The American Civil War

by John Keegan

  Prolonged firing could result in one side overcoming the other and advancing to occupy its ground. A shaken or beaten regiment, though, should have been replaced or stiffened by reserves appearing from the rear, as it often was. The outcome of Civil War battles was often decided by reinforcement or the movement of reserves to the front at a critical moment. As has been often observed, outcomes were not usually inluenced by the intervention of cavalry or even by the effect of artillery. Cavalry simply did not play a decisive or even particularly noticeable role between 1861 and 1865. Cavalry conducted many daring and successful raids into enemy territory, spreading alarm, destroying matériel, and capturing valuable supplies. It almost never charged infantry on the battlefield, or artillery; during the great battles of the war, it suffered negligible casualties. There are a number of reasons for the ineffectiveness of Civil War cavalry. One was that the terrain was not suited to cavalry, which required wide, uncluttered spaces in which to gather and deploy. Another was that there was no cavalry tradition in the pre-war American army, no group of leaders committed to its use. Cavalry was expensive to maintain and difficult to train, and there was no pool of skilled horsemen to enlist. The result was that neither side formed large bodies of cavalry.

  The diminished role of artillery is more difficult to explain. During the Napoleonic Wars artillery had dominated battlefields and been widely regarded as the decisive arm. Napoleon’s Grand Battery of 100 guns at Waterloo had caused Wellington severe concern. In 1861 both armies suffered from a shortage of field artillery, which was only slowly repaired. By mid-war, however, both armies fielded guns in European proportions, about four guns per thousand men, quite enough to decide battles if properly used. Yet such was rarely the case. At Malvern Hill, outside Richmond, in 1862 the Union artillery inflicted very heavy casualties, as the Confederate artillery did at Fredericksburg. The reason in both cases seems to have been that the terrain suited the gunners. At Malvern Hill there were wide, long fields of fire; at Fredericksburg the Confederate guns occupied commanding positions overlooking open ground. The guns could do their worst. More often, however, the field of fire was obscured by trees or broken ground and very often by the interposition of ranks of friendly troops. That could have been avoided had the guns been pushed right forward and manoeuvred as horse artillery during fluid moments of the battle. However, there was a reluctance by commanders on both sides to risk the capture of their valuable guns by placing them in exposed positions, and there was also a general shortage of horse artillery.

  Much debated is the question of whether infantry, armed with the new rifle, and so able to engage targets as far distant as 300 yards, were enabled to defend themselves against enemy artillery by targeting the batteries with aimed fire. Artillery usually fired at infantry at ranges of a thousand yards, though less if it were using canister, case shot containing packed musket balls, which was very destructive against massed formations of infantry. The conclusion of experts is that infantry fire rarely forced artillery to retire from its positions and that artillery rarely suffered heavy casualties from rifle fire.

  The effect of fire, whether from rifles or cannon, was heavily moderated by the digging of entrenchments, which began early in the war and became general practice as the war lengthened. That was a departure from the habits of the dynastic armies of the eighteenth century and the Napoleonic Wars. In those wars, once battle was joined, protection against casualties was held to reside in the return of fire, the use of artillery, or the unleashing of cavalry to drive the enemy away. Soldiers rarely dug in. There were exceptions, however. Entrenchment was known even as early as the War of the Spanish Succession. The French partially entrenched their positions at the battle of Ramillies in 1706. In general, however, it is true that eighteenth-century armies did not, except during sieges, dig.

  European practice was a strong influence on Civil War armies, so much so that, despite West Point’s emphasis on the teaching of engineering and fortification, most Civil War commanders began at the outset without any thought of setting their soldiers to dig. They sought to win by the practice of manoeuvre. As the war progressed, however, and casualties rose until 30 percent killed and wounded became the normal casualty list in infantry regiments in large battles, soldiers began to dig anyhow, whether encouraged to do so by their generals or not. They dug to protect themselves if ordered to hold a position in defence. They dug when the enemy’s fire began to tell during an advance to contact. After 1863 digging was a feature of all battlefields, and on those where the defender was given warning of impending action, battlefield entrenchments became very elaborate. Some of the complex lines that sprang up around Petersburg in 1864 were begun as “hasty” entrenchments against Grant’s constant efforts to outflank the Confederates to the south and west.

