A Savage War

A Military History of the Civil War

Williamson Murray, Wayne Wei-Siang Hsieh

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781400889372
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: American Civil War History
• Index: History

How the Civil War changed the face of war The Civil War represented a momentous change in the character of war. It combined the projection of military might across a continent on a scale never before seen with an unprecedented mass mobilization of peoples. Yet despite the revolutionizing aspects of the Civil War, its leaders faced the same uncertainties and vagaries of chance that have vexed combatants since the days of Thucydides and the Peloponnesian War. A Savage War sheds critical new light on this defining chapter in military history.In a masterful narrative that propels readers from the first shots fired at Fort Sumter to the surrender of Robert E. Lee's army at Appomattox, Williamson Murray and Wayne Wei-siang Hsieh bring every aspect of the battlefield vividly to life. They show how this new way of waging war was made possible by the powerful historical forces unleashed by the Industrial Revolution and the French Revolution, yet how the war was far from being simply a story of the triumph of superior machines. Despite the Union's material superiority, a Union victory remained in doubt for most of the war. Murray and Hsieh paint indelible portraits of Abraham Lincoln, Ulysses S. Grant, William Tecumseh Sherman, and other major figures whose leadership, judgment, and personal character played such decisive roles in the fate of a nation. They also examine how the Army of the Potomac, the Army of Northern Virginia, and the other major armies developed entirely different cultures that influenced the war's outcome.A military history of breathtaking sweep and scope, A Savage War reveals how the Civil War ushered in the age of modern warfare.

CHAPTER 1

The Origins

In times of peace and prosperity cities and individuals alike follow higher standards, because they are not forced into a situation where they have to do what they do not want to do. But war is a stern teacher; in depriving them of the power of satisfying their daily wants, it brings most people’s minds down to the level of their actual circumstances.

—Thucydides, The History of the Peloponnesian War

At the end of the Peloponnesian War in the late fifth century BC, that greatest of all strategic and military historians, Thucydides, noted the following as the overarching cause of the terrible conflict that had destroyed so much of his world: “What made war inevitable was the growth of Athenian power and the fear which this caused in Sparta.”¹ So too might we not attribute the outbreak of the American Civil War to the growth of Northern power and the fear that it occasioned throughout much of the South? Indeed, John C. Calhoun’s proposal for a dual executive to allow the slave South to counterbalance growing Northern power cited as one precedent the classical examples of Sparta’s two kings.²

In the case of the Peloponnesian War, the opposing sides had developed starkly different social systems: Spartan power rested firmly on the enslavement of its Helot population; the Athenians, on the other hand, had developed into a vibrant and seaborne empire, the economic impulses of which rested on trade and industry. So too, wealth, social status, and the political framework of the southern American states rested on the institution of slavery, which had allowed them to produce the millions of bales of cotton on which the clothing mills of old and New England depended, but which had also retarded the growth of the South in other sectors. Meanwhile, the fruits of continental expansion, which by the late 1850s had reached the territories of the Dakota Sioux, and the opening up of unimagined agricultural wealth, had combined with the Industrial Revolution to provide the North with a rapidly increasing advantage in wealth and power over the slave states. The growing disparity between the two regions had not gone unnoticed among white Southerners, despite the shrillness of their declarations about the vibrancy of their civilization and the future potential of slavery.

Even in areas where the South made strides, such as the near quadrupling of the mileage of its railroad tracks in the 1850s, it fell further behind the North’s total. In that decade, Northern railroads laid down almost double the mileage than did those of the South,³ as the tentacles of those tracks knit the Midwest ever more closely to the eastern seaboard. Not only did this have a profound impact on the industrialization of the North, but it was also to provide the transportation necessary for the agricultural bounty that was to feed the explosive growth of the North’s population. In the South the Industrial Revolution lagged behind. The Southern slave economy remained dependent on the production of agricultural staples—tobacco, rice, sugar, and particularly “king cotton,” but like modern economies over reliant on a single natural resource such as oil, the South’s specialization in staple agriculture retarded the growth of an indigenous industrial economy.

