Download how the civil war became a revolution

ALSO BY RICHARD SLOTKIN
NONFICTION
Regeneration through Violence:
The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600–1860
(1973) (Albert J. Beveridge Award—American Historical Association,
National Book Award Finalist, New York Times Notable Book of the Year)
So Dreadfull a Judgment: Puritan Responses to
King Philip’s War, 1675–1677, with James K. Folsom (1978)
The Fatal Environment: The Myth of the Frontier in
the Age of Industrialization, 1800–1890
(1985) (Little Big Horn Associates Literary Award,
New York Times Notable Book of the Year)
Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier
in Twentieth-Century America
(1992) (National Book Award Finalist,
New York Times Notable Book of the Year)
Lost Battalions: The Great War and the
Crisis of American Nationality (2005)
No Quarter: The Battle of the Crater, 1864
(2009)
FICTION
The Crater (1980) (New York Times Notable Book of the Year)
The Return of Henry Starr (1988)
Abe: A Novel of the Young Lincoln
(2000) (Michael Shaara Award for Civil War Fiction, Salon Best Book,
New York Times Notable Book of the Year)
THE
LONG ROAD TO
ANTIETAM
HOW THE CIVIL WAR BECAME
A REVOLUTION
RICHARD SLOTKIN
LIVERIGHT PUBLISHING CORPORATION
a division of
W. W. NORTON & COMPANY | NEW YORK LONDON
For Iris
CONTENTS
LIST OF MAPS
INTRODUCTION
A NOTE ON MILITARY TERMINOLOGY
PART ONE
TURNING POINT: MILITARY STALEMATE
AND STRATEGIC INITIATIVES
JULY 1862
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
Lincoln’s Strategy: Emancipation and the McClellan Problem
McClellan’s Strategy: Irresistible Force
President Davis’s Strategic Offensive
PART TWO
THE CONFEDERATE OFFENSIVE
AUGUST 1862
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
Self-Inflicted Wounds: The Union High Command
Both Ends Against the Middle: The Campaign of Second Bull Run
McClellan’s Victory
PART THREE
THE INVASION OF MARYLAND
SEPTEMBER 2–15, 1862
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
Lee Decides on Invasion
McClellan Takes the Offensive
The Battles of South Mountain
The Forces Gather
PART FOUR
THE BATTLE OF ANTIETAM
SEPTEMBER 16–18, 1862
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
Preparation for Battle
The Battle of Antietam: Hooker’s Fight, 6:00–9:00
The Battle of Antietam: Sumner’s Fight, 9:00–Noon
The Battle of Antietam: The Edge of Disaster, Noon to Evening
The Day When Nothing Happened
AM
PART FIVE
THE REVOLUTIONARY CRISIS
SEPTEMBER 22–NOVEMBER 7, 1862
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
Lincoln’s Revolution
The General and the President
Dubious Battle: Everything Changed, Nothing Settled
Chronology
Antietam Order of Battle
Notes
Selected Bibliography
Index
LIST OF MAPS
••
MAP 1:
THE VIRGINIA THEATER, JULY 1–SEPT. 9, 1862
MAP 2:
LEE DIVIDES HIS ARMY, SEPT. 9–13
MAP 3:
SOUTH MOUNTAIN, SEPT. 14–15
MAP 4:
ANTIETAM, 6:30–7:30 AM
MAP 5:
ANTIETAM, 7:30–9:00 AM
MAP 6:
ANTIETAM, 9:30–10:00 AM
MAP 7:
ANTIETAM, 10:30 AM–NOON
MAP 8:
ANTIETAM, NOON–1:00 PM
MAP 9:
ANTIETAM, 3:00–5:00 PM
INTRODUCTION
T
point of the Civil War. The defeat
of Lee’s army frustrated the Confederacy’s best chance to win the war on the battlefield. The Union
army’s narrow victory on September 17, 1862, enabled Abraham Lincoln to issue the Emancipation
Proclamation, a political act that transformed the war and the future of United States by binding the
defense of the Union to the destruction of slavery. Paradoxically, the victory also allowed Lincoln to
fire the man who won the battle, Major General George McClellan, and thereby begin the military
reorganization that would in the end produce victory for the Union.
