the Union was to be restored. Beyond his immediate political circle, moreover, he had to manage the wider politics of the war. Local, state, and presidential elections were all held in 1862-64 and the preservation of the Republican position in the contests required Lincoln’s constant and close supervision.

  McClellan’s plan was given attention but failed to win support. It was effectively quashed by the opposition of Winfield Scott, who objected to it on both political and practical grounds. He thought it likely to provoke anti-Union sentiment in Kentucky and western Virginia; he believed the likely costs prohibitive.

  Scott had already proposed his own scheme for the suppression of Southern rebellion, eventually to become known, at first disparagingly, as the Anaconda Plan. Called “Anaconda” after the great constrictor snake, its informing idea was to defeat the Confederacy by asphyxiation, with as little violence as possible, revealing the remarkable depth of the old warrior’s understanding of war and of his country. Scott was not a doughface, a Northerner of Southern sympathies; he was an old-fashioned patriot, personally devoted to the new president, Lincoln, anxious to avoid a breach with the South if at all possible but, if it came about, determined to mend it by the threat or use of force if that was all that sufficed. Scott’s plan advocated organising a close and efficient naval blockade of the Confederacy’s seacoasts and major ports, so as to deny Southern exporters and importers the opportunity to pursue trade and to starve the rebellious government of the imported means of making war, should the crisis come to war. The Anaconda would also cripple the South’s internal trade because, by taking the Mississippi as the principal military theatre and by closing it at its top and bottom, Cairo and New Orleans, it would interrupt the movement of goods north-south and also their distribution east-west along the great rivers’ tributaries. He had correctly identified that the Southern heartland—Virginia, the Carolinas, Louisiana, Tennessee, Georgia, Mississippi, Alabama, and the appendage of Florida—formed a territorial bloc that could be surrounded by Union forces, land-based, naval, and riverine, denied access to the outer world, and then subjected to penetrative attack—he suggested by a striking force operating along the Ohio River—into the Southern heartland.

  An element of Scott’s Anaconda Plan would eventually provide one of the means by which the North overcame the South. The plan was never, however, formally adopted as the Union’s principal strategy, and rightly not. It was too passive and attentiste in character. Scott cherished the belief, as did many other moderate Unionists, that, if given time to reflect, sufficient Southerners would repent of secession to collapse the Confederacy from within, perhaps as early as 1862. Time would tell, very little time in practice, that the Confederate idea was a great deal more robust than Northern optimists credited and that constriction alone would not bring the South to submit; only hard blows and victory in the field would restore the United States.

  Between those who hoped to bring an end to the war by giving Southerners time and those who realised that the imperative was for action there could be the making of no agreed plan. Among the activists, by contrast, there was some common ground. McClellan agreed with Scott that the Southern rivers were vital strategic avenues. Scott agreed with Lincoln that blockade would prove a vital means of weakening the South’s ability to make war. It would take time, however, to construct a cohesive and comprehensive war plan from such slender common elements. Eventually, the achievement of effective blockade, combined with offensives along the rivers into the Southern heartland, would lay the foundation for Northern victory. Its consolidation, however, would also eventually entail a railroad war, contrived to deconstruct the Southern network, and the organisation of long-distance overland campaigns inside Southern territory.

  At the outset, the need was to initiate the naval blockade, beginning at the places where the North could utilise an advantage, and to choose entry points into the South’s great
interconnected waterways, the Mississippi and its tributaries, the Ohio, Cumberland, and Tennessee rivers.

