The American Civil War

by John Keegan

  Temperament, a factor in human affairs widely ignored by professional historians, was of the greatest importance in distinguishing the good from the bad, the effective from ineffective, among generals of the Civil War.

  It was most notable in the case of McClellan, who provides material almost for a clinical study in the psychology of generalship. He was an extraordinary mixture of timidity and overweening self-importance, always overcome by self-doubt and anxiety in the face of the enemy, combined with tiresome belief in his superiority over all the colleagues with whom he worked during the war, from Lincoln downwards. He was not alone in his capacity for self-doubts. Halleck, too, found his enthusiasm for battle strongly diminished the closer he approached the enemy. Hooker suffered from the same disability. In the opinion of Professor T. Harry Williams, an excellent judge of the Civil War generals’ characters, Hooker lacked the ability to make war “on the map.” He functioned well only as long as his troops were under his eye. Once they moved beyond his field of vision, he lost the power to visualise their whereabouts. A contrast to Hooker was William Rosecrans, who also failed when action promised. His fault, however, was not timidity, but overexcitement. A great talker, he would work up a head of steam while he outlined his plans; his excitement grew as he listened to himself so that he lost his composure and, with it, his ability to implement his plans. He was successful as a junior commander of small forces, but in a major command he never brought off a great project. John Pope, too, was a great talker, who greatly impressed the world of Washington in 1862. Pope was always promising to fight and looked as if he would, being tall and of impressive appearance. But he too was afflicted by ineffectiveness; a later fault of Pope’s was quarrelsomeness. He got on the wrong side of McClellan, his direct superior in Virginia in 1862, and never re-established good relations. Pope was not as quarrelsome as Don Carlos Buell, who differed with any colleague he had and also failed in all his enterprises. Curiously, he was liked by McClellan, perhaps because he never threatened to be a rival in any respect.

  The two consistently successful generals of the war, Grant and Sherman, were blessed with equable temperaments. Close friends, they cooperated admirably and avoided quarrelling with others. Grant even kept his temper with McClernand, who, in his egotism, would have tried the patience of a saint. In his frenzy to have the reputation he thought he deserved, he tried to intrigue his way into command on the Mississippi. He magnified every encouragement Lincoln gave him until he eventually overstepped the boundary of military propriety and gave Grant incontestable grounds to remove him for insubordination, thus sparing Lincoln, who valued his political connections in the Midwest, the need to do so.

  Lincoln, a totally inexperienced commander in chief, was confronted from the onset of his presidency by a kaleidoscope of temperamental difficulties among his military helpmeets which would have brought down a lesser person. The verdict on the military leadership of the Union during the Civil War is that there was too much personality in play and far too little talent. Only Lincoln showed greatness from beginning to end. It was a war caused by his election and ultimately won by his capacity for compromise, an unexpected strategic skill.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  Civil War Battle

