THE CREATION of the armies that fought the Civil War was
both a monumental and an absolutely unprecedented task.
Even at the time of the French Revolution, when the Terror
had decreed the levee en masse and attempted to mobilize the entire
country, it had not achieved the degree of articulation of the Civil War
era. The entire pre-war army, a mere 16,000 men, would have been
about half of either force at Bull Run, and Bull Run represented but
a fraction of the armies then at the disposal of the two opposing sides.
If 1861 demonstrated that neither had as yet learned how to handle
such masses, that is hardly a matter of surprise: no one had any experience
of this magnitude before, and it was naturally going to take time
to find or develop men who could do it. Indeed, much of the history
of the Civil War can be explained in these terms—of a search for men
who were intelligent enough, and experienced enough, and who had
the right mental attitude, to wage the first modern war.
The officer ranks of each side therefore become a key to what happened.
Who were the officers? Where did they come from? What kind
of knowledge and experience did they possess? Answering these questions
may help in some degree to explain the war.
Perhaps the first point that comes to mind in any review of the officer
corps is the dominance of West Point over the war. The United States
Military Academy, founded in 1802, essentially turned out engineers.
There was what might appear to the uninformed an odd pecking order:
graduates chose their branch of service in order of their class standing,
and habitually the top of the class went to the engineers, then the
artillery, and finally the cavalry and infantry at the bottom. After the
War of 1812, the curriculum was developed to the extent that a smattering
of tactics, strategy, and military history was added to the basic
engineering core, and professors such as Dennis Hart Mahan developed
the military art and tried to adapt it to North American conditions.
For most of the pre-war generation, West Point graduated about
fifty to sixty young officers a year, which meant there were about 1 ,200
graduates in the generation before the war. Given, however, that there
were only 1,100 officers in the United States Army, that some small
number of them were not West Pointers, and that a great many of
them had been around two or more generations, this meant there was
a surplus of graduates. Thus a great many had left the army between
graduation and the Civil War. For a variety of reasons, civilian life
offered more or different attractions, and many men, knowing their
educations were valuable, resigned their commissions. On the Northern
side, for example, McClellan had become a railroad executive, Sherman
was the president of a southern college, and Grant had failed at a variety
of commercial positions. For the South, Polk left immediately after
finishing West Point and became an Episcopal bishop; Daniel Harvey
Hill was superintendent of the North Carolina Military Institute and
had been a professor of mathematics; and Thomas J. Jackson, class of
1846, was the Professor of Moral Philosophy and Artillery Tactics at
Virginia Military Institute.
Since the Confederate States Army was all to do from nothing, men
such as these, as well as those who resigned directly from the U.S.
Army, such as Albert Sidney Johnston and Ambrose Powell Hill,
moved with little friction into command positions. The most important
influence on them was probably how close they were, or how well
known, to Jefferson Davis. A West Pointer himself, and a former secretary
of war, Davis knew the military scene intimately, probably too
much so, and his predilection for certain officers was a major factor in
the South's command structure.
The situation in the North was a little more complicated. Those
serving officers who had stayed with the old flag continued to hold
their rank and perform their functions, but Lincoln and his government,
and his whole military establishment, were far less dependent
upon the "regulars" than might have been expected. The regular army,
though enlarged for the war, remained somewhat exclusive, and Winfield
Scott in the closing days of his tenure ofcommand was determined
not to have the real soldiers diffused throughout some amorphous mass
of part-time civilians. Most of the Union army therefore consisted of
what were officially called "United States Volunteers," and commissions
in these forces were heavily influenced by the separate states,
which were responsible for raising the regiments to fill their quotas for
the federal government. Thus General Patterson, who failed in western
Virginia, was a Pennsylvania general. Grant was a colonel of Illinois
infantry, and his commission as a brigadier general was of United States
Volunteers. Only after Vicksburg was he transformed from a volunteer
into a regular-army officer again. And such brilliant soldiers as Francis
Barlow, a lawyer who enlisted as a private in the 12th New York and
finished as a major general of United States Volunteers, never did get
a regular commission. Neither did William Bartlett, a Harvard junior
who enlisted the day Fort Sumter was fired upon, and rose to be a
brevet major general, losing a leg and being four times wounded in
the process. Giving rank as a volunteer officer was one way to avoid
clogging the regular system, and perhaps the most famous example of
that was George Armstrong Custer, a brigadier general of volunteers
while still officially a first lieutenant in the regular army. At the end
of the war he reverted from major general of volunteers to lieutenant
colonel in the regulars.
