by John Keegan
In the absence of economic targets, it was inevitable that the enemy’s army should form the principal object of military operations. Interestingly, Lincoln, completely untutored as he was in military science, quickly came to see that in northern Virginia, Lee’s army, rather than Richmond, the enemy capital, should be the Army of the Potomac’s main target. Lee had no real alternative, since attractive though the idea was to attack Baltimore or Philadelphia, the objective of one of his forays into the North, both lay too far from his start line to be attainable.
The bellicosity of Civil War armies led to the expectation that a clear-cut result would terminate the war sooner than actually happened. Yet Civil War battles, fought so fiercely though they were, were strangely inconclusive. That was not because the soldiers were halfhearted. On the contrary, they fought with chilling intensity. What robbed their efforts of result was the proliferation of entrenchment, thrown up on the battlefield at high speed in the face of the enemy. First appearing in 1862, by 1863 hasty entrenchment was an automatic response to enemy fire, and a very effective one. But entrenchment had a stalemating effect. By 1864 entrenchment had imposed a universal stalemate, a veritable state of siege, combined paradoxically with a huge toll of casualties, in an anticipation of the stalemate of the First World War. As in 1914-18, the combination of immobility and high losses could be overcome by reinforcement, at which by 1864 the North easily outdid the South, at least in availability of replacements. As for the management of replacements, the North never hit upon the right method; it allowed regiments to decline in numbers until they became ineffective and then raised new regiments to keep up total strength. It was not an efficient system since it did not preserve the cohesion and espirit de corps of experienced and successful units. Unit for unit, and perhaps man for man, the Confederate army exceeded that of the Union in quality, so that the Union triumphed in the end only because of larger numbers and greater wealth of resources.
Greater numbers and greater resources assured that the North would win most of the war’s battles, at least the battles that counted. The frequency and intensity of battles determined the war’s character. Battle also determined the war’s outcome. Antebellum America was a country, not a state. Political America impinged too little upon its citizens to confer a sense of common purpose or of belonging. As is often remarked, the only contact with the state experienced by most antebellum Americans was a visit to the post office. The Civil War changed that. There was no more graphic means of apprehending the power of the state than to stand in the line of battle, a voluntary act with unintended consequences. Men who performed the act and survived the consequences were transformed as citizens. Their understanding of “duty” and “sacrifice” were thereby revolutionised. Men who had stood shoulder to shoulder to brave the volleys of the enemy could not thenceforth be tepid or passive citizens. They became pillars of the republic and pillars of their communities. It is often overlooked that hundreds of thousands of Americans of the Gilded Age had been touched by fire and hardened by it. Antebellum America had been a gentle society. Postbellum America was a nation as well as a society and one hardened by the Civil War to embark on a rendezvous with greatness.
The experience of battle, so widely diffused, may have had another effect on postbellum America. The American historical profession has laboured hard and long to explain why the United States alone among major industrialised countries failed to produce a domestic socialist movement. It gave birth to powerful trade unions, such as the American Federation of Labor (AFL), and its splinter group, the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), but neither adopted a socialist ideology as their European equivalents did. It was not for want of trying by the ideologues. Karl Marx, himself a passionate student at a distance of the Civil War, believed and argued that it should inaugurate a new social order. In January 1865, he wrote, “The working men of Europe feel that as the American War of Independence initiated a new era of ascendancy for the middle class so the American anti-slavery war will do for the working classes. They consider it an earnest of the epoch to come that it fell to the lot of Abraham Lincoln, the single-minded son of the working class through the matchless struggle for the rescue of an enchained race and the reconstruction of a social peace.”5 Lincoln had already stridently rejected Marx’s vision of the future in words that encapsulated the American dream and anticipated the brunt of American historians’ attempt to explain why socialism failed to find rooting ground in his country. In 1864 he wrote, “None are so deeply interested to resist the present rebellion as the working people.” Then, in a reference to the draft riots in New York of 1863, he went on: “It should never be so. The strongest bond of human sympathy, outside the family, should be one uniting working people of all nations and tongues and kindreds. Nor should this be a war upon property—property is desirable—is a positive good in the world. That some should be rich shows that others may become rich and hence is a just encouragement to enterprise and industry. Let not him who is houseless pull down the house of another but let him labour diligently and build one for himself, thus by example assuring that his own shall be safe from violence when built.”6 In those last three sentences, Lincoln set forth the idea of individual effort on which the rise to prosperity of late Victorian and twentieth-century America was built. It was an idea perfectly acceptable to the thinking classes of the epoch in Europe but also in America, who had decided to give their allegiance to the state and to collective activity and many of whom found their inspiration in the ideology of the left in all its varieties. Karl Marx, who captured the imagination of so many on the left, argued that the working class should re-organise itself for its advance to capture the necessary resources on military principles. In the Communist Manifesto he urged the working class to “form industrial armies.” The American working class, though it unionised enthusiastically, consistently opposed the appeal to revolution. American intellectuals struggled for generations to understand the American worker’s antipathy for radical and violent change. The American worker, had he been able to articulate his feelings, might have said that his country’s first revolution, as he called the War of Independence, had fulfilled many of his aspirations by founding his republic and that the second revolution, which was the Civil War, had completed the first. He had no desire to form industrial armies, having in his hundreds of thousands already formed and served in real armies and learnt by his experience that armies brought hardship and suffering. One experience of army life was enough for a lifetime and not only for an individual lifetime but for a national lifetime as well. American socialism was stillborn on the battlefields of Shiloh and Gettysburg.