In fact, neither the military nor the political results of the battle were decisive. The military strength
of the Confederacy was not substantially weakened by the defeat. The political and military benefits
of emancipation would prove substantial, perhaps decisive, in the long run. But in the shorter term the
costs offset the benefits. Emancipation gave the disorganized Democratic opposition an issue around
which to rally: the defense of White supremacy. And although the president’s proclamation made it
more difficult for the British to recognize the Confederacy, the policy of Lord Palmerston’s
government was ultimately determined by a hardheaded calculation of the Confederacy’s military
prospects. In short, after Antietam the outcome of the war was still uncertain and would hinge on
policies not yet enacted and battles still to be fought.
The significance of Antietam lies not in the battle itself but in the campaign that produced it. That
campaign was the result of a radical turn in the strategies of both Union and Confederacy—a series of
political and military decisions made over a four-month period in the summer and fall of 1862 that
transformed the policies, principles, and purposes that had hitherto governed the conduct of the war.
Before Antietam it was still possible for Americans to imagine a compromise settlement of sectional
differences. After Antietam, and the Emancipation Proclamation, the only way the war could end was
by the outright victory of one side over the other. Either way, the result would be a revolutionary
transformation of American politics and society.
The road to Antietam, however, began long before September 3, 1862, when General Lee gave orders
for the invasion of Maryland. It had, in fact, begun nearly two months earlier, during the first two
weeks of July, when—after six months of intense military engagement by land and naval forces all
around the Confederate periphery—Presidents Lincoln and Davis were compelled to acknowledge that
their existing strategies were incapable of producing decisive results, and that new and more radical
policies were necessary.
HE BATTLE OF ANTIETAM HAS LONG BEEN CONSIDERED THE TURNING
than the mechanics of military operations. All war is a form of politics, in which
force and violence substitute for the civil exercise of power. That is especially true of the American
Civil War, which was not fought over territory but over fundamental questions of social order,
political organization, and human rights. Through strategic planning, the leaders of the warring parties
STRATEGY IS MORE
define the aims and purposes of the conflict and develop a combination of political actions and
military operations designed to control the action and achieve their objectives—which are always
ultimately political.
Of course, strategy is not everything in war or politics. It is a truism of military science that no
strategic or tactical plan outlives the first actual combat. The Antietam campaign is a pluperfect
illustration of that maxim, in that almost nothing about it went as its planners intended. Presidents and
generals cannot control the course of events that their orders may initiate. Their purposes and
intentions will be crossed by those of their opponents and complicated by the motives and
commitments of the people who do the actual fighting and the civilian societies that support or fail to
support the war effort. Nevertheless, in modern warfare the role of a nation’s political and military
leadership is central. The ideas and intentions of these individuals shape the decision whether, when,
and how to go to war or organize a campaign; their commands set the action in motion, determine its
initial lines of operation, and set the conditions under which the conflict will begin. In studying the
thoughts and actions of presidents and generals we gain insight into the motives and values that make
wars and help to determine their course.
While it is easy to see how politics shapes strategy through the whole course of a war, it is harder to
trace the connection between politics and the tactical decisions that shape war at the operational level.
Thus most histories of the Antietam campaign treat the political decisions of the rival presidents and
the operational decisions of their generals as if these occurred in separate spheres of thought and
action—overlapping at the edges, but essentially different. Historians generally acknowledge that
the outcome of the Battle of Antietam was given a vital political significance when Lincoln used the
Union’s narrow victory as the occasion to issue the Emancipation Proclamation. But in fact political
concerns and priorities shaped the operational decision making of both presidents, and of their army
commanders, at every stage of the campaign; and the interaction of politics with military operations
drove leaders on each side to adopt increasingly radical and even revolutionary policies. The Long
Road to Antietam differs from previous studies of the campaign in that it offers a narrative that
integrates military and political developments and shows how each played with and against the other
as events unfolded.
This book also differs from its predecessors in seeing the Civil War as a genuinely revolutionary
crisis in American history. I think we cannot appreciate the character and significance of the strategic
decisions taken by Lincoln and Davis unless we understand that they were not acting as the heads of
stable national governments, defending well-established constitutional systems, but as leaders of
embattled political movements whose regimes were vulnerable to the play of uncontrollable social
and political forces. Both presidents would have to deal with the threat of new secessions by
disaffected state governments and the threat of popular uprisings against their governments. Events
would pressure both Lincoln and Davis to stretch their constitutional authority to or beyond the
breaking point, to intensify the scope of combat operations beyond all precedent, and to inflict loss
and suffering on civilian populations as an instrument of policy.
