Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (68 page)

On July 22, the day after the defeat at Bull Run, the Union Congress authorized the creation of military boards to examine officers and remove those found to be unqualified. Over the next few months hundreds of officers were discharged or resigned voluntarily rather than face an examining board. This did not end the practice of electing officers, nor of their appointment by governors for political reasons, but it went part way toward establishing minimum standards of competence for those appointed. As the war lengthened, promotion to officer's rank on the basis of merit became increasingly the rule in veteran regiments. By 1863 the Union army had pretty well ended the practice of electing officers.

This practice persisted longer in the Confederacy. Nor did the South establish examining boards for officers until October 1862. Yet Confederate officers, at least in the Virginia theater, probably did a better job than their Union counterparts during the first year or two of the war. Two factors help to explain this. First, Union General-in-Chief Win-field Scott decided to keep the small regular army together in 1861 rather than to disperse its units among the volunteer army. Hundreds of officers and non-coms in the regular army could have provided drill instructors and tactical leadership to the volunteer regiments. But Scott

19
. Wiley,
Billy Yank
, 26;
Harper's Weekly
, V (Aug. 10, 1861), 449.

kept them with the regulars, sometimes far away on the frontier, while raw volunteers bled and died under incompetent officers in Virginia. The South, by contrast, had no regular army. The 313 officers who resigned from the U.S. army to join the Confederacy contributed a crucial leaven of initial leadership to the southern armies.

Second, the South's military schools had turned out a large number of graduates who provided the Confederacy with a nucleus of trained officers. In 1860 of the eight military "colleges" in the entire country seven were in the slave states. Virginia Military Institute in Lexington and The Citadel in Charleston were justly proud of the part their alumni played in the war. One-third of the field officers of Virginia regiments in 1861 were V.M.I, alumni. Of the 1,902 men who had ever attended V.M.I., 1,781 fought for the South. When Confederate regiments elected officers, they usually chose men with some military training. Most northern officers from civilian life had to learn their craft by experience, with its cost in defeat and casualties.

Political criteria played a role in the appointment of generals as well as lesser officers. In both North and South the president commissioned generals, subject to Senate confirmation. Lincoln and Davis found it necessary to consider factors of party, faction, and state as carefully in appointing generals as in naming cabinet officers or postmasters. Many politicians coveted a brigadier's star for themselves or their friends. Lincoln was particularly concerned to nurture Democratic support for the war, so he commissioned a large number of prominent Democrats as generals—among them Benjamin F. Butler, Daniel E. Sickles, John A. McClernand, and John A. Logan. To augment the loyalty of the North's large foreign-born population, Lincoln also rewarded ethnic leaders with generalships—Carl Schurz, Franz Sigel, Thomas Meagher, and numerous others. Davis had to satisfy the aspirations for military glory of powerful state politicians; hence he named such men as Robert A. Toombs of Georgia and John B. Floyd and Henry A. Wise of Virginia as generals.

These appointments made political sense but sometimes produced military calamity. "It seems but little better than murder to give important commands to such men as Banks, Butler, McClernand, Sigel, and Lew Wallace," wrote the West Point professional Henry W. Halleck, "yet it seems impossible to prevent it."
²⁰
"Political general" became almost a synonym for incompetency, especially in the North. But this

20
.
O.R.
, Ser. I, Vol. 34, pt. 3, pp. 332–33.

was often unfair. Some men appointed for political reasons became first-class Union corps commanders—Frank Blair and John Logan, for example. West Pointers Ulysses S. Grant and William T. Sherman received their initial commissions through the political influence of Congressman Elihu Washburne of Illinois and Senator John Sherman (William's brother) of Ohio. And in any case, West Point professionals held most of the top commands in both North and South—and some of them made a worse showing than the political generals. Generals appointed from civilian life sometimes complained bitterly that the "West Point clique" ran the armies as closed corporations, controlling promotions and reserving the best commands for themselves.

The appointment of political generals, like the election of company officers, was an essential part of the process by which a highly politicized society mobilized for war. Democracy often characterized the state of discipline in Civil War armies as well. As late as 1864 the inspector-general of the Army of Northern Virginia complained of "the difficulty of having orders properly and promptly executed. There is not that spirit of respect for and obedience to general orders which should pervade a military organization." Just because their neighbors from down the road back home now wore shoulder straps, Johnny Reb and Billy Yank could see no reason why their orders should be obeyed unless the orders seemed reasonable. "We have tite Rools over us, the order was Red out in dress parade the other day that we all have to pull off our hats when we go to the coin or genrel," wrote a Georgia private. "You know that is one thing I wont do. I would rather see him in hell before I will pull off my hat to any man and tha Jest as well shoot me at the start." About the same time a Massachessetts private wrote that "drill & saluting officers & guard duty is played out."
²¹

Many officers did little to inspire respect. Some had a penchant for drinking and carousing—which of course set a fine example for their men. In the summer of 1861 the 75th New York camped near Baltimore on its way to Washington. "Tonight not 200 men are in camp," wrote a diary-keeping member of the regiment despairingly. "Capt. Catlin, Capt. Hurburt, Lt. Cooper and one or two other officers are under arrest. A hundred men are drunk, a hundred more at houses of ill fame. . . . Col. Alford is very drunk all the time now." In 1862 a North

21
.
Ibid
., Ser. I, Vol. 42, pt. 2, p. 1276; Steven H. Hahn,
The Roots of Southern Populism: Yeoman Farmers and the Transformation of the Georgia Upcountry, 1850–1890
(New York, 1983), 118; Wiley,
Billy Yank
, 220.

