The American Civil War

by John Keegan

  The character of the “provisional” army was thenceforth fixed. Men in its higher ranks held Confederate commissions as general officers, though usually also in the militias of their states. The rank and file, and their regimental officers up to the rank of colonel, belonged to the state militia or wartime volunteer organisations, a situation almost exactly paralleled in the North. After April 16, 1862, however, when the Confederate Conscription Act was passed, all fit white males between the ages of eighteen and thirty-five were compulsorily enlisted; the age limits were extended to seventeen and fifty in February 1864, though the older and younger were liable only for state defence. Illogically, soldiers continued to be enlisted in state regiments, with state names and numbers, though collectively they formed a single Confederate army. Yet the power of state governors persisted. Conscription was unpopular in the South, with willing patriots because it devalued their voluntary commitment to serve, with the reluctant because it brought them into the ranks willy-nilly. The very reluctant could use state connections to secure exemption, by joining state militias retained for home service. The better-off could buy substitutes, not otherwise liable for conscription, to serve for them, or claim exemption for “essential service,” such as school teaching. There was a sudden creation of new schools in the South immediately after the passage of the Conscription Act. Particularly unpopular with poor patriots was the “Twenty Negro” law, introduced in October 1862, which exempted one white male from the draft on every plantation with twenty or more slaves, to protect the women left by their menfolk’s enlistment. Approximately 4,000 to 5,000 planters or overseers attained exemptions under the law, representing only 15 percent of plantations, but the class-dividing nature of the law caused much tension and resentment among ordinary whites.

  Overall it remains difficult to judge whether conscription, “the drafts,” as modern America knows it, served its purpose or not. About 900,000 Southerners enlisted, perhaps 500,000 joining as volunteers in 1861-62, a considerable number even afterwards, possibly impelled by the threat of compulsion. There is, again, an analogy with Britain in the First World War. There the volunteering impulse of 1914 brought nearly two million men into the ranks in 1914-15; as the impulse lost force, conscription had to be enacted in 1916 to keep up the army’s numbers. The British Great War state’s machinery was, however, far more efficient than the Confederacy’s or the Union’s of fifty years earlier. Exemptions were difficult to obtain, evasion or desertion almost impossible. Civil War desertion, by contrast, was frequent, widespread, and easy; inside a mobile and expanding population (though the war did depress immigration), with an open frontier to the west and, for Northerners, a neutral neighbour to the north, men could disappear without great risk.

  Desertion may have been easier in the North than the South, with its smaller population, neighbours well-known to one another, and western frontier closed by wide water barriers. On the other hand, the backcountry was empty and armed defiance of authority by lawless bands of bushwhackers a temptation. Maintaining control of an army nearly a million strong, to say nothing of equipping and supplying it, put both central and state governments in the Confederacy under relentless strain, and it is evidence of how powerful a hold the cause of secession exerted over the Southern mind that a collapse was averted for as long as it was.

  Lincoln’s first task, as war began to overwhelm the Union, was to expand its military forces, the tiny regular army, the state militias, and the volunteers serving as state forces. The small marine corps, though one of its regiments fought at First Bull Run, was scarcely expanded either; over half its junior officers defected to the South. The numbers of general and staff officers of the regular army were increased, though only slowly; many brigadier and major generals were at first appointed into the volunteers, to receive regular commissions, if they did so at all, only later. Major general was the highest rank granted; the exception was Ulysses S. Grant, promoted lieutenant general in March 1864, on taking up the appointment of general in chief, under a new act of Congress.

  Lincoln’s first mobilisation measure of April and May 1861 was to call for 117,000 volunteers to be found by the state governors from their militias and to serve for three months, later extended to three years. The states responded immediately, directing organised regiments towards Washington, the frontier post of the North-South confrontation, and promising more to follow. On May 3 Pennsylvania, one of the most populous states, promised twenty-five regiments, Ohio, most important of the Midwest states, twenty-two. New York had 20,000 men under arms. The smaller New England states offered four regiments ready and four to follow (Massachusetts), Vermont, Connecticut, and Rhode Island one each, Maine one ready and three nearly so, New Hampshire one mustered, two or four to follow. From the Midwest, Wisconsin reported one regiment ready, one in camp, two more at a day’s warning, Iowa two regiments drilling, Michigan six at various stages of preparation.