Men such as Barlow and Bartlett were examples of what worked well
with the system. There were other examples of what worked poorly.
State governors, or even the harassed federal government, often granted
commissions on the basis of political patronage or for other unmilitary
reasons. The notorious Benjamin F. Butler, for example, was a Massachusetts
militia general and was the first brigadier general of U.S.
Volunteers appointed by President Lincoln. Another Massachusetts
politician, Nathaniel P. Banks, offered his services as a general, and
Lincoln could not refuse him—he was too important politically. Daniel
Sickles got his commission because he was a leading War Democrat
from New York.
Only the war itself would sort out these men, the good and the bad,
the talented and the stupid. The two difficulties with that were, first,
that the war killed good and bad indiscriminately, and second, once
on the ladder of command, an officer was free to rise to his own level
of incompetence, and while he did so was entitled to the consideration
of his rank. Both sides were thus stuck throughout the war with the
potentially disastrous results of unwise early appointments to high
command, a Polk in the South, a Butler in the North. This, it may be
concluded, is a common problem with armies undergoing a vast enlargement
at the start of a war. France in 1792, and Britain in 1914,
for example, experienced the same sort of difficulty.
In Brussels in 1815, the Duke of Wellington was asked if he could
defeat Napoleon; Wellington pointed to a British soldier gawking at
the sights, and replied, "It all depends upon that article there." Officers
might be the brains of an army, but the blood and bone and muscle
was provided by the ordinary soldiers. What were they like, these
young men of 1861 who were stubborn enough, or brave enough, or
perhaps foolish enough, to stand up and be shot at for an idea? In the
entire course of the war there were nearly three million of them, North
and South, very close to one person in every ten of the entire population
of the United States before the war.
Mostly they were young; the average age of enlisted men in the war
would be in the very early twenties; as a rough rule one might say the
men were in their early twenties, the company-grade officers in their
late twenties and early thirties, the field-grade officers in their late
thirties and early forties, and the brigade and higher officers in their
late forties and early fifties. There were of course exceptions in either
direction. Edwin "Bull" Sumner commanded a corps in the Army of
the Potomac, and was in his sixties; both of his sons also became generals;
and Galusha Pennypacker of Pennsylvania was a captain at seventeen
and a major general at twenty-one. John Sanders of Alabama
was a brigadier general at twenty-four, and did not live to be twentyfive;
David Twiggs, the oldest officer of the old army to go South, was
seventy-one when the war began, but he was too old for active service.
But the enlisted men, especially before conscription was brought in,
were usually young. In both armies they were recruited territorially;
that is to say, they joined companies made up from their own towns
and villages, and then were put into units by counties and states. A
great many of them, in the beginning, came straight from local militia
units already in existence. There were positive and negative aspects to
this; on the one side, the young soldier felt better away from home if
he was surrounded by friends going through the same experience as he
was. There was an enormous comfort in that, and a great boost to the
spirit. In times of peril, soldiers often encouraged each other by saying
they must make the folks at home proud of them. But the cost could
be terrible; a bad battle might well destroy the youth of an entire town
all at once, and often did; companies or whole regiments could be
virtually wiped out in a single charge, and with them the hopes and
future of a little town in Vermont or Mississippi.
The initial calls for volunteers were quickly oversubscribed, and
these men who enlisted in late 1861 or early 1862 were the backbone
of both armies for most of the war. The expiry of the enlistments of
these three-year men in the North brought a manpower crisis in late
1864; retrospectively, the government should have enlisted them for
three years or the duration, whichever was longer, rather than three
years or the duration, whichever was shorter. In the first enthusiasm of
the war, men would still have gone; later they were more wary.
As it was, the federal government was besieged by state governors
begging that their quotas of regiments be increased. The regimental
system, in universal use among armies of the day, proved to be a drawback
in the way it was administered, especially in the North. Officially
a regiment should consist of from eight hundred to a thousand men,
and most of them did, to start out. Southern regiments were a little
smaller, and soon were a great deal smaller. On both sides, the commissioning
of officers was a perquisite of the states, and every time a
state raised a new regiment, it could commission a new batch of officers.