  Advantage was given to the North in initiating a blockade by its undisturbed possession of several of the great fortresses built in the early years of the republic around the Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico coasts. The Founding Fathers and their successors had sought to make the United States not only separate from the Old World but impregnable to it. That required the building of fortifications around America’s coasts to deny Europeans, particularly the British, whose navy commanded the ocean’s surface. The young republic could not afford the cost of a navy to match Britain’s. Forts were reckoned to be an alternative means of defence. It was probably an unwise decision financially. Forts are expensive. At the outset of the war the balance of coastal control was about equally divided between Union and Confederacy, though the latter, of course, had no foothold in Northern territory. The South held the coasts and harbours of Virginia, the Carolinas, Georgia, Florida, and the Gulf states, with strong points at Charleston, Savannah, and the mouth of the Mississippi, and enjoyed the use of the intracoastal waterway inside the Sea Islands of the Carolinas and Georgia, which provided a protected route for coastwise shipping and bases for blockade-running. The North, through its possession of Fortress Monroe, controlled Chesapeake Bay and dominated Norfolk; it also had important naval outposts off Florida and, at Fort Pickens, in the Gulf. Once the plan to impose a tight blockade became a campaign, in 1862-63, the dots on the map would be joined up and further important points seized. The geography of the coastal war was simple and the steps to be followed self-evident. Entry into the great Southern river system, by contrast, was by no means dictated by the geography, which was highly complex. The first steps would be tentative and the essential way forward identified only by trial and error.

  A particular problem for Northern soldiers seeking to operate inside Southern territory was their ignorance of its terrain and the lack of accurate maps, often of any maps at all. North America, even by the mid-nineteenth century, was poorly surveyed and had not been surveyed systematically as, say, Britain and its Indian empire had been. The federal government maintained a coast survey, the navy a Hydrographic Office, and the army a Corps of Topographical Engineers to map areas of importance inside the United States. The U.S. Post Office also prepared route maps, showing post office towns and distances between them, while the Department of the Interior ran a Pacific Wagon Road Office, which recorded rail routes, as did, very accurately, the railroad companies themselves.3 The results of their work, however, were piecemeal, as was that of state and county land surveyors, who delineated public and private landholdings and claims for settlement. Their maps were accurate, as far as they went. What lacked was an overarching survey, reconciling all observation and measurement inside a single system. That would have required a continent-wide triangulation, based on accurate measurement from an agreed set of intervisible points of prominence. The British had completed such a triangulation of India, the Great Survey of India, between 1800 and 1830, but it had been an enormous labour made possible only because the whole of India was settled and centrally administered. Such conditions did not apply in the United States, much of whose territory was still unexplored in 1861.

  The need for comprehensive survey had been recognised as early as 1785 with the passage of the Land Ordinance, which required public land offered for private sale to be divided into square-mile lots laid out along an east-west baseline and a north-south meridian. Two factors militated against this leading to the production of accurate maps. The first was that squatters staked out claims first and awaited survey later. The second was that, while the delineation of latitude could be easily fixed by astronomical observation, that of longitude, which required triangulation, could not. As a result, comprehensive maps of the United States, of which several existed by 1861, were patchworks of survey which did not coincide.

  Moreover, worthless land—swamp, mountain, upland, and areas of aridity, of which there was a great deal in the United States—did not merit survey; nor did worked-out areas of early settlement, abandoned by cultivators, of which there was already a surprising amount by 1861, notably the Wilderness of northern Virginia, scene of one of Grant’s most difficult campaigns in 1864. The inadequacy of available maps infuriated and tantalised Civil War generals. Even Confederate generals, operating inside their own territory, could express frustration at the lack of maps showing ways through. Northern generals, usually campaigning inside Confederate territory, found fault with everything. Often they had no maps at all or had to make do with outdated maps bought in bookstores which did not show heights or gradients—contouring was a concept few American mapmakers had yet adopted—or stopped at county boundaries, so failing to depict the continuation of essential roads onto the next sheet. Other faults were lack of differentiation between strong and weak bridges, deep and shallow fords, and paved and unpaved roads, in each case information essential to the movement of armies. Inexplicable variation of place-names also misled. “Cold Harbor, Virginia, was sometimes called Coal Harbor and there was also a New Cold Harbor and a ‘burned’ Cold Harbor. Burned Cold Harbor was known by the locals as Old Cold Harbor. Many roads were known by one of two names: the Market or River Road; the Williamsburg or Seven Mile Road; the Quaker or Willis Church Road. To add to the confusion, there were sometimes other nearby roads with the same or similar names that ran in completely different directions.” It would have been little consolation to Union generals, blundering about inside Confederate territory, to know that their opponents were often equally blind. Brigadier General Richard Taylor, son of former president Zachary Taylor, complained that “the Confederate commanders knew no more about the topography of the country than they did about Central Africa.” Recalling the campaign in northern Virginia, he went on, “Here was a limited district, the whole of it within a day’s march of the city of Richmond, capital of Virginia, and the Confederacy … and yet we were profoundly ignorant of the country, were without maps, sketches, or proper guides, and nearly as helpless as if we had been transferred to the banks of the Lualaba.”4