  All these regiments were stronger on paper than in reality. They lacked training, and above all trained officers; they lacked arms and equipment; they even lacked coherent organisation. Plans of organisation were much debated in Washington at the outset, between the various officers of state Lincoln had inherited or appointed to run military offices. The ancient Winfield Scott, general in chief, was too old to undertake detailed administration; he confined himself to devising a war-winning national strategy, leaving the formation of a national army to colleagues. Simon Cameron, secretary of war, was not esteemed by Lincoln, who managed to entrust organisation of the volunteers to Salmon P. Chase, Treasury secretary. Chase was very good at solving complex problems and, though also abrasively ambitious, had thereby impressed both Lincoln and Scott. Chase enlisted two men to help him, William B. Franklin, the superintending architect of the Treasury but also a West Point graduate, and Brigadier General Irvin McDowell, the assistant adjutant general.

  McDowell, later to hold high command, was an experienced staff officer of some cultivation who had travelled abroad. He knew about European military systems. The American system was English in origin, based on small, independent regiments not subject to superior organisation; the emergency of 1861 had produced a mass of willing men subject to no system at all. McDowell and Franklin therefore proposed the creation of a national army along European lines: the volunteers were to be enrolled in regiments numbered nationally, of two active battalions with a third to feed them, led by officers holding Federal commissions. The states were to be left a role, but it would be confined to providing men in proportion to their representation in Congress and to nominating officers for the president to appoint. Salmon Chase, a canny politician who had served as governor of Ohio, rejected their proposal as overbalanced in favour of the centre. Volunteers from the states, and voters at home, would expect regiments to have state titles and numbers and their officers to be appointed by state governors. He even insisted on sticking to the historic but familiar militia regimental system. As a result, though the regulation of May 1864 laid down that regiments of volunteers in Federal service should have two battalions, in practice most fielded only one, which almost always had difficulty in keeping up its numbers. Throughout the war the states found it easier to create new regiments than to make good the gaps in the ranks of existing regiments left by casualties, disease, or desertion. The weight of the old British royal master’s hand lay heavy on the great republic’s saving force: tiny regiments from the historic colonies and their later equivalents, commanded by successors of the old colonial governors, were to fight democracy’s battles. Their opponents were to be of the same sort. The military world of federal troops and state National Guards lay half a century in the future.

  Such officers as had travelled or visited armies abroad—Henry Halleck, McClellan, McDowell—were familiar, however, with organisations above the regimental level, with brigades, divisions, corps, even separate armies. The larger formations were unknown in American military history; even during the Mexican War of 1846 Generals Taylor and Scott had
organised nothing larger than brigades and divisions. The crisis of 1861, however, presented a new challenge. Lincoln, Scott, Chase, and McDowell recognised at the outset that to meet it separate armies, and appropriate subordinate formations, would have to be created, under generals with consonant responsibilities and subject to orthodox hierarchy. Out of the disparate ranks of state militias and U.S. volunteers, an army of Napoleonic formality would have to be formed. In the North, its outlines began to appear almost as soon as rebellion became manifest; brigadiers were named to lead brigades, major generals to command divisions. By mid-June, however, well after the first exchange of shots at Fort Sumter and between troops elsewhere in the field, the North still had only the makings of five operational armies: one at the arsenal of Harpers Ferry, abandoned but destroyed by its pre-war garrison, under the aged General Robert Patterson; one under General Benjamin Butler at the great Virginian stronghold of Fortress Monroe; General McDowell’s army at Washington; General George McClellan’s small but recently victorious force in western Virginia; and General Nathaniel Lyon’s in Missouri.

  Lack of men was not the factor limiting the expansion of forces in the field. On the contrary: men abounded, as the case of New York, state and city, exemplified. In the first flush of enthusiasm, the state government announced that it would raise thirty-eight volunteer regiments, the men to serve for two years. The city simultaneously offered fourteen, provoking a dispute with Washington over whether the volunteers would serve for three years or two. The city’s military committee, which was financing recruitment and equipment from the city’s enormous wealth, but was anxious to transfer the cost to the national government, agreed to three, but then began to quarrel with the state government over whether the city’s fourteen regiments should count as part of or in addition to its thirty-eight. The dispute was eventually settled by Lincoln’s decision that they should be an addition. During the course of 1861 New York, state and city, raised 120,000 men, forming 125 regiments, battalions, or artillery batteries.

