The American Civil War

by John Keegan

  The Confederate cabinet in Montgomery understood at once the dilemma in which Lincoln was placing the South but, urged on by firebrands, decided to be caught all the same. Beauregard was ordered by Jefferson Davis to fire on Sumter before the relief arrived. He did so, having issued a formal call to surrender, which Anderson dismissed. Beauregard gave orders for the bombardment to begin at 4:30 a.m. on April 12, 1861; there was competition to fire the first shot. Thirty-three hours later, after 3,340 further shots had landed, the garrison surrendered. They had fired a thousand shots in reply but were battered and worn out—though, miraculously, neither side had suffered any fatal casualty. A mule was the only fatality. Anderson and his garrison were allowed to withdraw by ship and make their way to the North. None was made prisoner. It was as if the South still did not wish to formalise the opening of a war.

  Yet the fall of Sumter brought war all the same. In the North it prompted President Lincoln to issue a call for the loyal states’ militia to be mobilised, to the strength of 75,000. Such was the enthusiasm in some states that their quotas were quickly exceeded. In the South the effect of Sumter was to propel more of the militants into secession and to polarise public opinion. By April, eight Southern states still remained in the Union. Virginia was electrified by the news of Fort Sumter’s fall and Lincoln’s mobilisation. On April 17 a convention assembled to consider Virginia’s position and voted for secession, 88 to 55. The state government had already sent its militia to seize the federal arms factory at Harpers Ferry and the naval dockyard at Norfolk. Secession was ratified by popular vote on May 23 by a huge majority, two days after the state government’s offer of Richmond as a capital city for the Confederacy had been accepted by the Confederate government in Montgomery, Alabama. Among the Virginians agreeing to take service under the new flag of stars and bars was Robert E. Lee, who had been offered but rejected appointment as commander of the Union army by General in Chief Winfield Scott. Lee affirmed that he had to go with his state.

  The thinly populated state of Arkansas, which had a sizable anti-secession party drawn from the non-slave Ozark Mountains, voted for secession on May 6. North Carolina’s convention, elected on May 13, unanimously voted for secession on May 20. Though one of the most northerly of the Upper South states, North Carolina was curiously detached from the rest of the Confederacy; its borders were difficult for Union troops to approach and its coastline was narrow and inaccessible. It would not suffer Northern invasion until right at the end of the war. Tennessee did not formally secede but passed a declaration of independence on June 8. Its eastern counties, where slave owners were few, voted heavily against secession. Lincoln was to make the liberation of Tennessee loyalists from the secessionists one of his principal war aims. Maryland and Delaware, geographically part of the North though heavily Southern by temperament, did not secede despite strong efforts by their pro-secession minorities. In Delaware they were restrained by the movement of federal troops, making their way to Washington. Maryland, also coerced by federal force, ultimately failed to find the nerve to secede, its legislature refusing to vote for secession or to call a convention to do so. Later, after the Confederate victory of First Bull Run, the secessionist legislators would summon up courage to threaten the Union again, but their bravado was quickly dissipated by arrest and imprisonment.

  Kentucky, a border state whose population almost equally divided for North and South, also attempted to evade the issue by a declaration of neutrality. Lincoln cannily declined to force the point and did not attempt coercion. An out-of-term election held in June returned a large pro-Union majority to Congress, after which, as the strength of loyalist militias within the state grew, it came over to the Union, all the more readily after the Confederacy made the mistake of trying to seize the state by force. Nevertheless, many Kentuckians left home to join Confederate units, in a proportion of two to every three joining the Union army. Its neighbouring state of Missouri, also sharply divided, had a strongly Confederate governor who set out to take his state into the Confederacy with the active support of many of its citizens. He was frustrated by the initiative of the local Federal commander, Captain Nathaniel Lyon. Although the beginnings of a vicious internal guerrilla war were already raging in Missouri, Lyon seized the stores of arms in St. Louis, took command of the local pro-Union militia, and overcame their pro-Southern opponents. That was not the end of the trouble. The state legislature left for the Arkansas border, where it set up as a government in exile and was eventually recognised as legitimate by the Confederates, which admitted Missouri as a Confederate state. Its functions at home were assumed by the convention assembled to decide for or against secession, which had a strong Unionist majority. Missouri was thus represented in both wartime governments during the war. The Unionists of Tennessee, who dominated the state’s eastern counties, also attempted to secede but, lacking the support of Union troops on the ground, failed in the attempt. Tennessee therefore counted as a Confederate state, although 30,000 of its sons fought in the Union army.