  The practice of entrenchment, apparently a soldier’s exercise rather than one imposed from above, at least at the outset, helps us to answer the most obvious question about Civil War battle, which is this: how did the ordinary mortals in blue and gray sustain the fear and horror that close-order fighting engendered? Frightened men run away or, if they cannot, hide themselves or fling themselves flat. Civil War soldiers of both sides did all those things and also offered themselves as prisoners, hence the surprisingly large number of prisoners taken by both sides during the war. But Civil War soldiers also did not run away or take cover or freeze or cry “surrender” but stood their ground, fired, reloaded, and fired again, often minute after minute until they overcame the men opposite. What held them to their soldierly duty? There are a number of factors that explain steadfastness in all wars, including the example of leaders, the coercion of junior leaders, Dutch courage, and the undesirable consequences of cowardice. Coercion does not seem to have played a significant role in the Civil War. Americans are not accustomed to threatening their fellows or being threatened. It is not the American way. Although there are instances of Civil War soldiers turning their weapons upon comrades who showed cowardice in the face of the enemy, they are not commonly found in the records. There are by contrast many instances of soldiers recording the admiration they felt for the courage of their officers and drawing inspiration from it; sometimes they wrote of the contrary also, as when an officer was found hiding in a hollow tree at Shiloh or another was observed applying cosmetic marks of battle to himself at a safe distance from the enemy. Dutch courage was in common use; the canteen full of whisky was greatly appreciated and not much disapproved of. Generals who became drunk during battle were, however, usually removed from command. It was also often remarked that flight was too dangerous when in close proximity to the enemy and that it was safer to stay and attempt to return fire. Moreover, and this underlay the whole Civil War experience of combat, men did not run because they were motivated by what James McPherson characterises as “cause and comrades.” Men on both sides had gone to war because they believed passionately in their reasons for doing so: to preserve or restore the Union, if they were Unionists; to defend states’ rights and the Southern way of life if they were Confederates; and in both cases because their standing in the eyes of their brothers in arms meant a great deal to them—indeed, at the time probably more than anything else. Both armies had intensely masculine identities, in which to be thought manly was the overriding value and to be thought a coward the supreme devaluation.

  In nineteenth-century America religion was a powerful motivation of many, both in peace and war. In many ways the Civil War was as much a religious war as a political one, since abolitionists held their beliefs with religious fervour while Southern rustics, who may not have been able to articulate any coherent political view, identified their Southernness with their membership in their Baptist and Methodist meetinghouses and took their beliefs with them into the ranks.

  Ultimately, Civil War battles came to be characterised by heavy rifle fire, by the absence of significant quantities of artillery, and by the prevalence of earthworks. Fire between the lines could continue for long periods without mov
ement by one side or the other, in the hope that volume of fire would eventually persuade the enemy to retire. Hence the phenomenon of large-scale exchanges at medium range resulting in very few casualties. Heavy casualties, of course, were also a feature of Civil War battles but were usually explained by troops finding themselves confined by local terrain features in a position from which it was difficult to escape and within which it was difficult to manoeuvre. Such was the case at Antietam, and on parts of the field of Gettysburg. Woodland, so frequently present, also contributed to heavy casualties, since troops came upon each other by surprise in the poor visibility and then found it difficult to disengage because of the density of vegetation.

  The nature of battle in the Civil War has been much debated and strong views are held by historians. It cannot be disputed, however, that Civil War battle was very largely rifle battle, with cavalry playing almost no part in the clash of major armies, and artillery fulfilling a subordinate role. Firepower was not the main cause of death. The Union’s total of fatalities amounts to 110,000 battle deaths, the Confederacy’s to 94,000 battle deaths; twice as many as died on both sides, but were the victims of disease, still the greatest killer of soldiers, as would remain the case until the First World War.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Could the South Have Survived?

  THE QUESTION OF WHETHER the South could have won has become one of the most popular of post-conflict questions. The answer is almost certainly not. Material disparities in numbers of men and in industrial output make it most unlikely that the Confederacy could have prevailed over its stronger northern neighbour, though at the outset there were many in the South who believed and proclaimed that what were seen as critical advantages, particularly European dependence on the South’s exports of cotton, made it certain that expenditure on that raw material would, if supply were interrupted or denied, compel Europe’s industrial states—which were also its great powers, Britain foremost but France as well—to recognise the Confederacy as a legitimately independent state and to intervene in its support, breaking the North’s blockade and supplying necessities, including credit, which would nullify the North’s economic advantages. As we now know, prudence deterred the South’s putative supporters from offending the United States, even when provoked as Britain was during the Trent affair.

  Though the question persists, it is not therefore pursued with much diligence. Even the most disgruntled Southerners came to accept, almost in the war’s immediate aftermath, that the South had been beaten fair and square and that indulgence in daydreams about a different outcome was profitless. A great deal of the credit for the fact that the South accepted defeat so quickly and completely belongs to Robert E. Lee for his unyielding opposition to all suggestions that, after Appomattox, or instead of Appomattox, the remnants of the Confederate States Army should have taken up guerrilla warfare. Lee’s commendable decision derived from his admirable constitutionalism and respect for law, both the common laws of war and those of his country, but also, as he made clear, to his determination to spare the South the horrors of irregular warfare within its own territory. The sufferings of those parts of the South, particularly the Shenandoah Valley of his beloved Virginia, during the campaigns of depredation conducted by Union armies had convinced him that prolonging the conflict simply out of a refusal to accept its result as determined on conventional battlefields would not be in his fellow Southerners’ interest. Instead of irregular resistance to the results of the war, the South instead consoled itself with resort to an idealised version of Confederate history, which became known as the Lost Cause. Fortunately for Americans, the Lost Cause took the form of a legend rather than a political movement, a highly romanticised legend which eventually resolved itself into a depiction of the antebellum South as a land of magnolia blossoms, white-pillared mansions, pretty damsels of the plantation, and contented slaves, which reached its apotheosis in the best-selling novel Gone with the Wind, later made into an enormously successful Hollywood film. Eventually Gone with the Wind became in a way the South’s revenge on the North for the popularity and influence of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Just as Harriet Beecher Stowe (“the little woman who made this great war”) had succeeded in making the South appear populated by selfish, heartless, and cruel slave owners, Margaret Mitchell succeeded in reworking the picture as one in which Southern beauties and their gallants presided over chuckling old black retainers who gave as good in banter as they got by way of servitude. The result was that, over time, Gone with the Wind has become better known than Uncle Tom’s Cabin and had greater lasting effect.

