The industrial revolution’s factories, railroads, steamboats, and telegraphs also revolutionized warfare. Northern and southern leaders made the most of mass production, rapid transportation, and near-instantaneous communications. Industrialization favored the strategic offensive and the tactical defense.16
The South had several crucial advantages that initially offset much of the hard power that the North amassed. First, strategically the southerners were fighting on the defensive. They could more easily take advantage of interior lines to transfer troops, provisions, munitions, and ordnance from one front to another. They could chose and fortify sites that Union armies would have to either assault, besiege, or bypass at their peril. Magnifying this strategic advantage was the South’s vast land area of 750,000 square miles. Somehow Union armies had to invade and either secure or devastate the South’s key regions. The North faced the “strategic consumption dilemma,” whereby the farther an army advanced, the more troops it had to detach to guard lengthening and vulnerable supply lines. As rebel armies withdrew, they got closer to their own supplies and absorbed garrisons along the way. For the war’s first three years, this dilemma diluted much of the North’s manpower and logistical advantage.
War and supply are inseparable. Logistics may not determine strategy but certainly limits its possibilities. Logistics is all about getting enough essential resources for war to those who fight it. For the industrialized North, producing enough bullets and beans was not difficult. Getting all that to the front, however, was a Herculean, and at times Sisyphean, labor. Railroads, steamboats, and wagons were all vital links in the transportation system. Each had its own vulnerabilities. Raiders could tear up train tracks. Fortifications, obstructions, and low water could halt steamboats. Sooner or later all the provisions and munitions conveyed by trains or boats were unloaded and transferred to wagons.
Wagons drawn by draft animals posed their own problems. Hours each day were consumed feeding and watering and hitching and unhitching the beasts. Horses, mules, and oxen differ in how much energy they can exert each day to pull their wagons, and that of course varies with the weight of the load, grade of the road, and miles of journey. Generally a draft animal pulling a full load can go only two-thirds as far as a man marching with a full pack, including the eating, sleeping, resting, and preparation times for each. Forage was the biggest drawback to draft animals and cavalry mounts. Even during the lush summer months, animals will soon eat and trample grassy fields into muddy or dusty earth; the more grazing animals, the quicker the destruction. Winter magnifies the forage problem. Enough hay and oats must be harvested across the country in the preceding late summer, stored, then shipped for half the year to the mouths of hundreds of thousands of draft animals and cavalry horses.
A terrible legacy haunted the North and South alike. Tactics and technology are inseparable, with the latter determining the former. During the Civil War there was a huge disconnect in the minds of most professional officers between their previous training and experiences and the current conflict. An entire generation of West Point graduates had studied Napoleon’s campaigns, then fought in the Mexican War. What they learned was to maneuver, pin down the enemy, then crush them with massive attacks. This formula’s first two elements were and remain essential to victory. Technology, however, rendered the third element obsolete. The brilliant victories of Napoleon and Winfield Scott were won in an age of inaccurate, short-range muskets; massed troops could smash through an enemy’s line, often not so much because of the musket fire but as the defenders fled before the glint of massed bayonets rushing toward them. The Civil War was fought with rifles with accurate killing ranges of several hundred yards, which thus made any assault all but suicidal. The advantage shifted to defenders, especially if they leveled their rifles at the enemy from behind a breastwork or within a trench. During the war, defenders defeated seven of eight attacks.
Tragically, the older mindset trapped most officers despite the repeated, blood-soaked lessons of failed attacks. Usually in the heat of battle but sometimes from cold miscalculation, a general ordered a massed charge that experience should have warned would have only one result—mass slaughter. Even the two greatest respective generals of the North and South were responsible for such debacles—Grant at Spotsylvania and Cold Harbor, and Lee at Malvern Hill and Cemetery Ridge. This was partly because frontal assaults occasionally worked, as did Grant’s at Missionary Ridge or Lee’s at Gaines’s Mill and Chancellorsville.
The U.S. Navy made two vital contributions to the American victory by blockading rebel ports and conveying armies down rebel rivers.17 These strategies were essential parts of the strategy known as the Anaconda Plan, devised by Gen. Winfield Scott in the war’s first month.