  BATTLE WAS THE defining characteristic of the Civil War. Some authorities count as many as 10,000 battles fought between 1861 and 1865. It is easy to reckon up between 200 and 300 named battles familiar to a general reader. Such a number, compressed into four years of warfare, speaks of a quite remarkable intensity, compared, say, to the experience of Wellington’s army in Spain and Portugal in 1808-14, when one major battle a year was nearer the norm. Civil War armies appear to have fought all the time, at very short intervals, so that it was not uncommon for individuals to have taken part in dozens of battles. It is the frequency of battle which makes the Civil War distinctive. There was no gradual intensification. Americans fought each other as if imbued with deadly mutual hatred from the outset. First Bull Run was as hard-fought as Second Bull Run a year later, which was as hard-fought as Gettysburg. It is difficult to define why this should have been so. Americans in 1860 did not hate each other as Spanish workers and the Spanish middle class did before 1936. Though identifiable sections existed in the United States before 1860, “sections” referred to geographical areas of the country, of which the cotton-growing South was one and the industrialising North another. But the sections were not homogeneous. There were notable internal divisions. In the South the most important division was that between the large landowning regions and those of subsistence farming, from which the Confederate army was to draw most of its recruits. Particular sections were the Low Country of the Carolinas, where the first large concentrations of black slaves were established and which became in consequence hotbeds of Confederate patriotism, and Tidewater Virginia, homeland of the state’s political class. Virginia was socially the most distinct of the colonies and later of the states, because it was deliberately set up in imitation of the English landed counties by its mid-seventeenth-century governor, Sir William Berkeley. Berkeley recruited the younger and therefore landless sons of English landowning families, which bequeathed all to the eldest, with the promise that in the New World they would be able to set up as landed gentlemen themselves. He succeeded perhaps better than he hoped. As early as 1660 every seat on the ruling Council of Virginia was held by members of five interrelated families, and as late as 1775 every council member was descended from one of the 1660 councillors. As Berkeley had endowed many of the settlers he attracted with large grants of land, the families were not only politically powerful but rich. They remained so and their names were to become celebrated in American history, the Madisons, the Washingtons, the Lees. They supplied the young United States with many of its Founding Fathers and the Confederacy also with many of its leaders. The strength and extent of the Virginia oligarchy helps to explain the speed and completeness of the Confederacy’s establishment. The old families, who were also large plantation holders and slave owners, felt the most threatened of all Southerners by the rise of anti-slavers to political power in the North and in Washington during the 1850s and, by their legal and social dominance, easily carried the majority of the population with them in 1861.

  The speed with which the Confederacy took off and the attraction that the Confederate idea exerted in the border states, which were not cotton-growing or slaveholding, greatly divided opinion in the North. It was also to present the Union with its principal military problem, which was how to achieve victory in the conflict. Many Northerners persuaded themselves that secession, leaving the Union, was repugnant to many Southerners and that if the right overtures were made to the people below the Mason-Dixon line, the errant population could be brought back into the fold without fighting, the prospect of which was abhorrent to many in the North. While it was true that there were important areas in the secessionist states, notably western Virginia and eastern Tennessee, which were at the outset hostile to the Confederacy and remained so, their people lacked the means to alter opinion in the larger South or to influence the rebel government in Richmond. The Confederate leaders were quite as prepared to coerce anti-secessionists as the Union was to suppress rebellion within its own territory. Thus from the beginning it became obvious that the conflict between North and South was destined to be a struggle for minds. Indeed, though the truth was not perceived until much later in the war, and then only by a few professional Northern soldiers of brutal imagination, the Southern mind was the only profitable target in the Confederacy. Just as all the rich material objectives in the North—the Atlantic seaboard cities and the industry of New England—lay at too great a distance from the Confederacy’s northern border to be attacked, so the South was not materially vulnerable to the North, though for a different reason. It had no great industries or financial centres against which the Northern armies might have marched. Its only store of wealth, the cotton crop, the North had devalued by imposing blockade. As a result there was nothing fo
r the North to ruin—except the South’s stock of fighting men. That fact explains the relentless recurrence of battles between the two armies, and the determination of the war’s great generals to fight for victory on the battlefield.