Carolina private wrote of his captain: "He put . . . [me] in the gard house one time & he got drunk again from Wilmington to Goldsboro on the train & we put him in the Sh-t House So we are even."
²²

Such officers were in the minority, however, and over time a number of them were weeded out by resignation or by examining boards. The best officers from civilian life took seriously their new profession. Many of them burned the midnight oil studying manuals on drill and tactics. They avoided giving petty or unreasonable orders and compelled obedience to reasonable ones by dint of personality and intellect rather than by threats. They led by example, not prescript. And in combat they led from the front, not the rear. In both armies the proportion of officers killed in action was about 15 percent higher than the proportion of enlisted men killed. Generals suffered the highest combat casualties; their chances of being killed in battle were 50 percent greater than the privates'.

Civil War regiments learned on the battlefield to fight, not in the training camp. In keeping with the initial lack of professionalism, the training of recruits was superficial. It consisted mainly of the manual of arms (but little target practice), company and regimental drill in basic maneuvers, and sometimes brigade drill and skirmishing tactics. Rarely did soldiers engage in division drill or mock combat. Indeed, brigades were not combined into divisions until July 1861 or later, nor divisions into corps until the spring and summer of 1862.
²³
Regiments sometimes

22
. Bruce Catton,
Mr. Lincoln's Army
(Garden City, N.Y., 1956), 64–65; Wiley,
Johnny Reb
, 242.

23
. Both the Union and Confederate armies were organized in similar fashion. Four infantry regiments (later in the war sometimes five or six) formed a brigade, commanded by a brigadier general. Three (sometimes four) brigades comprised a division, commanded by a brigadier or major general. Two or more divisions (usually three) constituted an army corps, commanded by a major general in the Union army and by a major or lieutenant general in the Confederacy. A small army might consist of a single corps; the principal armies consisted of two or more. In theory the full strength of an infantry regiment was 1,000 men; of a brigade, 4,000; of a division, 12,000 ; and of a corps, 24,000 or more. In practice the average size of each unit was a third to a half of the above numbers in the Union army. Confederate divisions and corps tended to be larger than their Union counterparts because a southern division often contained four brigades and a corps four divisions. Cavalry regiments often had twelve rather than ten companies (called "troops" in the cavalry). Cavalry regiments, brigades, or divisions were attached to divisions, corps, or armies as the tactical situation required. By 1863 Confederate cavalry divisions sometimes operated as a semi-independent corps, and by 1864 the Union cavalry followed suit, carrying such independent operations to an even higher level of development. Field artillery batteries (a battery consisted of four or six guns) were attached to brigades, divisions, or corps as the situation required. About 80 percent of the fighting men in the Union army were infantry, 14 percent cavalry, and 6 percent artillery. The Confederates had about the same proportion of artillery but a somewhat higher proportion of cavalry (nearly 20 percent).

went into combat only three weeks after they had been organized, with predictable results. General Helmuth von Moltke, chief of the Prussian general staff, denied having said that the American armies of 1861 were nothing but armed mobs chasing each other around the countryside—but whether he said it or not, he and many other European professionals had reason to believe it. By 1862 or 1863, however, the school of experience had made rebel and Yankee veterans into tough, combat-wise soldiers whose powers of endurance and willingness to absorb punishment astonished many Europeans who had considered Americans all bluster and no grit. A British observer who visited the Antietam battlefield ten days after the fighting wrote that "in about seven or eight acres of wood there is not a tree which is not full of bullets and bits of shell. It is impossible to understand how anyone could live in such a fire as there must have been here."
²⁴

V

Amateurism and confusion characterized the development of strategies as well as the mobilization of armies. Most officers had learned little of strategic theory. The curriculum at West Point slighted strategic studies in favor of engineering, mathematics, fortification, army administration, and a smattering of tactics. The assignment of most officers to garrison and Indian-fighting duty on the frontier did little to encourage the study of strategy. Few if any Civil War generals had read Karl von Clausewitz, the foremost nineteenth-century writer on the art of war. A number of officers had read the writings of Antoine Henry Jomini, a Swiss-born member of Napoleon's staff who became the foremost interpreter of the great Corsican's campaigns. All West Point graduates had absorbed Jominian principles from the courses of Dennis Hart Mahan, who taught at the military academy for nearly half a century. Henry W. Halleck's
Elements of Military Art and Science
(1846), essentially a translation of Jomini, was used as a textbook at West Point. But Jomini's

24
. Quoted in Jay Luvaas,
The Military Legacy of the Civil War: The European Inheritance
(Chicago, 1959), 18–19.

influence on Civil War strategy should not be exaggerated, as some historians have done.
²⁵
Many Jominian "principles" were common-sense ideas hardly original with Jomini: concentrate the mass of your own force against fractions of the enemy's; menace the enemy's communications while protecting your own; attack the enemy's weak point with your own strength; and so on. There is little evidence that Jomini's writings influenced Civil War strategy in a direct or tangible way; the most successful strategist of the war, Grant, confessed to having never read Jomini.

The trial and error of experience played a larger role than theory in shaping Civil War strategy. The experience of the Mexican War governed the thinking of most officers in 1861. But that easy victory against a weak foe in an era of smoothbore muskets taught some wrong lessons to Civil War commanders who faced a determined enemy armed (after 1861) largely with rifled muskets. The experience necessary to fight the Civil War had to be gained in the Civil War itself. As generals and civilian leaders learned from their mistakes, as war aims changed from limited to total war, as political demands and civilian morale fluctuated, military strategy evolved and adjusted. The Civil War was pre-eminently a
political
war, a war of peoples rather than of professional armies. Therefore political leadership and public opinion weighed heavily in the formation of strategy.