Existing regiments, mustered into federal service, were less susceptible
to this political interference. The tendency, therefore, was to let the
older regiments wear down until they virtually disappeared, and to
raise wholly new ones in their places. The system was not quite as bad
as it sounds, for once an officer had proved himself, he could usually
get reappointed to a new regiment in his state. But it still did admit
of playing political favors, and it was very hard on the soldiers in the
ranks. Month after month they would watch their unit—their home
—
waste away, until there were not enough of them left to do anything.
It also meant that new soldiers had to learn everything from scratch,
without the inestimable advantage of being filtered in, a few at a time,
to a veteran unit where they could become seasoned. As it was, older,
worn-down regiments scoffed at the big new ones who had yet to see
action, and the new ones made all the mistakes that new soldiers have
always made and that the veterans might have helped them avoid had
the two groups been put together.
One peculiarity that is worth noting is the prevalence, more particularly
on the Northern than on the Southern side, of foreign-born
troops. In mid-century the United States was in the midst of a great
tide of immigration, so much so that the situation had spawned the
Know-Nothing Party, basically a nativist party; in the 1850s Massachusetts
had even passed a law denying immigrants the vote as a
reaction against the Irish immigrants coming in. But these immigrants,
however badly they were sometimes treated in the land of opportunity,
were willing to fight, and numbers of Northern regiments were almost
completely made up of such men. Some two hundred thousand German
immigrants fought in the Civil War; many of them were veterans of
the 1848 revolutions, and the little wars they had spawned, and there
were regiments and whole divisions in which the language of command
was German. President Lincoln had commissioned Alexander Schimmelfennig
less because of his knowledge than because of his name; the
name, Lincoln wryly remarked, ought to be worth thousands of
German recruits. Unfortunately the Germans tended not to do well,
either in their commanders or in their battles, and they were regarded,
probably unfairly, as inferior soldiers by the rest of the army.
Both sides had large Irish contingents, and the Army of the Potomac
contained an Irish Brigade, commanded by General Thomas Meagher,
a former revolutionary transported to Tasmania by the British government.
It was made up mostly of New York regiments, with some
additions from Massachusetts and Pennsylvania. The German regiments,
by contrast, tended to come from the northwestern states out
around the Great Lakes. Other nationalities were represented in smaller
numbers on both sides. Some of the Louisiana Zouave regiments, for
example, were almost exclusively French.
One significant group that was initially totally unrepresented was
American blacks. In spite of the fact that this war would eventually
prove to be very much about slavery—whatever the war's origin was
thought or said to be—few people in 1861 or 1862 thought that black
men ought to fight in it. Initial attempts on the part of free blacks to
enlist were usually rebuffed, and protestations by the few black leaders
that their people should participate were met either with indifference
or embarrassment by the government. For a surprisingly long time,
white Americans insisted that this was a white man's war—though the
Confederacy was willing to ally with Indian tribes out in Arkansas and
Missouri. Eventually, of course, any blood would do, even for the Confederacy,
but that stage was a long time being reached.
The army tended, as armies do, to cook all these disparate ingredi-
ents down into a homogeneous whole. As units were mustered into
state and then federal service, they went through a training process
designed to transform them from civilians and individuals into soldiers.
The recruits trained in camps in their home states, and when they had
been uniformed and taught how to march and shoot, their unit was
inspected and then formally mustered into United States service. Then,
usually by train or boat, they went off to active service.
Though writers of books tend naturally to dwell on battles, surprisingly
little of the soldier's life is spent in them. Most of it goes in
filling in the time, drilling, doing fatigues, moving here or there, and
waiting for something to happen. In both armies, through the winter
of 1861-62, there was a great deal of waiting. The new commander of
the Army of the Potomac, General McClellan, was a great believer in
drill and reviews, and his army settled into its camps around Alexandria,
doing its successful best to ignore the Rebels. Meanwhile, the
army drilled. The tactical systems of the day were highly complex, and
soldiers had to learn all the successive moves: forming up, guiding by
the center, guiding by the right, facing to the front, or the rear, or the
left or right flank, moving by companies, by columns of companies,
by columns of division, firing by volley, firing independently, and on
and on and on. One sympathizes with the officer, leading his regiment
in an attack, who came up against a bog, and eventually shouted out
in frustration, "Boys, git acrost that swamp and form up on t'other
side now!"