Lincoln’s decision to issue the Emancipation Proclamation was the culmination of this movement: to
defeat the Confederacy’s political revolution he would inaugurate a social revolution, with class and
race consequences far more like those of, say, the French or Russian revolutions than the Napoleonic
Wars. The Proclamation was an unprecedented assertion of presidential and Federal power, which
altered forever the constitutional balance of powers. Although it freed only those slaves held in Rebel
territory, its application would legally annihilate several billion dollars in property. It would
revolutionize the economy, social order, and politics of one-half of the country; and that
transformation would be nationalized in the longer term, as freed slaves left the South and racial
issues became a critical factor in the social, cultural, and political life of the entire nation. The Civil
War may have ended as (in Eric Foner’s phrase) an “unfinished revolution”—but revolution it
certainly was.
But before he could put his new strategy into effect, Lincoln would have to overcome the most
severe challenge of military to civilian authority in American history. Almost from the start of
hostilities there had been movements in Washington to transfer the president’s effective power as
commander in chief to a professional soldier, who would be legally appointed to a temporary and
limited dictatorship. That movement had found a focus and an active agent in General George B.
McClellan, commander of the armies entrusted with the defense of the capital; and it would rise to the
level of a explicit threat during the summer and fall of 1862.
The fact that, in the end, McClellan never acted to seize control has led most historians to discount
the seriousness of the threat he represented. But historical actors, ignorant of the outcome, have to act
with the full range of potential outcomes in mind. If we want to understand the quality and the content
of decision making by Davis, Lincoln, and their military advisers, we need to know more than how
things actually turned out. Any historical crisis has more potential outcomes than will actually be
realized. Many of these possibilities have been codified in those lists of “might-have-beens” that
historians and history buffs love to compile. The Antietam campaign is rife with such moments, most
of them having to do with purely military events. What would have happened if McClellan had not
accidentally learned Lee’s plans through the finding of the lost order, or had moved with greater speed
to attack? What if Lee had chosen retreat instead of battle? Some of these are questions of real
importance and will be addressed in this book.
Beyond the tactical might-have-beens are deeper questions, arising from the political crisis with
which the presidents and their generals had to deal. Davis would be disappointed in his belief that a
Confederate invasion would produce a political revolution in the Border States and an electoral
revulsion against the administration. Was that failure inevitable, or were the decisions of Davis and
Lee based on a realistic assessment of their chances to win the war on the battlefield in September
1862? In the end, the conflict between Lincoln and McClellan would not end in a military takeover.
But Lincoln lacked the advantage of hindsight, and this book assesses the potential menace of the
McClellan problem as Lincoln would have seen it.
History would have taught Lincoln that the political disruption of a revolutionary crisis, and the
social violence of civil war, almost inevitably create the potential for the overthrow or abdication of
civil authority in favor of a military dictatorship that promises to restore order. The Senate of Rome
had surrendered republican powers to Caesar and his imperial successors. The English Revolution of
1640–52, which overthrew the monarchy and established a Parliamentary government, had ended in
the dictatorship of Oliver Cromwell. The French Republic established by the Revolution of 1789 had
given way in 1799 to the dictatorship of General Napoleon Bonaparte; and history repeated itself sixty
years later when the Second Republic, formed in 1849, was overthrown by Napoleon III in 1852. Ten
years after that debacle it was hardly inconceivable that the same fate might overtake the American
republic.
What Lincoln also knew was that from the moment McClellan first assumed high command, in July
1861, the general had incessantly schemed and conspired and politicked to gain control of the
administration. In August and September the president would come to believe that McClellan was
deliberately sabotaging the war effort, and that the ideas espoused at army headquarters were
increasingly disloyal and by some accounts treasonous. The threat of what Lincoln’s aide John Hay
called “the McClellan conspiracy” was serious, and a central theme of this study will be to show how
Lincoln’s decision making at every stage of the Antietam campaign was distorted by his need to deal
with that threat.
Lincoln’s conflict with McClellan was far more dangerous to constitutional government than the
later clash between President Truman and General MacArthur during the Korean War. Truman
enjoyed the presumption that the president has unquestioned constitutional authority as commander in
chief to direct military policy—a presumption Lincoln did not enjoy in 1862. Moreover, the LincolnMcClellan conflict occurred in the midst of civil war and revolution, when the authority of
constitutional government itself was under challenge; and McClellan’s army was not half a world
away but was entrusted with defense of the president, his government, and the capital of the nation.
Even a failed or abortive coup attempt by a few disgruntled officers would have done severe, perhaps
irreparable, harm to the Union cause, and set a dangerous precedent for the future of constitutional
government.