Indeed, it was slavery, and slavery alone, that accounted for the steadily growing gap in the culture and attitudes between the two sections of the American state that the revolution of the colonies against Britain in 1775 had created. While both the free and slave states played important roles in a larger Industrial Revolution, so far based mostly in Britain, the slave society of the South set it apart from its Northern brethren. Contrary to popular imagination, the antebellum South fully participated in the rapid social and economic changes the Western world saw in the mid-nineteenth century. By Western European standards, the future states of the Confederacy possessed an impressive railroad network, high rates of literacy, a thriving civil society, and a vibrant political democracy (albeit one strictly restricted to white men). Nevertheless, free labor and the absence of a dominant agricultural staple facilitated the growth of Northern industry, agriculture, and transportation which justified growing Southern fears that they would at some date in the future find themselves submerged under the weight of Northern economic and political power.

Furthermore, rapid social changes in the North enabled the rise of an antislavery reform movement that aimed a dagger at the heart of the Southern social and racial order. While many Southern slaveholders believed with conviction that they had Christianized chattel slavery into a benign and godly institution (indeed, some had criticized the Spartans for excessive cruelty toward the Helots), the violent examples of slave revolts in the Haitian Revolution (1791–1804) and Nat Turner’s Rebellion in Virginia (1831) appeared to pose serious threats to the very fabric of Southern white society. Roughly a year before the 1860 presidential election that sent Lincoln to the White House with exclusively Northern votes, John Brown’s aborted raid on Harper’s Ferry on 16 October 1859, raised the alarm among white Southerners to a fevered pitch. Brown had earned a notorious reputation in the guerrilla warfare between free soil and proslavery settlers in “Bleeding Kansas,” and he stormed the Harper’s Ferry armory in the failed hope of raising and arming a slave rebellion. While responsible Northern politicians such as Lincoln condemned the raid, a significant and vocal Northern minority (including antiwar activist Henry David Thoreau) hailed Brown as a hero. Just as the Spartans in the midst of hostile Helot slaves saw Athenian ideas about Radical Democracy as a threat to their physical survival (fears eventually justified by the successful Theban effort to free the Helots and break Spartan power), Confederates saw similar perils if they remained coupled to an increasingly antislavery North.

Only the coming Civil War would reveal the true importance of Northern industrial superiority, but the Confederate nation-in-waiting had found threatening enough a changing American political system less willing to protect slavery. Not only did future Confederates see the free states gain an increasing advantage in sheer numbers—an important component of political power in the federal Union’s representative system of government—but it also saw the gradual collapse of a political system based around two national political parties, each of which needed both Northern and Southern votes to succeed. That fear, combined with a deep sense of the uniqueness of the South’s civilization and a belief that the Southern way of life was under siege resulted in the steady growth in the numbers of those who either tacitly or actively supported the movement toward secession. Yet there was considerable irony in such attitudes, for in terms of the nation’s political life, white Southerners controlled the Supreme Court; along with Northern sympathizers, they dominated the Senate; and they had maintained a solid control over the presidency for most of the two decades before the Civil War with either white Southerners or Southern sympathizers holding the office. And even the popularly elected House of Representatives was controllable as long as Northern and Southern Democrats retained a semblance of unity.

Nevertheless, the shrillness with which white Southerners defended their rights only served to underline their fear that they were losing control of their destiny. And they intimately tied that destiny to the continuation of slavery, the most inhumane of all of the institutions that marked the republic’s expansion across North America. William Seward, who eventually became a Republican Party political boss and served as secretary of state to Lincoln, caught that inhumanity in a chilling note in which he described a scene that he, his wife, and son witnessed in their progress through Virginia: “Ten naked little boys, between six and twelve years old, tied together, two and two, by their wrists, were all fastened to a long rope, and followed by a tall, gaunt white man, who, with his long lash, whipped up the sad and weary little procession, drove it to the horse-trough to drink, and thence to a shed, where they lay down on the ground and sobbed and moaned themselves to sleep.”⁴ All, purchased that day, were headed south to the slave markets of Richmond—most eventually to journey on to the plantations of the Deep South. That was the reality of an economic and political system which rested on the enslavement of human beings, whose labor it obtained with the whip and the lash.