  Thus, by May 1861, a month of hiatus, the lines of division between North and South had been drawn. Would they become lines of battle? So far there had been little blood shed, none at Sumter, a sprinkling only in skirmishing and rioting. Young men were gathering, however, putting on uniforms, drilling, learning to march in formation, to stand in ranks, to handle muskets and rifles. North America was not yet a continent organised for war but its mood was increasingly warlike, and newspaper editors and politicians were demanding action. The two capitals, Washington and Richmond, lay only a hundred miles apart, little more than two days’ march. “On to Richmond,” which had begun as a newspaper slogan, was becoming a popular catchphrase in the North. Virginians, residents of the Confederacy’s frontline state, were alert for the tramp of Northern feet. The outskirts of Washington were already being crisscrossed with defensive earthworks. The Potomac River had become an important military obstacle. If war came, where would it strike? Secession had not only divided one of the largest countries in the world, it had also created a gigantic theatre of war, confronting both combatants, if they fell to fighting, with one of the most complex military problems ever to face war-making governments. Leaders and soldiers on both sides were already puzzling not only how but where to take the armies that were forming in the search for victory.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Improvised Armies

  AMERICA WAS NOT prepared for war, any war, let alone a great internal war. It had almost no soldiers. The Founding Fathers of the United States, in their rejection of all that was bad about the Old World, had hoped to dispense with a standing army altogether, just as the parliamentarians who restored Charles II to the throne after England’s Civil War had hoped also. Domestic rebellion—trivial in both cases but alarming while it lasted—prompted them to reconsider. As a precaution against recurrence, the English Parliament kept in being a few of the existing regiments, Cromwellian or royal; the American Congress preserved some units of Washington’s army. In 1802 it established a military academy at West Point to officer them. West Point’s graduates, trained as engineers, were also expected to supervise the construction of the new nation’s public works, building bridges, dams, and harbours, for many of which the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers remains responsible to this day.

  Yet West Point classes were so tiny, yielding sometimes only a dozen trained officers a year to the army before 1861, and the other sources of officer recruitment were so haphazard—service in one of the nation’s foreign or internal wars—the War of 1812, the Seminole War, the Creek War—that there was no reserve of experienced, professional military leaders on which to draw when the Civil War came in 1861. Things were quite different in Europe, where “military families” flourished, sending some of their sons into particular regiments for some of their youth as a matter of course, and where the national armies inducted young men for limited periods of service as reserve officers. It is true that America possessed several families with military traditions, su
ch as the Lees of Virginia; but they were too small and isolated to found military dynasties, as existed elsewhere in the world. As a substitute in the absence of an officer class, North and South in 1861 turned to the middle class, to lawyers, teachers, and businessmen, often those with political experience. Such men had standing in their communities. Standing in the community did not, however, necessarily translate into ability as a military leader, particularly not of military innocents. All too often the big man of a locality proved to lack the power of command, or even soldierly common sense.

  The United States’ tiny army had successfully defended the republic against British invaders during the War of 1812; in 1846 it achieved a complete victory over the army of Mexico, harvesting as a consequence of the ensuing peace an enormous addition to the national territory in the southwest, which would become the states of Texas, Utah, New Mexico, Nevada, Arizona, and California. The Mexican War brought an expansion of army strength. Afterwards it dwindled again, so that in 1861 it numbered only 16,000, deployed for the most part in fortified posts in Indian territory, west of the Mississippi, or in the great federal fortresses that guarded the nation’s coasts, from Boston harbour to the bay of San Francisco.

  The military philosophy of the United States was that, if required, any large number of soldiers should be supplied by the militia, a body authorised by the Second Amendment to the Constitution. In his 1829 inaugural address, President Andrew Jackson had referred to “a million of armed freemen, possessed of the means of war,” as the republic’s chief means of defence. The militia was important in American history. A military system brought from England by the early colonists, it required the able-bodied to muster for service when called upon to do so by the local authority. At the outset that meant the individual colony, and it was upon the colonies’ militias that the eighteenth-century rebellion against the Crown had been organised. In the aftermath of independence, however, the militias had withered away. In some of the states, successors to the colonies, they continued to turn out and to train; in the majority they subsided into paper organisations.

  They might have disappeared altogether—as the militia did in England after the Napoleonic Wars, surviving at best as a source of recruits for the regular army—had not America become infected after 1859 by the fashion for “volunteering” that swept England in that year. An entirely unfounded fear of French invasion impelled the civilian British in 1859 to form units of “rifle volunteers,” encouraged by publicists, who included Alfred, Lord Tennyson. His poem “Form, Riflemen, Form” was a major motivation of the rifle movement. The volunteering impulse spread to the United States and took root particularly in the South, already infected by the urge to take arms against the spectre of Northern aggression. By 1861 many volunteer rifle corps, and also artillery units, had appeared in the South, adopting gallant designations—the Palmetto Guard of South Carolina, the Lexington Rifles of Kentucky (which went south with its first commander, General Simon Bolivar Buckner), the North Carolina Sharpshooters, the Washington Artillery of New Orleans—and flamboyant uniforms to match the regimental titles. “Cadet gray”—worn at West Point—was the preferred Southern colour; but many Southern volunteers wore Union blue or, particularly favoured, varieties of French uniform; in 1861 Napoleon III’s army, recently victorious against the Austrians, was the leading military power in the world. The French style, short jacket and baggy trousers, was the favoured outfit of most Southern units at the start of the war.