In the end Lincoln would succeed in transforming Federal strategy and putting the Union on the path
to both victory and emancipation; and he would settle the question of civilian supremacy over the
military in terms that would serve Harry Truman nearly a century later. Ironically, his initial attempt
to both deal with McClellan and prepare the ground for the Emancipation Proclamation would give
Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee their best opportunity to win the war in a single campaign.
THE STRATEGIC SETTING:
MILITARY OPERATIONS IN THE WAR’S FIRST YEAR
The secession of the Southern state was a political revolution—a fundamental disruption of national
government, which challenged all existing constitutional relations. So too, in its way, was the decision
of President Lincoln’s government to suppress the secession movement by force of arms. The
governments of states in the upper South denied his right to use force against the rebellious states and
joined the secession. The constitutional authority for his action was held questionable by many
Northern leaders as well as partisans of the new Confederacy; while even staunch Unionists like
Democratic senator Stephen A. Douglas and Republican editor Horace Greeley questioned whether it
was feasible, wise, or safe for a republican government to undertake so vast a political suppression.
The revolutionary character of the moment was obscured by the fact that both sides justified their
actions by an appeal to conservative values. Each claimed to be acting on perfectly legal constitutional
grounds, with the aim of preserving republican institutions and social order in their traditional form.
They backed these rhetorical claims with policies that reflected the preponderance of genuinely
conservative inclinations. The Confederate constitution retained the essential elements and wording of
the Federal constitution, and its departures for the most part simply made explicit long-standing
Southern interpretations of the original text. Unionists and Confederates also chose “conservative”
presidents to lead them. Jefferson Davis had been among the more reluctant secessionists and was one
of the few who defended secession as a constitutionally protected remedy rather than an assertion of
the natural right of revolution. Among Republicans Lincoln was considered moderate to conservative
on the slavery question, willing to give guarantees of protection to the institution in the states where it
already existed. He was adamant on only two points: the specific insistence that slavery be banned
from any new territory acquired by the United States; and the general principle that slavery be
recognized as both a moral and a political wrong, and set on a path to “ultimate extinction” by
peaceful means, at some indeterminate future date.
The strategies initially adopted by Lincoln and Davis reflected their wish that the conflict be
resolved by some kind of compromise that would preserve the values and social order each man
valued. They hoped that hostilities could be brought to an early end by the combination of successful
but limited military actions with efforts to conciliate and compromise political differences. A few
substantial and impressive victories might teach the North the futility of invasion and conquest or
convince the South that the costs of resistance would be unbearable. If such successes were coupled
with political measures designed to show that a peace settlement would not endanger vital interests,
they might yield some kind of compromise peace.
So in defining the Confederacy’s war aims, Davis denied any intention to invade the territory or
threaten the political integrity of those states that remained in the Union. Davis was willing to give
assurances that an independent Confederacy would not endanger vital Northern interests, for example
by offering to sign a treaty guaranteeing the free passage of the Mississippi for the produce of farmers
in the Ohio and upper Mississippi River valleys. Faced with the costs of a long and bloody war,
reasonable men at the North might make peace if, as Davis said, “All we ask is to be left alone.”1
Since the North’s primary war aim was to restore the Union by force of arms. Lincoln had no choice
but to assume the offensive. His strategy envisioned powerful military offensives on several fronts,
designed to inflict demoralizing defeats on Southern armies, coupled with a blockade that would
inflict significant but not ruinous damage on Southern economic interests. However, these offensive
measures would be combined with a civil policy designed to reassure Southerners that their states
could negotiate a return to “the Union as it was,” with their rights and civil standing unimpaired.
Central to this conservative policy was Lincoln’s declared intent to leave slavery untouched in those
states where it now existed. His stance was principled: the Constitution he hoped to preserve
recognized and protected slave property. It was also politic: by declaring his intention to respect the
rights of slaveholders, Lincoln was able to hold or win the allegiance of the slaveholding Border
States of Maryland, Delaware, and Kentucky (which had remained in the Union). It also allowed him
to make a plausible appeal to whatever peace or pro-union sentiment existed in the Confederacy. In
his first message to Congress, on December 3, 1861, he therefore declared that his policy would be to
leave slavery alone, so that the war would not degenerate into “a remorseless revolutionary contest.”2
Lincoln and Davis understood that a compromise settlement would be extraordinarily difficult to
achieve, given the depth and intensity of their disagreement on the fundamental issues: the right of
any state to secede from the Union, and the question whether slavery should be perpetuated and
extended or put on a path to “ultimate extinction.” Davis would accept no peace that did not concede
Southern independence; Lincoln would reach no settlement that did not achieve the restoration of the
Union and repudiation of the supposed “right of secession.” Both therefore hoped that early and
decisive victories on the battlefield would degrade, if not break, the enemy’s political will to resist
and bring them to make peace on acceptable terms.