The Founding Fathers had attempted to avoid or disguise the issue of slavery, at least in their most important political documents. They could do so, because while slavery existed in the North, and some Northern communities benefited from the slave trade, the institution did not form a crucial pillar of the social order—to use the terms of a modern historian, the North was a “society with slaves” before the Revolution, while the Southern colonies were true “slave societies.”⁵ Moreover, the distances between the individual colonies, as well as the parochialism of the new nation, made it relatively easy for Northerners to ignore the implications of the institution. And some of the Founding Fathers from the South hoped that the institution would gradually disappear. George Washington on his deathbed had freed his slaves. Few at the time were willing to defend the institution in public as a positive good in and of itself.

But two major contributions of the Industrial Revolution changed the status of and the attitudes toward slavery throughout the South. The first was Eli Whitney’s invention of the cotton gin, which by eliminating the obnoxious seeds in the cotton balls quickly made cotton a viable cash crop. Second was the rapid growth of the Industrial Revolution’s textile mills in Britain, and to a lesser extent in New England, which possessed an insatiable hunger for cotton to mass produce cloth in unheard of amounts. Thus, slavery became immensely profitable throughout the Deep South along the lowlands of the many rivers that drained into the Mississippi River and Gulf of Mexico. With fortunes at stake, slavery spread throughout the richest delta lands of Georgia, Tennessee, Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, and then into Texas.

But at the same time, revolutions in transportation, communications, and cultural values knitted together the United States in an unprecedented manner. Moreover, the telegraph reported events almost instantaneously to a literate and increasingly informed population, while transportation by rail and steamboat allowed many to see what others reported. No longer were the realities of slavery something Northerners could ignore. Some, particularly in the Democratic Party, supported the white Southern myth about the happiness of the slaves under the “benevolent” tutelage of their plantation masters. Some in the North hoped the problem would go away. Others came to believe that, if slavery were not an evil, then it represented a serious impediment to their interests and the economic growth of the nation. Finally, particularly in New England, a growing number of abolitionists decried slavery as an unmitigated evil. But at least until the 1840s that group remained relatively small, however socially prominent its leaders, and for the most part ineffective—a group confined largely to the states farthest from the South.

Toward the Abyss: The Political Origins of the War

Besides setting the overarching cause for the Peloponnesian War—the growing fear in Sparta of Athenian power—that made war inevitable, Thucydides set out for his readers the tangled course of events that contributed directly to the outbreak of the war in 431 BC, rather than any other year. Thus, to understand the American Civil War one must understand the contributing factors and events the led to the Civil War that eventually broke the Confederacy and redefined the relationship between the Federal government and the states—in other words the war that began in April 1861. The rapid expansion of American territory between independence and the outbreak of the Civil War provided the primary points of conflict between free soil and proslavery forces. American constitutional practice saw slavery as falling within the general police powers of individual states; the main questions centered on slavery’s status in new territories and states. Did Congress have the authority to prohibit slavery in territories before they achieved statehood? And how would the incorporation of new states affect the sectional balance of power in the Federal system, particularly in the Senate with its equal representation allotted to every state?

Before 1800, Tennessee and Kentucky had joined the Union as slave states, while the admission of Vermont had equalized the number of slave and nonslave states. Then, the Louisiana Purchase made available for settlement a wide span of territory ranging from Louisiana to Montana, but it was the southern portions of that purchase with its climate and soil particularly suitable for cultivation of cotton that attracted those willing to carve plantations out of the wilderness. Meanwhile, the soil and climate of the old Northwest territories (eventually Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, and Illinois), where Congress had prohibited slavery in the territorial phase of organization, attracted farmers from the North’s free states as well as from abroad. The Compromise of 1820 seemingly laid to rest the issue of slavery in the western and southern territories for the immediate future. With the exception of Missouri, admitted as a slave state in 1821, largely because its settlers had come up the Mississippi River from the south rather from the east and north, those territories lying north of the line 36°30′ were to be free, while those lying to the south would become slave states. Both North and South seemed willing to accept the agreement as a reasonable solution to what, even in 1820, was becoming a troubling issue. For the next two-and-a-half decades Americans got on with the business of continental expansion without too much friction over issues associated with slavery.

