Insurgents, Raiders, and Bandits (18 page)

Nationalism also bred ferocity. Coupled with accurate weapons and wedded to large forces, this meant huge casualties. Over a quarter million Confederates died in battle or from their wounds, of just under nine hundred thousand who served. Union fatalities exceeded 360,000 of the roughly 2.2 million who fought. This remains the bloodiest war that Americans have ever waged—and it was against their own countrymen. But these terrible losses were not simply the result of concurrent leaps in weapons, and information technologies; their root cause lay in the belief of generals on both sides that, despite all these changes, Napoleonic methods could still be applied to this Napoleonic-sized war. Thus Union and Confederate soldiers were often condemned to march shoulder to shoulder into heavy fire, in formations most resembling Wellington’s thin red line or the columns of the French Old Guard, employing a battle doctrine that has been labeled by some Civil War historians “attack and die.”
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In the main, generals on both sides adhered stubbornly to notions of massed assaults against well-armed defenders. If tried frontally, blunt-edged attacks of this sort led to such disasters as the Battle of Fredericksburg in December 1862, when Union forces suffered thirteen thousand casualties—to fewer than five thousand rebels—in a single day of battle. The Confederates showed just as much bullheadedness in Pickett’s Charge at Gettysburg in July 1863, when losses mounted to half the fourteen thousand men employed in that attack alone, over just a few hours. Even when linked to flanking movements, as Ulysses S. Grant repeatedly did in his campaign against Robert E. Lee in the spring and summer of 1864, the results were just as dismal. In the Wilderness, Grant lost almost eighteen thousand troops in two days, against Lee’s forces’ casualties of about seven thousand. At Cold Harbor just a month later, the proportion of losses was even worse, with Union casualties at seven thousand against just over one thousand for Lee’s forces in a day’s action.

Most generals on both sides shared this retrograde view of how to conduct their battles, reflecting the influence of the Baron Jomini’s great lesson from his study of Napoleon: strike with the greatest mass at a single “decisive point.”
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Their perspective might also have grown from having participated in successful frontal assaults during the war with Mexico (1846–1848), in which so many had served as junior officers.
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As things turned out, it was the Union commander-in-chief, Abraham Lincoln, who would eventually overcome his generals’ predilections by calling for major offensives mounted simultaneously in all theaters, sustained by the railroads and coordinated by telegraph. But it would take Lincoln nearly three long years of jawboning, coaxing, and coercing before the strategy that would ultimately overwhelm the Confederacy was finally adopted in full.
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By the time the Union offensives were at last underway in earnest in 1864, the South had formulated a powerful response that combined fighting largely on the tactical defensive with regular troops while taking the offensive with guerrillas and deep-strike cavalry. A key champion of the tactical defensive was General James Longstreet, one of Lee’s chief subordinates and a man who had argued strongly against continuing to batter away at Union forces fighting from well-prepared defensive positions at Gettysburg. Beyond Longstreet, General Joseph E. Johnston also had a considerable appreciation of the superiority of the defensive in pitched battles, as he would skillfully demonstrate in his delaying actions against Union general William T. Sherman during the latter’s drive for Atlanta in 1864.

As to leaders of irregular forces, the Confederacy enjoyed the great benefit of having several commanders—mostly cavalrymen—who thought strategically in terms of waging a wholly different kind of war. Some favored the idea of guerrilla operations. The darker version, as practiced by William Quantrill in the west, looked quite a bit like terrorism, as at the burning of Lawrence, Kansas, and in the various depredations of the James brothers. These sorts of operations attracted a lot of riffraff, leading to more heinous acts and reinforcing a trend toward banditry. This devolution in behavior and goals contributed strongly to the repeal in early 1865 of the Confederacy’s Partisan Ranger Act which had been passed in April 1862 to legitimize and regulate irregular warfare practices. But as Lee ultimately put it regarding the guerrillas: “I regard the whole system as an unmixed evil.”
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A somewhat more acceptable form of guerrilla warfare was practiced in the Shenandoah Valley by John Singleton Mosby. His campaign unfolded on friendly territory where the people aided and abetted the Confederate cause. Mosby’s rangers—never amounting to more than a few hundred riders—caused no end of mischief for Union forces operating in the area. At one point Mosby even abducted a Union general. But none of these actions ultimately rose to the level of achieving truly strategic effects. Still, one can see in these operations in what came to be called “Mosby’s Confederacy” at least a foreshadowing of the kind of resistance and insurgent movements that would one day arise in Nazi-occupied France, and later in American-occupied Iraq.

But to throw a real monkey wrench into the works of Lincoln’s great “cordon offense”
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it would take much more than terror raids and kidnappings. Out in the western theater of operations, west of the Appalachian Mountains, a number of rebel commanders arose who took the irregular offensive against the advancing Union masses. One who made a tremendous mark in four long-range raids was John Hunt Morgan. Usually operating in brigade strength—roughly two thousand to four thousand riders—he struck hard and inflicted great damage in Ohio and Indiana. His forays were, however, in the words of one historian, “spectacular but pointless.”
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They were too disconnected from the overall campaign.

In his last Ohio raid, Morgan and his men were tracked down by Union cavalry troopers who had finally become adept at “tip and run” operations themselves. They killed or captured almost all the rebel raiders. Morgan himself was taken and imprisoned in the Ohio state penitentiary but worked with other prisoners to dig a tunnel and escape. Once loose, he evaded recapture and made his way back south. Soon he was leading another raid; but his forces were detected, tracked, and cornered once again. This time Morgan was killed. His great skill as an irregular fighter had never been fully realized.