Slowly, the army was whipped into shape. McClellan was a great
one for grand reviews. The soldiers would form up, regiment after
regiment, vastly impressed with themselves; the bands would play
jaunty airs, and then up would sweep the little general, surrounded by
gorgeous staff officers, and escorted by Rush's Pennsylvania Lancers,
with their lance pennants flapping bravely in the breeze. It was a long
way from the smoke and terror of Bull Run, but under these conditions,
it was fun to be a soldier. To greater or lesser degree, other armies in
other venues were doing the same thing, and all along the border
between the United States and the Confederate States of America, boys
practiced their close-order drill, did their camp duties, wrote letters
home, and waited for something to happen.
The armies themselves were the several points of the spears, but an
army does not just happen, and it certainly does not live independently.
On both sides, governments made vast efforts to sustain and supply
the forces they were creating. This was naturally easier for the North
than for the South. The North not only had more manufacturing capacity
of its own, but it had the established credit and the existing
organization needed for the process. It had mills and factories that could
readily be converted to war production, and the brick beehives of Lowell
and Lawrence were soon turning out thousands of pairs of blue
trousers and dark blue fatigue jackets, and the armory in Springfield
geared up to increase tenfold its production of rifles. Not only that,
the federal government was in a position to buy abroad and pay hard
cash for what it got. The soldiers found themselves armed with weapons
from every arsenal in Europe, from first-class Enfield weapons bought
in England, to cranky old Suhl muskets bought from Austria, hastily
converted from flintlock to cap-and-ball firing mechanisms. The South
went through the same process, but it started from a smaller industrial
base, and as a revolutionary government, had a harder time raising
money and paying for what it bought abroad, though as always, plenty
of European dealers were eager to speculate and make money from other
people's troubles. War is such a lavish consumer that it always makes
a great market. On balance, the Confederacy did very well for most of
the war; with what it manufactured at home, captured from the Union,
and bought abroad, it managed to sustain the war effort far longer than
might originally have been anticipated.
Still, it was in the North that the sinews of modern war were first
fully created, and much of that was due to Edwin M. Stanton, one of
the least-liked and greatest men in this or any war. A successful lawyer,
Stanton had been attorney general under President Buchanan; he returned
to private life after Lincoln's election, but remained a power in
Washington, and was associated with the anti-Lincoln faction—as who
was not?—until January of 1862. He and McClellan were friends, and
both thought Lincoln was not up to his job, a fact on which they often
commiserated. The two were together when a message arrived from
the White House appointing Stanton secretary of war in place of Simon
Cameron, and the story is that when McClellan asked Stanton what he
was going to do, Stanton replied, "Do? I am going to make Abraham
Lincoln president of the United States!" Stanton always thought a little
too much of himself, and it soon became apparent that it was Lincoln
who was master, and Stanton was his man, and the best secretary of
war in the United States, and possibly in all of history. He was a
meddler, but he got things done, whether it was jailing crooked con-
tractors or prosecuting newspaper editors who revealed military information
to the Confederacy. Above all, he supplied armies; he presided
over a War Department that produced endless quantities of guns,
clothing, food, wagons, paper, ammunition, and the thousand things
an army needs. A good administrator and a bad hater, next to Lincoln
himself he was almost indispensable to the Union, and the two came
to have a very close, if often stormy, relationship. The Union was lucky
to have him.
The Confederacy did not have his equal. President Davis went
through five secretaries of war, a couple of whom were very bright indeed.
One, Judah P. Benjamin, may have been the most intelligent
man on the whole continent, and he would have been a more than competent
secretary had Davis let him alone. But Davis the onetime warrior
and former federal secretary of war could not stay out of his own War
Department, and Benjamin lasted only six months before becoming the
Confederacy's new secretary of state; he was replaced by George W.
Randolph, another highly competent administrator. Randolph brought
in conscription and tried to get Davis to focus on the western theater,
and he lasted only eight months, again driven off by Davis's interference.
After that Davis settled on James A. Seddon, a Virginian of very
poor health who let Davis make all the major decisions, and who thus
held on to his post almost until the end of the war.