The civil and military leadership of Union and Confederacy tried from the first to develop viable
strategies for putting these nascent forces in play. It was clear that the Confederacy would have to
stand on the defensive; clear as well that the Federals would have to take the offensive if they hoped to
compel the South’s return to the Union. But it was not at all obvious just how a strategic offensive
might be conducted, or whether an armed reconquest of the South was even possible. Lieutenant
General Winfield Scott, general in chief of the Federal army and an officer of vast military knowledge
and experience, doubted whether the North could muster and equip enough land forces to successfully
invade and occupy the South. At the outset, the only element on which Lincoln and Scott agreed was
the necessity of establishing a naval blockade of Southern ports, which Lincoln declared on April 19,
five days after the surrender of Fort Sumter. The press derided Scott’s hope that the economic
strangulation inflicted by a blockade—“Scott’s Anaconda”—would bring the South to terms.
Military operations during the first phase of the conflict, which lasted from April 14 to the late
summer of 1861, were sporadic, opportunistic, and badly organized. The firing on Fort Sumter on
April 14, 1861, and Lincoln’s call for troops, had brought out the militias of states North and South,
and waves of recruits for newly formed volunteer regiments. But it was slow and frustrating work to
form these gangs of enthusiasts into effective military units. The Regular Army of the United States
was too small to provide a core combat force or an adequate supply of officers for either side. The
state militias were generally neglected, poorly armed, and officered by local magnates and politicos. It
would take each side months to recruit, equip, and concentrate enough regiments to form effective
field armies; and their training was so poor that it was difficult if not impossible for commanders to
maneuver troop combinations larger than a brigade of four or five regiments.
A premature attempt to take the offensive ended in disaster at the First Battle of Bull Run, on July
21, 1861. Ill-trained Federal troops were unable to mount organized attacks or conduct an orderly
retreat when repulsed. The Federal army, commanded by General Irvin McDowell, simply fell apart,
but managed to escape because the badly trained Rebel army was too disorganized by victory to
pursue.
While each side was forming its field armies, the rival governments contended for control of
Missouri, Kentucky, Maryland, and the western counties of Virginia, where slavery existed but Union
sentiment remained strong. The struggle was made with a mixture of political chicanery, semilegal
subversion, and small-scale actions by hastily gathered military forces, the proportions differing in
each state. In Missouri Unionists in effect staged a military coup against the secessionist governor and
legislature and won control of the northern half of the state. In Maryland, Lincoln mixed appeals to
Unionist politicians with the military occupation of Annapolis, Baltimore, and the rail lines to
Washington, and the threat to arrest secessionist legislators. In the end, the Maryland legislature
rejected secession. In Kentucky the struggle was mostly political, though both sides smuggled arms to
their supporters and both concentrated military forces on the state’s borders anticipating invasion. The
standoff lasted until September 1861, when, under threat of invasion, the Unionist legislature declared
for the North. Only in western Virginia did success hinge entirely on action by regular military forces.
In June 1861 a small Union army under General George McClellan crossed the Ohio River into the
mountains and, in a campaign of maneuver punctuated by two small but decisive battles, drove
Confederate forces out of the region. McClellan’s success stood out sharply, juxtaposed with the Bull
Run disaster and the disorder everywhere else, and led Lincoln to summon him to Washington.
McClellan took command of the Federal forces there on July 26 and became the president’s most
influential military adviser. In consultation with Lincoln and General Scott, he developed a general
plan of operations, dated August 2, which laid down the general course of action Union armies would
follow in their strategic offensive. Many of the plan’s specific proposals would prove impractical, and
McClellan’s ideas would undergo numerous changes before they were finally put into effect.