There was however one Confederate military leader possessed of similar skills who did figure out how to employ the raid and the
COUP DE MAIN
in a manner that was well integrated with the overall Confederate strategy in the west: Nathan Bedford Forrest. A man with a total of about six months’ formal education—he always said pens made him think of snakes—and no prior military experience, Forrest entered the Confederate Army a private. He would rise to the rank of lieutenant general, and along the way he would prove that the rail and telegraph technologies that so empowered Union forces also imperiled them. For a modern industrial army is highly dependent on secure logistics and communications. To make both insecure was Forrest’s goal, one he repeatedly achieved for significant periods of time at crucial moments during the war. His record was so good that Ulysses S. Grant
himself, the best Union commander and later on president of the United States, judged Forrest “the ablest cavalry general in the South.”
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Growing up on the frontier in Tennessee during the early 1820s, Forrest became tough, resourceful, and independent-minded. For that era he was big too, being over six feet tall and well muscled. His father died in 1837 when he was sixteen, so Forrest as the eldest son took on the burden of providing for his mother and five younger brothers. But as he came into manhood his desire for adventures farther afield came to the fore. He joined a group of volunteers who intended to enlist with Sam Houston in Texas and, when the group disbanded before arriving, he continued on anyway. But a severe illness followed, and he never did serve in the army of the Republic of Texas. Instead he eventually made his way home after recuperating. He stayed only briefly, for about this time his mother was remarrying, which allowed him to strike out on his own once more. He joined the mercantile and livestock business of his uncle, Jonathan Forrest, in Hernando, Mississippi, soon demonstrating a skilled eye for cattle and horses.

It was a period of fierce commercial competition, and Forrest was soon embroiled in bitter disputes on behalf of his uncle, a kindly man with little business aptitude. On one occasion in 1845, two men came to see Jonathan—it seems to collect on a debt—and in the ensuing argument one of them shot down the elder Forrest. Bedford, showing his penchant for swift action, immediately gunned down the two assailants, establishing what his peers called a “reputation for volatility.” Nevertheless he had on balance more redeeming qualities, including gallantry toward women and, in an age of very hard living, abstinence from both tobacco and alcohol. Just months after Jonathan’s death, Forrest courted and wed Mary Ann Montgomery, a woman from a fine family. He also began to involve himself more deeply in the slave trade, where he could apply his merchant’s insight to more than just horses and cattle.
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For any aspiring slave trader, Memphis, Tennessee, was the place to be, as it featured the most vigorous market for African Americans. By 1852 Forrest had moved there and soon grew quite prosperous. By the time the Civil War broke out in 1861, he was a millionaire. He was also a respected citizen and member of the city council. When Tennessee seceded from the Union, Forrest volunteered as a private, but he soon rose to lieutenant colonel, no doubt in recognition of the fact that he had used his own funds to raise and equip a battalion of cavalry (some seven hundred riders). Thus the self-made man, lacking in formal education and previous military experience, went to war.

Given his thin credentials for command, one might expect Forrest to have failed early on; but it soon became clear that he had a natural instinct for soldiering. He quickly grasped the importance of seizing and holding the initiative, and understood that firepower was now more important to cavalry than the saber. Throughout the war he would use horses basically for mobility while his men would, for the most part, fight on foot. The one-fourth of his troopers who held the horses during the initial battle became his reserve, remaining fresh to mount and sustain the pursuit of a defeated, disorganized enemy force.

Forrest’s other traits included an extremely innovative tactical approach to battle and a farseeing strategic sensibility. In an age when his colleagues—and most of his Union adversaries—sought victory through the shock of frontal attack, Forrest pioneered a concept of operations based on mounting simultaneous attacks on flanks and rear—what we today call swarm tactics. At the more strategic level, he understood that the farther Union forces advanced, the more vulnerable their communications and supply lines became—much like the situation Napoleon had faced in Russia. Indeed, in striving for some antecedent to Forrest’s prowess in irregular warfare, the historian Walter Laqueur made the analogy explicit, noting that Forrest’s campaigns “resembled those of Denis Davydov in the (Russo-French) War of 1812: deep-penetration raids into the enemy’s rear rather than guerrilla warfare.”
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If some of Davydov’s practices reemerged half a century later in Forrest’s raids, Forrest’s own imprint on later mechanized operations was to be felt just as strongly among the tank commanders of the 1920s and 1930s, for whom a study of the rebel raider’s campaigns was viewed as mandatory.
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One of the greatest masters of the blitzkrieg
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Erwin Rommel, carefully examined Forrest’s methods.
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Thus, in addition to his insights into irregular warfare, Forrest would provide some of the inspiration for the rise of modern maneuver warfare.

Nathan Bedford Forrest’s Civil War

Forrest became famous for his relentless pursuit of the offensive, but he began his military career with retreats, though skillful ones. The first occurred at Fort Donelson in February 1862, where Grant trapped about thirteen thousand rebels. Almost all ended up surrendering, save for the five hundred or so troopers who escaped with Forrest, who had requested and been granted permission to try to break out. In his next big fight, at the bloody battle of Shiloh in April, Forrest commanded the Confederate rearguard against the Union pursuit mounted by Sherman, Grant’s great comrade in arms. In the savage fighting that ensued, the rearguard held on long enough for the main rebel force to withdraw safely, but Forrest suffered a bullet wound—the first of four he would receive during the war—and barely escaped being killed or captured.