  Yet the course, flow, depth, and interconnection of rivers would become, during the western campaign of 1862-63, the most essential of all information sought by Union commanders. President Jefferson, who sponsored the Lewis and Clark transcontinental expedition to plot a route to the Pacific in 1804, had been keenly aware of the need to understand the riverine system of the United States. In 1809 he had speculated if “a river called Oregon interlocked with the Missouri.” He probably meant what is today called the Columbia and Snake rivers, which do not “interlock” with the Missouri, but flow into the Pacific. The Missouri, however, does “interlock” with a whole network of waterways, the Mississippi, Ohio, Cumberland, and Tennessee, and their numerous tributaries, which even today dominate the human and economic geography of the entire United States, and in 1861, because of the primacy of steamboat transport and the termination of the railroads on the Mississippi’s eastern bank, provided the most important arteries of strategic movement within the American theatre of war.

  The difficulties of prosecuting the war west of the Mississippi did not derive principally from lack of cartographic information but from the disproportion of space to force. In Arkansas, New Mexico, and adjacent territories neither side had troops enough to form garrisons at key points, let alone stage decisive battles. Yet both had ambitions to control the Far West. To the Union it was national territory not to be surrendered to rebel hands. To the Confederacy it was a potential addition to their new country’s extent which would bring prestige and open the promise of a way to the Pacific coast.

  Supply was the crux of campaigning west of the Mississippi. The Union solved its problems, the Confederates did not, hence the Union’s ability to hold on to the distant states and the Confederacy’s failure. The whole of the campaign in the West, however, from the capture of Forts Henry and Donelson to the Chattanooga campaign of 1863, was a s
trategic anomaly, since the theatre of operations was so far from the main centre of power, Union and Confederate alike, that either side might have lost altogether the ability to sustain its war effort there. What the commanders on both sides had been taught at West Point should have deterred any one of them from the inclination to wage so awkward a campaign.

  West Point orthodoxy was acquired from the teachings of the Swiss Napoleonic theorist Henri de Jomini. Jomini taught, among other things, the necessity of obedience to geometric rules, notably that a line of operations should lie at right angles to the base from which it was sustained. In that respect the war in northern Virginia was strictly Jominian. Both sides were squared-up to each other across the plain of the Chesapeake waterway and both concentrated their efforts at driving down it. There was, except for the recurrent effort to seize the Shenandoah Valley, no divergence from that narrow battleground. In the West, by contrast, it was difficult to define where, if at all, the base of operations lay. The axis of offensive ran, for the North, down the Mississippi, thereby determining that the South’s defensive efforts must run up and along it. Neither side, however, had a firm base, as defined by major cities or economic centres, running at right angles across the line of operations. Indeed, any attempt to delineate the geometry of the war in the West on a map would produce a cat’s cradle of deviations and crisscrossing lines and arrows. For the South, state boundaries, particularly those of Tennessee, imposed a certain symmetry. For the North, however, the whole theatre of the western war defied Jomini in any form. It lay in detachment from the main mass of Northern territory, and communication could be maintained only by following wide loops of river or rail lines. Indeed once the North’s campaign left the Mississippi Valley, as it did in 1863, and began to burrow eastward, and then northward, into the Southern heartland, all Jominian principle was lost and the picture of the campaign could be kept in focus only within a general’s mental perception, as it was so tenaciously first by Grant and then by Sherman. In a sense the North’s ability to wage the war in the West was as much a triumph of the imagination as it was of logistics.