NOTES
CHAPTER ONE
1. U. S. Grant, Personal Memoirs of U. S. Grant (New York, 1885-86), p. 22.
2. John M. Gould, The History of the First—Tenth—Twenty-ninth Maine Regiment (Portland, Maine, 1871), pp. 613-64.
3. Bell Irvin Wiley, The Life of Billy Yank (New York, 1952), pp. 303-4.
4. Ibid., pp. 304-5.
5. Ibid., p. 356.
6. Ibid., pp. 360-61.
CHAPTER TWO
1. Carl Sandburg, Abraham Lincoln (New York, 2002), p. 228.
CHAPTER THREE
1. Bell Irvin Wiley, The Life of Billy Yank, (New York, 1952), p. 20.
2. James M. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom (New York, 1988), p. 325.
CHAPTER FOUR
1. T. Harry Williams, Lincoln and His Generals (London, 1952), p. 20.
CHAPTER SIX
1. Bell Irvin Wiley, The Life of Billy Yank (New York, 1952), p. 119.
CHAPTER SEVEN
1. Richmond Examiner, September 27, 1861, quoted in McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom (New York, 1988), p. 337.
2. Abraham Lincoln, Speeches and Writings, 1859-1865 (New York, 1989), vol. 2, p. 302.
3. Earl B. McElfresh, Maps and Mapmakers of the Civil War (New York, 1999), passim.
4. T. Harry Williams, Lincoln and His Generals (London, 1952), p. 5.
/> 5. Ibid., p. 24.
6. Allen Tate, Stonewall Jackson (Nashville, Tenn., 1991), p. 86.
7. Ibid., p. 88.
CHAPTER EIGHT
1. John C. Waugh, The Class of 1846: From West Point to Appomattox; Stonewall Jackson, George McClellan and Their Brothers (New York, 1994), p. 332.
2. Ibid., p. 362.
3. T. Harry Williams, Lincoln and His Generals (London, 1952), p. 14.
4. Ibid., p. 21.
5. Ibid., p. 16.
6. James McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom (New York, 1988), p. 396.
7. U. S. Grant, Personal Memoirs of U. S. Grant (New York, 1885-86), p. 311.
8. Abraham Lincoln, Speeches and Writings, 1859-1865, pp. 323-24.
9. Williams, Lincoln and His Generals, p. 109.
CHAPTER NINE
1. R. U. Johnson and C. C. Buel, Battles and Leaders of the Civil War (New York, 1884-88), vol. 3, p. 68.
2. James McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom (New York, 1988), p. 550.
CHAPTER TEN
1. R. U. Johnson and C. C. Buel, Battles and Leaders of the Civil War (New York, 1884-88), vol. 2, p. 662.
2. Ibid., vol. 3, p. 682.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
1. R. U. Johnson and C. C. Buel, Battles and Leaders of the Civil War (New York, 1884-88), vol. 3, p. 161.
2. Ibid., vol. 3, p. 196.
3. Ibid., vol. 1, p. 249.
4. James McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom (New York, 1988), p. 651.
5. Abraham Lincoln, Speeches and Writings, 1859-1865 (New York, 1989), vol. 2, p. 464.
6. T. Harry Williams, Lincoln and His Generals (London, 1952), p. 211.
7. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom, pp. 655-56.
8. Johnson and Buel, Battles and Leaders, vol. 3, pp. 387-90.
CHAPTER TWELVE
1. U. S. Grant, Personal Memoirs of U. S. Grant (New York, 1885-86), p. 281.
2. Abraham Lincoln, Speeches and Writings, 1859-1865 (New York, 1989), vol. 2, pp. 477-78.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
1. R. U. Johnson and C. C. Buel, Battles and Leaders of the Civil War (New York, 1884-88), vol. 3, p. 671.
2. U. S. Grant, Personal Memoirs of U. S. Grant (New York, 1885-86), p. 469.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
1. U. S. Grant, Personal Memoirs of U.S. Grant (New York, 1885-86), p. 117.
2. James McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom (New York, 1988), pp. 733-34.
3. Ibid., p. 779.
4. EyeWitness to History, “Surrender at Appomattox, 1865,” www.eyewitnesstohistory.com (1997).
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
1. R. U. Johnson and C. C. Buel, Battles and Leaders of the Civil War (New York, 1884-88), vol. 4 p. 250.
2. Ibid., p. 252.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid., p. 256.
5. Ibid., p. 253.
6. Ibid.
7. William T. Sherman, Memoirs of General William T. Sherman (London, 1975), p. 112.
8. Steven E. Woodworth, Nothing but Victory (New York, 2005), p. 539.
9. Sherman, Memoirs, p. 173.
10. Ibid., p. 852.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
1. R. Cobb, quoted in James McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom (New York, 1988), p. 835.
2. N. A. Trudeau, Like Men of War (Boston, 1998), p. 326.
3. Ibid., p. 416.
4. Theodore Lyman, Meade’s Headquarters, ed. George R. Agassiz (Boston, 1922), p. 102.
5. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom, p. 759.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
1. Steven E. Woodworth, Nothing but Victory(New York, 2005), p. 518.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
1. James McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom (New York, 1988), p. 849.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid., p. 850.
4. Quoted in Edmund Wilson, Patriotic Gore (New York, 1994), p. 685.
5. Saul R. Padover, Karl Marx on America and the Civil War (New York, 1972).
6. Ibid.
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