Navy Secretary Gideon Welles brilliantly implemented the blockade.18 By one count, the U.S. Navy captured 1,149 and burned 355 enemy merchant vessels for a total of 1,504. Impressive as this seems, perhaps ten times more ships slipped through the blockade. At Wilmington, for instance, of 2,054 attempts to run the blockade during the Civil War, 1,735, or 84 percent, succeeded. Nonetheless, the blockade steadily cut off more crucial imports like munitions, rifles, cannons, and machinery and prevented crucial exports like cotton to pay for all this.19
More important for the South’s conquest than the blockade was the navy’s domination of the South’s navigable rivers. With flotillas of transports protected by iron-clad gunboats developed by the brilliant engineer James Eads, Union forces could move swiftly and mostly safely deep into enemy territory via the Mississippi, Cumberland, Tennessee, James, and Red Rivers. At a certain point, of course, armies had to disembark to march and fight. But the strategic attrition of forces hived off to protect the supply lines of river-borne armies was a fraction of those supplied by railroads; the more river miles an army wove into its supply line, the fewer troops were needed to protect it. In contrast, the longer a supply line ran along railroads, the more troops it consumed for its protection and the more vulnerable it was to disruption.
The Union equaled or exceeded the Confederacy in every element of the art of war except three—large-scale raids, cavalry commanders, and guerrillas. During the war, rebel infantry generals like Kirby Smith and Earl Van Dorn and cavalry generals like Nathan Bedford Forrest, J. E. B. Stuart, John Hunt Morgan, Joe Wheeler, Wade Hampton, and John Mosby conducted devastating raids deep into the enemy’s rear. Of these generals Forrest was by far the greatest because he was just as deft in commanding large bodies of infantry as he was cavalry and he excelled at both strategy and tactics.
The rifle eliminated the crucial role that cavalry could play on battlefields during earlier eras of warfare. Volleys of massed rifle fire could decimate a cavalry charge hundreds of yards away. Each side understood this and kept their horsemen on the periphery of any large-scale battle. It was the Confederates, however, who initially understood the vital strategic role that cavalry could play. Thousands of horsemen riding fast and far could raid behind enemy lines to destroy railroad tracks, wagon trains, and supply depots. The most devastating raids brought Union offensives to a dead halt, like Buell’s into eastern Tennessee, Grant’s into northern Mississippi, and Banks’s into northwestern Louisiana. It took years for the North to narrow the gap with the South’s initial vast advantage in cavalry commanders. Eventually Phil Sheridan proved to be nearly as able and bold a general as Forrest, while Benjamin Grierson, George Armstrong Custer, and Wesley Merritt were excellent cavalry commanders.
Guerrilla tactics were exclusively a Confederate way of war because nearly all of the war was fought in the South. Guerrillas lived behind enemy lines, often hiding in plain sight wearing civilian clothes and performing civilian tasks. They anxiously awaited word from their leaders to gather for raids in which they usually masked themselves by night and at times by wearing blue uniforms. They would strike to destroy lives and supplies, then disperse to their homes or hidden camps. Sherman vividly described guerrilla warfare as a situation in which “a
rmies pass across . . . the land, the war closes in behind and leaves the same enemy behind,” where “every house is a nest of secret, bitter enemies.”20 The Confederacy made guerrilla warfare an official part of its grand strategy with its Partisan Ranger Act of June 28, 1862, which empowered the government to issue commissions to guerrilla leaders and integrate them within the Confederate command structure.
Terrorism is the threat or use of destruction of the lives and property of noncombatants. This definition might appear easy enough to apply to history. The trouble in doing so is that politics and prejudices often distort the application. As the saying goes, one man’s terrorist is another’s freedom fighter. Through most northern eyes, terrorism was exclusively a rebel strategy, most notoriously wielded by such cold-blooded murderers as “Bloody Bill” Anderson, William Quantrill, and Jesse James, who usually wore no uniforms and took no prisoners. Confederate terrorism provoked more terrorism. In Missouri, Union general Clinton Fisk explained the pathology: “There is scarcely a citizen in the county but wants to kill someone of his neighbors for fear that said neighbor may kill him.”21 The worst Confederate atrocity was the murder of 181 unarmed men and boys and the looting and burning of Lawrence, Kansas, on August 23, 1863.