  Gone with the Wind may even have influenced the way in which the Civil War is seen. Its memorable depiction of the battle of Atlanta and the spoliation of the Tara plantation certainly fed the loyal of the Lost Cause in emphasising the story of Southern bravery and of a war lost in a less than fair fight. If it were a reader’s only source it would certainly raise the issue of how a people so resolute lost the war they fought to defend their way of life, and so whether, given appropriate alterations in the course of events, the Confederacy could have survived. Were such a reader to turn to the military history of the war in search of illumination, he or she would almost certainly and promptly conclude that no other outcome than the one delivered by the war’s events was possible.

  The first set of events pointing to the inevitability of the actual outcome, leaving material disparities in the strength of the combatants out of account, was the progress of the imposition of blockade. At the outset, the South’s access to supply of military essentials was unimpeded; indeed, in the first months of the war, the Confederacy succeeded in purchasing abroad and in importing very large quantities of war materials. By August 1861 the South had brought 50,000 European rifles into the country, despite the fact that the blockade had been declared and was being enforced by the United States Navy, which had nearly a hundred vessels at a time when the South had no navy at all. The blockade proceeded relentlessly as the Union, by action at sea and by landing troops on the coast, took possession of the South’s ports and coastal waters. By April 1862 the whole Atlantic coast of the Confederacy, with the exceptions of Wilmington, Charleston, and Savannah, was in Union hands, and the Union army could land troops wherever it chose, to garrison, if so wanted, several large enclaves it had established ashore.

  The loss of the Confederacy’s coastline presaged doom, since it undermined the South’s claim to be sovereign and independent by cutting it off from the outside world. The next progressive stage in its isolation, an internal rather than foreign isolation, came with the capture of the shorelines of the western rivers, first the Cumberland and the Tennessee following the taking of Forts Henry and Donelson in February 1862, which rapidly led to the capture of most of the length of the Mississippi (less Vicksburg). The isolation of this area, which eventually became known as Kirby Smithdom, was not fatal to the South’s survival, since the region contained no great centres of population or manufacturing but it was weakening nevertheless since it did contain the largest concentration of livestock in the South and was an important source of agricultural produce. The fall of Forts Henry and Donelson inaugurated the North’s domination of the Mississippi Valley and of the sequence of Northern offensives in Tennessee and then Georgia which weakened the Confederacy both materially and morally. Grant’s campaign in the Mississippi Valley was to unfold as one of the most complex of the war, both geographically and in its sequence of events. Vicksburg, because of its location on high ground, and because of the girdle of its encircling waterways, was almost impregnable. Grant’s success in tempting Pemberton, the Vicksburg commander, out of his fortifications to do battle in the open was a brilliant achievement. Grant’s western campaign of 1863 defeated all hope of further Southern success in the border states, consolidated Union dominance over the Mississippi Valley, and secured the platform for Sherman’s invasion of Georgia and the inauguration of his war against popular morale inside the South.

  Eastern successes in 186
3, at Gettysburg in particular, brought to an end for good the Confederacy’s freedom to mount invasions of the North. Events in 1864, particularly the Overland Campaign, with its appalling toll of casualties, shook the resolution of the North again, but the Union’s will to fight on revived and once the siege of Petersburg began, the determination to see the war out to victory persisted undimmed to the very end.

  By that stage of the war, the overthrow of the Confederacy was unavoidable. The strength of its armies was in irreversible decline; its currency had lost all value, and so isolation from the outside world was complete. Important areas of the South were no longer under Richmond’s control, and some had already been laid waste, a process which was to continue.

  In retrospect and in the light of its progressive material weakening, what stands out as remarkable about the Confederacy’s conduct of the war is Southern resilience. Just as the North recovered from psychological setback, such as invasion of its borderland and defeats such as Fredericksburg, so the South made recoveries also. It seemed not offended at all by the early loss of New Orleans, its largest city, or by such terrible slaughters as at Shiloh. It was undoubtedly cast down by Gettysburg and even by the loss of Vicksburg, on the same day, but a month afterwards it was tussling as hard as ever. At no point in the war, until Davis’s flight from Richmond in April 1865, did the South publicly disclose a loss of the will to resist. It was astonishing that it contested the onward march of the Union army on both the day before the surrender at Appomattox and the day before that. On April 7, two days before he met Grant to capitulate, Robert E. Lee was still denying that resistance was pointless.