The Mexican Cession that resulted from the Mexican War broke the domestic truce between free and slave states, because it once again raised the question of slavery’s status in newly acquired territory. Sagacious politicians, North and South, had earlier avoided conflict with Mexico over the newly independent Republic of Texas, rightly fearing that the acquisition of Texas and other Mexican territories would reopen questions that the Missouri Compromise had seemed to resolve. Nevertheless, the sudden death of William Henry Harrison in 1841 led to the presidency of John Tyler, who had been selected by the Whigs as a cynical sop to planter interests in the Whig presidential ticket of 1840—a cynicism that came back to haunt the Whigs, because Tyler proved indifferent to Whig economic policies and defied the party’s leadership. Indeed, the leading Whig, Henry Clay, opposed Texas annexation precisely because he feared the consequences of another political debate over slavery in newly acquired American territory. Tyler failed in his bid to build a political base of support independent of both the Whigs and the Democrats, but the winner of the 1844 election, Democrat James K. Polk, set the acquisition of California as one of his top priorities—even if it required war with Mexico.

In Mexico, the young republic found an impediment to expansion more serious than what had previously hindered western expansion. Instead of fragmented Indian tribes bereft of imperial sponsorship, the United States would have to defeat a nation-state army fighting on its own terrain and a government determined to avoid humiliation. Fortunately for American arms, although not for the Union’s sectional balance, a newly professionalized officer corps showed its worth in Mexico. It was in Mexico where the post–War of 1812 officer corps, now mostly trained at a reinvigorated and reformed West Point, showed their worth as talented junior officers serving under the stolid Zachary Taylor and the brilliant Winfield Scott. These junior officers would later go on to serve as senior commanders during the Civil War. For example, Grant modeled his military bearing on the bluff and stolid persona of Taylor, while his own triumph at Vicksburg echoed the bold flanking movements of Scott during the Vera Cruz campaign. At the same time, Lee so impressed Scott with his daring reconnaissance missions and intellect that on the eve of the Civil War he would ask Lee to command what would become the Union Army of the Potomac—an offer Lee refused, with fateful consequences. However, Lee’s later campaign style would also show some of the boldness exhibited by his former commander.

The quick victories achieved by American arms had all the more importance because of the war’s controversial nature at home, especially in the North. Henry David Thoreau would spend a night in jail for refusing to pay taxes that he believed supported the war effort—an act of civil disobedience that would inspire future dissidents both at home and abroad. White Southerners supported the war for obvious reasons, but the strongly expansionist Jacksonians also believed in an economical and limited Federal government, which meant the war had to be won on the cheap. Furthermore, even within the officer corps, especially among Northerners, U. S. Grant was not alone in the sentiment he later reported in his memoirs, that “the war that resulted [was] one of the most unjust wars ever waged by a stronger nation against a weaker nation.”⁶ Moreover, as he rightly pointed out: “the Southern rebellion was largely the outgrowth of the Mexican War.”⁷

Why so? Basically, the war with Mexico upset a delicate political equilibrium between North and South, because slave-holding white Southerners, the most vocifer...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Endorsement
• Contents
• List of Maps
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1: The Origins
• 2: The War’s Strategic Framework
• 3: “And the War Came”
• 4: First Battles and the Making of Armies
• 5: Stillborn between Earth and Water: The Unfulfilled Promise of Joint Operations
• 6: The Confederacy Recovers, 1862
• 7: The Confederate Counter-Offensives, 1862
• 8: The War in the East, 1863
• 9: The War in the West, 1863
• 10: The Killing Time: The War in the East, 1864
• 11: Victory in the West, 1864
• 12: The Collapse of the Confederacy
• 13: The Civil War in History
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Further Reading
• Index