The American government faced similar political, strategic, and moral dilemmas in combating Confederate guerrillas as it has in more recent wars. Guerrillas hide among either a sympathetic or an intimidated population. How does the army find and destroy them without destroying the lives and property of the broader population in which they shelter, and thus provoking more people to join their ranks? The obvious strategy is to separate the guerrillas from the people. To this end, Gen. Henry Halleck issued two orders in March 1862. The first required all civilians to take an oath of allegiance to the United States. The second warned that “every man who enlists in a . . . guerrilla band . . . will not, if captured, be treated as ordinary prisoners of war, but will be hung as robbers and murderers.” Attorney General Edward Bates followed up Halleck’s decree by announcing that any guerrillas captured without uniforms would be summarily shot.22 On August 25, 1863, Gen. Thomas Ewing, who commanded a military district headquartered in Kansas City, tried to suppress guerrillas by ordering all civilians to evacuate their homes in three adjacent counties. Just how much such measures reduced or multiplied the guerrilla ranks is impossible to determine.
To most southern eyes the deliberate destruction of homes, barns, fields, livestock, and railroads by Sherman’s army in Georgia and the Carolinas or Sheridan’s army in the Shenandoah Valley constituted terrorism. Those who wage or think about total war would reply that destroying the enemy’s capacity to fight is justified not only on practical but on ethical grounds. The more devastating the destruction, the sooner the enemy surrenders, and this saves lives, treasure, and property over the long run.
An obviously essential element of war is mobilizing enough people and things both at and behind the lines to win. The North surpassed the South by virtually every measure of hard power. First of all, the U.S. federal government was up and running, while the Confederates had to build and finance a government from nothing. With a population of 22,338,989, the North had twice as many people as the South’s 9,103,332, of whom 5,449,462 were whites, 3,521,110 were slaves, and 132,760 were free blacks. The North had a five to two advantage in men eligible for military service. Although the Confederacy mobilized enough troops to stave off defeat for four years, it suffered an irremediable deficiency in a key element of power—the U.S. Navy numbered eighty-two warships when the war began; the South would have to build a navy from scratch. The North’s economic lead was even more formidable, with 110,000 factories employing 1.1 million workers compared to the South’s 18,000 factories employing 110,000 workers. Many factors explain this gap, but Yankee ingenuity in innovation and enterprise was critical—New Englanders accounted for 93 percent of the patents registered from 1790 to 1860. The North’s 21,973 miles of railroad were more than twice the extent of the South’s 9,283 miles. There were eight hundred thousand draft animals in the North and only three hundred thousand in the South. As for financial power, the North accounted for 79 percent of the nation’s financial markets and 88 percent of the circulating money. The United States gained as well as lost states during the Civil War. Kansas was admitted on January 29, 1861, West Virginia on July 23, 1863, and Nevada on October 31, 1864. Each of these states supplied both troops to the Union and votes mostly to Republicans.23
Soft power animates hard power. Morale is a key element of soft power. Of the many forces that shape morale, perhaps the most vital is the belief that one’s cause is just and thus worth the greatest sacrifices. The “rally around the war flag effect” that initially brings a nation together after the first shots are fired will sooner or later dissipate. Crucial to the art of power in war is sustaining the initial burst of patriotism, especially if the toll of death and defeat soars. Lincoln understood that and did what he could to mobilize and sustain the North’s spirits. Ideally this was as much a bottom-up as a top-down process.24
Eventually the Union army raised 2,213,363 troops, of whom nine of ten were volunteers.25 In the first year, most men joined motivated solely by patriotism. With time the evident horrors of war, with lengthening casualty lists and countless amputees returning from the front, dulled the ardor of ever more men, forcing federal and state governments to offer a more prosaic reason to join the ranks than mere love of country. State enlistment bonuses ranged from $600 to $1,000. In October 1863 Washington offered a $300 bonus.