  If lack of numbers was not, or rapidly ceased to be, a problem for the Union, lack of equipment, arms, and even provisions presented very serious problems indeed. The difficulty of feeding armies in the field was a historic check on war-making; only the most advanced states learnt how to buy provisions in bulk and distribute them to soldiers; war-making states too often were driven to outright requisition of supplies in the theatre of operations, a recourse which rapidly ate it out and forced retreat. The South, whose soldiers were raised on corn bread and pork belly, and which fought largely on its own soil, at the outset kept up an adequate supply of rations; as the war dragged out, it was forced to resort to the Impressment Act, which required farmers in operational areas or near railroads to sell their produce at prices fixed below that of the market. The foreseeable result was grain hoarding and the concealment of livestock. Confederate soldiers consequently often went hungry or lived on the scantiest fare, the scantier the longer the war lasted. In the North, by contrast, after an initial stage of disorganisation, supply was brought to a high level of efficiency. The mastermind was Montgomery Meigs, a graduate of both the University of Pennsylvania and West Point who, as an officer of the Corps of Engineers, erected the dome of the Capitol (under construction during the war) and built Washington’s water supply. Meigs was supremely competent and incorruptible.

  Although not directly responsible for providing rations, which was the business of the Subsistence Department and its subordinate commissary officers, Meigs purchased and organised the trains of horses, mules, and waggons that brought the food to the armies. His assumption of office coincided with the beginnings of the revolution in food production in America, when the exploitation of the Great Plains as a grain-growing region and the organisation of meatpacking, of both fresh meat and preserved, at Chicago, was to make the United States the world’s leader. Meigs, as quartermaster general, working in cooperation with the Subsistence Department, was able to assure that every Union soldier received a daily supply of hardtack bread and canned or salted meat, supplemented by dried vegetables, coffee beans, pickles, and molasses. Union army rations rarely amounted to a feast; but they banished hunger altogether, making the Northern soldier the best-fed man in the history of warfare to that time.

  Meigs also clothed the army, decently if unglamorously, and he moved it, by river, road, and rail. The North, with its extensive railroad network—expanded during the war—was never in danger of failing at the level of strategic communication. Meigs’s most striking achievement was to guarantee the effectiveness of the Union army’s tactical transport system, by wagon and draught animal. Both Confederacy and Union had vast reserves of horses and mules. Meigs purchased and fed horses on a huge scale. By 1863 the Union army had half as many horses as men, a proportion hitherto unknown in warfare; the proportion Meigs made standard was one horse or mule to every two to three men, one wagon for forty men, when operating in Confederate territory. “A campaigning army of 100,000 men therefore required 2,500 supply waggons and at least 35,000 animals, and consumed 600 tons of supplies each day.” Livestock wore out very quickly; overworked and badly fed, horses and mules had a life expectancy in service of only a few months.

  Wagons were easily built, while the supply of draught animals, despite the attrition rate, never ran out. The most pressing shortage at the outset of the war was in small arms and artillery weapons. The Federal government manufactured arms at Springfield, Massachusetts, and Harpers Ferry and maintained arsenals at several provincial centres. State governments also kept stocks of weapons to outfit their militias, though many were of obsolete pattern. In April 1861 there were about 600,000 small arms in the country, some 240,000 in the South, the rest in the Northern states. The Springfield armoury had an annual output of 20,000. It was soon to be increased to 200,000, but in the meantime the North had to purchase abroad, as the South did also before blockade became effective. Lacking funds, the South by August 1862 had acquired only 50,000, but the North had bought 726,000. Though the South’s manufacturing shortfalls forced it to continue purchasing in Europe, eventually to a total of 580,000 rifles, the output of Springfield and twenty private contractors supplied the North’s needs. It was a great advantage that the British Enfield rifle, the most common import, had a bore of .58 inch, and so could accept the Springfield bullet, of .57 inch. Interchangeability suited the South as well as the North, since by capture in the field and the seizure of Federal arsenals it acquired 100,000 Springfields early on, besides purchasing many Enfields. Springfield and Enfield alike used the minié ball, a conical lead bullet grooved to expand into the rifling when fired. They were accurate to 500 yards and caused dreadful wounds.