Both governments were constantly faced with internal opposition
on the running of the war. In the South there were several sources of
this, and some authorities have argued that the particularism of the
separate states, and their resistance to control by the central government,
was what ultimately cost the South the war. Since resistance to
central authority was the whole raison of the Confederacy, this thesis
has a certain plausibility to it. Other writers have argued equally convincingly,
however, that this was a relatively unimportant factor, and
that actually the Confederate central government functioned pretty
well, and got along at least as well as could be expected with its component
state counterparts. But there were other factors or factions at
work. The Confederate politicians from the border states, in effect politicians
in exile, always exerted a disproportionate influence, and like
exiles everywhere, always promised a great deal more than they could
ever actually deliver. There was also a "western bloc," trying unsuccessfully
to distract Davis from Virginia and make him aware of both
potential and danger across the mountains. And finally, there were
those politicians in Richmond who were motivated simply by their
intense dislike for Jefferson Davis, and opposed him just because he
was the man he was. In his way Davis was a great man, and with a
little more luck or better timing, he might have been the father of his
country, but he was also an easy man to dislike, and there was no lack
of men who fought him simply for that reason alone.
Lincoln too had his enemies, of course, and Washington had as many
factions, or more of them, as did Richmond. Especially in these early
days of the war, men were still learning how to handle themselves, and
there were plenty of men who thought they knew far better than the
president what ought to be done. In Congress there was the whole
spectrum of opinion, from those who were still against the war, or any
form of coercion at all, to those Radical Republicans, the far left of
Lincoln's own party, who wanted war to the knife, and considered
Lincoln far too squeamish to fight as they wanted to fight. They soon
set up a Committee on the Conduct of the War, and any general who
was considered soft on their main issue had to operate with one eye
over his shoulder. What happened to General Charles P. Stone was a
case in point. In October of 1861 Stone was commanding a division
on the Maryland side of the Potomac. Ordered to help dislodge some
Confederates on the other side, he pushed a brigade across the river to
Ball's Bluff, where it got trapped with no supports and no line of
retreat. In the shambles that followed, the brigade suffered nine hundred
casualties out of 1,700 men. Stone was called before the congressional
committee, meeting in secret, and ended up being arrested and
thrown in a military prison, where he languished for more than six
months, though no charges were ever preferred against him. The Radicals
had their own charge: "unsound on the question of slavery." That
was not an indictable offense, but if they had their way it would be,
and any general who failed to realize that had better watch out.
Stone was merely a scapegoat, of course; from the Radical point of
view, the real target was McClellan, and as the winter went on, as the
army took shape, as the country watched and waited and the newspapers
demanded action, the Young Napoleon became more and more
the focus of attention. What was he going to do, and when was he
going to do it? Everyone wanted to know, even Lincoln.
The president indeed was incredibly patient with his new general,
a patience which McClellan returned with ill-disguised contempt. Lincoln
tried to find out what McClellan proposed to do; McClellan would
not tell him. Lincoln tried to suggest something he might do;
McClellan dismissed this as mere amateurism. Lincoln proposed he
might move; McClellan was not ready. Lincoln pointed out that it was
expensive to keep a huge army doing nothing; McClellan pooh-poohed
all this civilian nonsense. When McClellan snubbed the president, Lincoln
mildly replied, "I will hold General McClellan's horse for him if
only he will do something." Eventually of course even Lincoln lost his
patience: "If General McClellan does not propose to use the army,
perhaps President Lincoln might borrow it for a while."
Finally, of course, even McClellan knew he had to act. When Lincoln
told him a straightforward advance south on Richmond seemed the
most sensible move, McClellan loftily set aside such a silly idea. How
simple, how childish, how civilian the president was! Advancing south
overland would simply lead to another Bull Run. McClellan came up
instead with a far more intriguing idea. He would do a flanking move
by water, and be in Richmond before the Rebels knew what he was
up to.
Meanwhile, while McClellan entertained politicians and made fun
of his leader, while the Army of the Potomac stretched and stirred in
its encampments, while spring rolled across the land, other armies in
other theaters started to move. The grass greened, the trees blossomed,
the blood ran high. Both sides now had armies at least half-prepared;
it was time for real war now.
World History