Unfortunately, the substitution fees and volunteer bonuses encouraged countless acts of “bounty jumping,” or joining and pocketing the money, deserting, joining a different regiment and pocketing more money, deserting, and so on. Regardless of whether they enlisted once or more times, obviously the temptation to take the money grew the poorer one was. Of the two million men who served in the Union army and navy, half a million, or one in four, were immigrants. This is hardly surprising considering that many immigrants were young, single men who stepped ashore friendless and all but penniless.
As genuine enlistments dwindled, Washington had no choice but to institute a draft. Congress passed and Lincoln signed the Militia Law on July 17, 1862. This law rendered all able-bodied men from eighteen to forty-five years of age liable for federal service of nine months. Each state had to supply a quota of troops proportional to its population. On August 4, 1862, Lincoln issued just such a call and by the year’s end was able to raise eighty-eight thousand nine-month militia atop the three hundred thousand three-year volunteers he had earlier called for. But nine-month draftees were of little military use. They were no sooner mustered, equipped, trained, and dispatched to distant fronts than their enlistments expired and they dispersed to their homes. To remedy this deficiency, Lincoln got Congress to pass the Enrollment Act of March 6, 1863. The bill required all able-bodied men from twenty to forty-five years of age to register for the draft; those drafted had to either serve or find a substitute.
In all, the government issued four drafts between March 1863 and the war’s end. Two men dodged the draft for every man who ended up serving. Of 776,000 who received notice, 161,000 went into hiding, 315,000 got doctors to certify that they were ineligible, and 87,000 paid the $300 fine. Of the 170,000 men who joined the ranks, only 50,000 were actually draftees, while 120,000 were substitutes found by those whose names were called.26
If patriotism, duty, and money explain why men served either willingly or fatalistically, those who dodged the draft did so for more diverse reasons. Most naturally feared being killed or maimed. Many had no desire to kill or maim others. Some sympathized with the South. Some opposed the idea of fighting for abolition. Some were genuine pacifists. Some insisted that the poor were fighting for the interests of the rich and that this was wrong. Some asserted two or more of these reasons.
Whether a man volunteered or was drafted, he most likely shared a similar background with most other men i
n the ranks. As with all wars, the complaint that the Civil War was “a rich man’s war, poor man’s fight” is irrefutable. A U.S. Sanitary Commission survey found that 47.5 percent of all soldiers were farmers and farm laborers, 25.1 percent were skilled laborers, and 15.9 percent were unskilled laborers, while only 5.1 percent were clerks or businessmen and 3.2 percent were professionals; 3.2 percent were of miscellaneous or unknown background.27
Every strategic question is also a moral question. For instance, the Union faced a dilemma over what to do about prisoners of war. Feeding and guarding them was expensive; paroling them was deadly if they broke their promise and rejoined the rebel ranks. The dangers of a parole policy became evident within months after July 1863, when Grant and Banks took the oath from, respectively, thirty thousand rebels at Vicksburg and seven thousand at Port Hudson. Rather than go and stay home until they were officially exchanged, many reenlisted. Grant ended up recapturing at Chattanooga some of those who violated their oath. A formal exchange was just as problematic. Grant pointed out that the Union’s better-treated rebel captives would be released “hale, hearty, and well-fed” and thus able to “become active soldiers against us at once,” while Union troops freed from dismal conditions in southern camps would be “half-starved, sick, and emaciated” and thus be unable to fight again. Actually the death rates for prisoners were similar, with 30,128, or 15.5 percent, of 194,743 Union troops dying in southern camps, and 25,976, or 12.1 percent, of 214,865 rebels dying in northern camps.28
Slavery was the only clear Confederate hard-power advantage. Slaves sowed and reaped crops, hauled supplies, and built fortifications. Lincoln eventually devised a strategy that depleted this advantage and transformed it into a source of Union power. But in doing so he faced a dilemma.
The Age of Lincoln and the Art of American Power, 1848-1876 Page 35