  It was to be at least a year, however, before the armies standardised on the Springfield and Enfield. Well into 1862 many soldiers, particularly in the South, were still equipped with smoothbore flintlock muskets, or with muskets bored out with rifle grooves and adapted to accept the percussion cap. Whatever the model—and the North during the war accepted 226,000 Austrian, 57,000 Belgian, and 59,000 Prussian rifles—all were muzzle-loading. Some Union cavalry and sharpshooter units received breech-loading rifles but they formed a tiny minority. The mass of the soldiery continued to force bullet and powder down the barrel by ramrod and to prepare to fire by placing a percussion cap under the hammer. Experienced soldiers might achieve a rate of fire of three shots a minute.

  In even shorter supply than small arms were artillery cannon. In 1861 the Union army had only 5 Napoleon 12-pounders, a number that increased to over 1,100 as the war progressed. The South acquired about 600, a remarkable achievement given its lack of foundry and engineering capacity. The Napoleon was smoothbore, with a maximum range of 2,000 yards. Union field artillery also acquired during the war 587 Parrott 10-pounders, a rifled gun accurate to 2,000 yards, 925 three-inch ordnance rifled cannon, 388 12-pounder mountain howitzers, and some 24- and 32-pounder howitzers.

  Battlefield artillery on both sides, however, compris
ed largely 12-and 10-pounders, in surprisingly small numbers. The war was to be a rifle rather than an artillery war, but artillery, when present in quantity, did terrible execution. Yet, although deployed at the forward edge of the battlefield, field artillery was rarely captured, perhaps because it was so valuable to both North and South that extreme care was taken to protect it. Siege artillery, the weapon that began the war with the firing at Fort Sumter, was surprisingly plentiful, probably because the federal government’s First and Third System fortification-building programme had required it to found appropriate armament. It included Rodman guns of calibres between 8 and 20 inches and older 24- and 32-pounders. The Confederacy, which benefited from capturing large numbers of Federal heavy guns at Fort Sumter and the Norfolk naval base, deployed several 8-, 10-, and 15-inch Columbiads. Both sides deployed large numbers of short-range mortars.

  All Civil War artillery was muzzle-loading. The heavier artillery was immobile or movable only by great and time-consuming effort. Field artillery—the Napoleon and Parrott guns—was organised into batteries of four or six guns, six horses to a gun and caisson. The essential ammunition column was also horse-drawn. Gun and caisson could manoeuvre across country at speed and, when brought into action, the crew of six or seven gunners could fire up to two rounds a minute. The rate delivered was usually slower, but because gun drill was a series of methodical steps, each performed by one man, even amateur crews could learn to cooperate quite quickly. Civil War batteries became effective sooner than rifle regiments, in which loading and firing by hundreds of individuals was more difficult to coordinate.

  Engineers, signallers, and railroad troops were easily recruited by the North, which needed them more than the South, from the ranks of men engaged in building industrial America. The Corps of Engineers had been the elite of the pre-war army and consisted almost entirely of officers; wartime recruits into the rank and file were organised into labour units, sometimes called sappers, miners, pioneers, or pontoneers, according to European practice. They were occasionally required as combat engineers, to build bridges in the field, but more often worked on the construction of roads and earthwork defences. The South began by forming a corps of officer engineers, supervising a small company of sappers and miners but, as the war prolonged, created more regiments of rank-and-file engineers and pioneers. In 1862 it also formed a signal corps, whose tasks including intercepting Union signals and other intelligence work. The South did not, however, form a dedicated intelligence service, nor did the North, besides employing the Pinkerton detective agency, unsatisfactorily as it turned out. Because of the permeability of the North-South border, a great deal of intelligence circulated; neither side seemed impelled to undertake organised espionage against the other.