  At the beginning of the war, there arose a belief in both armies and both governments that the war could, indeed should, be won by a single great victory. This belief owed its origins to the prevailing power of the Napoleonic legacy. Napoleon owed his rise to imperial dominance to his ability to win battles, which he did with dispiriting regularity. His great victories were taught to the West Point cadet, whose professors extolled the virtue of seeking decision by blows of crushing force, as delivered at Austerlitz and Marengo. President Lincoln, but also Jefferson Davis, the new Confederate president, both hoped for an American Austerlitz, to end the conflict in a single day of violence. In the first seasons of campaign the hope was futile, for neither side yet possessed trained soldiers or weapons in sufficient quantity to inflict decisive blows. Even as they grew stronger, decisive victory continued to prove elusive. Victories there were, as at Chancellorsville and Fredericksburg, but though sometimes spectacular they achieved no destruction of the enemy. The reasons for that seemed obscure at the time and remain so. One was that the Confederates possessed commanders, notably Stonewall Jackson but also their supremo, Robert E. Lee, who were unfailingly daring and attacked even in the teeth of apparently overwhelming odds, achieving a moral effect which time and again carried the day; another was that neither side fielded cavalry in sufficient numbers to perform the battle-winning role it had traditionally done in Europe. Cavalry in the great European campaigns broke up the large formations of infantry and then pursued the fugitives to destruction. America did not possess either a cavalry tradition or the sort of soldiers who might have established one. The battles of the Civil War were almost exclusively infantry struggles, in which casualties were inflicted by rifle fire at ranges from fifty to a hundred yards or more, but because of the efficiency of the Springfield and Enfield rifles they were very costly to combatants.

  The casualty figures pose what is perhaps the supreme mystery of the war: why did the common soldier of both sides bear the loss of comrades in such large numbers and the fear of the battlefield experience and yet return again and again to the fray to continue fighting as if unnerved by the effect? Eighteenth-century armies recognised a mass reaction to extreme fear, called by the French panique-terreur. Panique-terreur does not seem to have afflicted the Americans of the Civil War. That may have been because, since it was a civil war, the soldiers surrendered to each other, their English-speaking fellow inhabitants of the same landmass, with relative ease. This was not the case, however, with black Union soldiers, who following massacre at Fort Pillow and the Petersburg Crater were understandably not prepared to entrust their lives to white Confederates and fought fiercely to avoid capture.

  The nature of the terrain in the theatres of war helps to explain why battles occurred as often as they did. In the two great corridors of conflict—one formed in the east by the Appalachian chain and the Atlantic; the other in what is loosely called the “West,” formed again by the Appalachians and the Mississippi—the barriers to left and right forced the armies, once set in motion, into frontal contact with each other, as long as they could be supplied, which ease of access to river lines of communication, supplemented by the railroads, assured that they could. Neither side lacked for men. Numbers compressed by geography ensured that as long as there was the will to fight, and the will held up throughout the war, battles would take place. Indeed, one of the most consistently surprising factors of the war was the readiness of both sides to expose themselves to the risks of combat and to return to the fight even after suffering heavy losses.

  The armies’ readiness for battle is all the more extraordinary given their almost total lack of experience of warfare. Both sides had to learn as they went along, leaders and led alike. Memory of America’s wars of the past, written accounts of wars in Europe, particularly those of Napoleon, supplied the uninformed with almost their only notion of what a battle should be like. The nature of battle was scarcely understood, hence the belief, which persisted long after the first encounters, that one great engagement would settle the issue.

  Perhaps the first reality that had to be grasped was the necessity of massing firepower. There past American experience did not assist, for Europeans had identified from King George’s War and the French and Indian War a style of fighting they called “American” or “Indian” war, in which armies did not form ordered masses as they did on the open battlefields of the Old World, but skirmished behind tree cover and sought to take the enemy by surprise. “American” warfare was individualistic, not ordered, and fighting in such conditions typically took the form of ambush or surprise attack, as at the battle of the Monongahela in 1755, where a small French army with numerous Indian allies had overwhelmed the redcoats of Edward Braddock’s army in the preliminaries to what would become known as the French and Indian War. The armies of 1861, recognising that “American” warfare would not win them this conflict, had to learn, by reference to the available drill books, how to organise themselves for Old World fighting. It had taken European armies long years of trial and error to learn that the fire of gunpowder muskets was effective only if those who carried them stood shoulder to shoulder and fired in unison. While knowing that such tactics were correct, the soldiers of 1861 had to teach themselves to do likewise, since the requirement defies nature. Instinct drives men who are fired upon to seek cover, either by lying down or by finding shelter behind a natural obstacle, the antithesis of battle-winning procedure. Many inexperienced Civil War regiments did indeed give way to instinct at the first onset of battle, running away or breaking formation at the first exposure to fire.