  Some Southern units went further, to adopt Zouave costume, modelled on the dress which the French army had borrowed from their tribal enemies during the conquest of Algeria after 1830. The Zouaves’ baggy red trousers and embroidered waistcoats made for a very dramatic appearance, which proved even more popular in the North than the South. Among Northern Zouave units were numbered the New York Fire Zouaves, formed from members of the New York Fire Brigade and led by Elmer Ellsworth, a friend of Abraham Lincoln’s. A Southern equivalent was the Louisiana Zouaves, known after their commanding officer as Wheat’s Tigers. Other borrowings from contemporary European military fashion included the feathered hats of various “Garibaldi” regiments and, surprisingly, the tailcoats and towering bearskins of such units as the 40th Massachusetts, which mimicked the uniform of the City of London’s volunteer regiment, the Honourable Artillery Company.

  The well-dressed among the would-be soldiers of 1860-61 were the minority. Surprisingly few volunteer units, on both sides, adopted anything resembling the uniforms of their British rifle volunteer equivalents, who turned themselves out in the tweed shooting-suits of contemporary country gentlemen, with stylish results. The overwhelming effect achieved, North and South, once the first finery was outworn, was one of drabness—dull colours, Northern blue, Southern gray, but more often the “butternut” of homespun dyes, and uniformly shapeless cut. The armies of the Civil War were the worst tailored of any great conflict, and the effect was heightened by the almost universal abandonment of shaving. Beards were both military and modern, adopted in Britain in imitation of the returning veterans of the Crimean War, who had been excused from shaving during the bitter winters outside Sebastopol in 1855-56. The British fashion for beards spread to America, where it took such hold that by 1861 scarcely any mature man remained clean-shaven. All leading generals of the war—Ambrose Burnside, Nathan Bedford Forrest, U. S. Grant, A. P. Hill, John Bell Hood, Stonewall Jackson, E. Kirby Smith, Lee, Irvin McDowell, George Meade, John Pope, William Rosecrans, William Sherman, and Jeb Stuart—cultivated a full set of whiskers; Beauregard and McClellan wore luxuriant moustaches and small “Napoleons;” Burnside invented a style of “sideburns,” or sideboards, that perpetuates his name to this day. However worn, and it was usually worn long enough to conceal both mouth and chin, facial hair gave almost all but the youngest Civil War soldiers a sombre, preacherish look, perhaps appropriate to men who were fighting for an idea.

  The enthusiasm for volunteering, to supplement the legal requirement to maintain a militia, varied in intensity from state to state. On the eve of the war, only a handful of states maintained efficient militias. They included, in the North, Massachusetts, with 5,000 active militiamen, and New York, with 19,000, and in the South, Georgia, which had many volunteer and militia companies, and South Carolina, heartland of secession, with numbers of well-trained and well-equipped volunteer companies. Kentucky, a bitterly divided state, had 73 State Guard companies, of Southern sympathy, and 66 Home Guard companies sympathetic to the North. Ohio had 30 companies, Vermont 22, Wisconsin 1,993 militiamen, Maine 35 companies, all available to the Federal government. Virginia had 8 militia regiments, all ready to declare for the South, and Mississippi had 3,927 volunteers, belonging to 78 companies, all of which would go south. Many states, including several located in Northern and Southern heartland territory, were quite unorganised for war, including Alabama and North Carolina (South) and Connecticut, Illinois, Indiana, New Hampshire, and New Jersey (North). Kansas was full of armed men who had been fighting the Civil War before it began but were unorganised. Texas had its own eccentric military organisation, the Texas Rangers, largely dedicated to protecting isolated settlers.

  Despite the lack of trained men, shortage of manpower was not to prove a problem to either side at the outset of the war. Such was the enthusiasm for cause—the Union or states’ rights—that regiments could be formed as quickly as weapons could be found to arm them or officers to lead, indeed without either necessity in many cases. America in 1861 was a populous country, and growing, partly thanks to immigration, partly to the fertility of its well-fed population. Size of population, and population growth, favoured the North. The census of 1860 enumerated a total population of approximately thirty million: 20,275,000 whites in the North and 5,500,000 in the South; blacks in the North added 430,000, in the South 3,654,000. Almost all Southern blacks were enslaved; so were some Northern blacks, in the District of Columbia itself and in the border states of Tennessee, Delaware, Maryland, and Missouri. Blacks
did not count in the military population (until 1863, when Lincoln’s Emancipation Act officially authorised their enlistment, as unofficially they had been enlisted since the previous year). The white population of military age—men under thirty, though many older men joined—was about 2,500,000 in the North, 900,000 in the South.