  The obsessive repetition of drill movements, taught from books by officers or sergeants who were themselves only a page ahead of their pupils, was thus exactly the correct way of preparing the innocents of 1861 for battle. The drill books, almost always translations from the French or rewritten versions of French originals, laid down that the regiment of ten companies should form most of them into a line of two ranks; three had been earlier ordered, but the practice abandoned because of the danger to the front rank from bullets fired by the third. Even so, the front rank was regularly singed and deafened by the rifles of the second. Live firing practice was a rare event. Many soldiers did not fire their weapons for the first time until they met the enemy. There was, however, a great deal of practice in the seventeen separate movements necessary to load and level the rifle, extracting the paper cartridge from the pouch, tearing it with the teeth, pouring the powder down the barrel, spilling the bullet after the powder, crumpling the paper into a wad, ramming home with the ramrod, placing the percussion cap on the nipple, and bringing the butt to the shoulder. Speed and dexterity in loading did not, however, exhaust the requirements of the drill master. It was also necessary to mass the effect of discharge, by training the soldiers to stand shoulder to shoulder and perform the drill movements simultaneously; otherwise the impact of the volley was diminished, while accidents would occur if loading and aiming were mistimed.

  Regiments advanced to contact in columns, their officers hoping to successfully deploy from column into line at optimum range from the enemy, perhaps a hundred or two hundred yards. Changing formation or direction on the battlefield was an invitation to disorder but was essential if the regiment were to damage the enemy, and could be achieved even by inexperienced troops if they had been sufficiently exercised in foot drill. The ideal was for the regiment to make the approach to contact in column, then deploy into line, at which point the regimental skirmishers would move to the front and flank to bring individual fire against the enemy’s front. What followed was rarely as prescribed in the drill book, which expected the battalion line to deliver a succession of volleys until the enemy drew back or it essayed a charge, with or without fixed bayonets. In practice, once a regime
nt had delivered its first volley, firing tended to become individual. The bayonet charge was rarely practised. The proof of that, Civil War observers believed, was because of the very low proportion of bayonet wounds displayed among the wounded brought to hospital. The low incidence of such wounds has been noted in many conflicts at different times and places but is not proof that the bayonet was not used; it may have been that bayonet wounds were so often fatal that the victims died on the spot, and were not collected for treatment. Nevertheless, it does seem the case that the bayonet was rarely used in Civil War battles. The charge of the 20th Maine at Little Round Top, after it had exhausted its ammunition, was an exception to the rule that Civil War battles were largely fought with the rifle.

  That this should have been so was made the more likely because of the confidence the soldier had in his firearm. The Springfield and Enfield rifles were a great technological advance over the smoothbore musket. They were more accurate, carried to a greater range, and, being ignited by a percussion cap, rarely misfired. Firing was still a complicated and time-consuming business, leading to eccentric results when a novice rifleman, for example, would ram home the contents of several cartridges but forget to place the percussion cap on the nipple. With such a weapon in his hands, the soldier was naturally tempted, once the firefight began, to stand and deliver shot after shot, even if they fell short, than to take the risk of closing the distance with a charge, during which he could not reload. Hence the descriptions of regiments standing opposite each other for long periods during which they fired off all the ammunition in their pouches. But the armies of the Civil War soon became accustomed to rifle firefights and adept in the rifle’s uses. Lee certainly esteemed the rifle more than the artillery gun as a battle-winner, and he did not notably employ artillery to decisive effect in any of his battles. That may have been because his great skill as a commander was in the rapid manoeuvre of infantry units in the face of and in direct contact with the enemy; infantry was easier to manoeuvre than artillery. Indeed, there was no outstanding artillery general on either side.