Nevertheless, certain general lines of operation laid down in McClellan’s plan would become the basis
of Federal strategy. The naval blockade, which had already been instituted, would be pressed by
staging a series of amphibious operations to capture and hold key positions along the Atlantic and
Gulf coasts. These beachheads would serve as supply bases for the blockading fleet and allow Union
forces to seize or control access to Southern seaports. The invasion of the South would follow three
primary lines of advance. On the Virginia front, the Army of the Potomac under McClellan’s direct
command would advance against the Rebel capital of Richmond. An army commanded by General
Don Carlos Buell, then forming around Louisville, Kentucky, would advance against Rebel forces
based on Nashville in middle Tennessee—then turn east to capture Chattanooga, cutting the shortest
rail link between Virginia and the Confederate West and liberating the pro-Union population there. A
third army, or rather a group of armies and a fleet of navy gunboats, commanded by General Henry W.
Halleck, would begin an offensive to recover the Mississippi River Valley—an army under General
John Pope operating on the west bank of the river while another under U.S. Grant advanced on the
eastern side.3
Lincoln pressed his generals to begin operations in the late summer and fall of 1861. However, none
of the army commanders were willing to do so. All three believed it was unwise to risk a major battle
before their forces were fully trained, organized and equipped. Halleck and Buell also needed time to
arrange for transport and the supplies that would allow them to operate in the vast spaces of the
western theater. Their objections were well founded: offensive operations were far more demanding
and difficult than the defensive for raw troops and untried army staffs to organize and conduct.
However, as we will see, McClellan’s resistance was also driven by less reasonable factors.
The result was that, until January 1862, it was impossible for Lincoln to put any strategic concept
into effect. However, the preparations made in the latter half of 1861 allowed Union forces to open a
multipronged strategic offensive all around the Confederate periphery, starting in the winter of 1861–
62 and culminating on July 1, 1862.
The opening gambits were a series of joint operations by the army and navy to seize key positions
along the Atlantic coast. On November 7, 1861, they captured Port Royal, South Carolina, and soon
gained control of the Sea Islands off the coasts of Georgia and South Carolina. Three months later, on
February 1, a force under Brigadier General Ambrose Burnside entered the North Carolina sounds. It
captured the Confederate force defending Roanoke Island on February 7, destroying the small
defensive fleet. With complete naval superiority, Burnside would spend the next four months
capturing the major towns along the coast, from Elizabeth City southward to Beaufort. The threat of
invasions emanating from these Atlantic enclaves tied substantial numbers of Southern troops to local
defense and limited the numbers that could be concentrated in the field armies.
While these operations went forward, another amphibious expedition, the largest of all, was
organized to capture New Orleans. A fleet of mortar boats was sent in March 1862 to reinforce the
navy’s West Gulf Squadron and provide the big guns that would reduce the Confederate forts
defending the city. A division of Union infantry was specially recruited and sent south to provide an
initial garrison once the place was taken.
While the coastal operations were under way, Halleck’s and Buell’s armies were on the move in
Missouri and Kentucky. The Confederates had a field army under General Albert Sidney Johnston
facing Buell and defending Nashville, and two fortified posts, Forts Henry and Donelson, blocking a
southward advance by U. S. Grant’s army of Halleck’s command via the Tennessee and Cumberland
rivers. Grant’s infantry, supported by navy gunboats, captured Fort Henry on February 6. Grant then
made a rapid cross-country march to surround Fort Donelson, which surrendered on February 16 after
a hard fight. Grant’s victories compromised the Confederate defensive line and forced Johnston’s
army to retreat. Buell took Nashville on February 25 and marched with painful slowness to join forces
with Grant, whose army was isolated in an advanced position on the Tennessee River, at Pittsburg
Landing, Tennessee. Before Buell could get there, the Confederates under Johnston pulled their forces
together and staged a surprise attack on Grant’s army. Grant managed to salvage a victory in the
ensuing Battle of Shiloh (April 7–8), at horrendous cost to both armies. The armies of Grant and Buell
were then combined under Halleck’s command and, after another painfully slow advance, captured the
vital railroad junction of Corinth, Mississippi, on May 30.
While Halleck was moving against Corinth, Union naval forces under Admirals David Farragut and
David Porter undertook a futile bombardment of Confederate forts below New Orleans from April 18
to April 24. On April 25 the fleet ran past the forts and it captured New Orleans on April 30, isolating
the forts and forcing their surrender. The Union now had possession of the largest city and greatest
seaport in the South, and it seemed possible for the navy to drive north and join forces with Halleck,
clearing the Mississippi River in the process.
Operations under McClellan on the Virginia front took much longer to develop, for reasons that bear
further discussion. But on March 17 the navy began transporting McClellan’s Army of the Potomac,
120,000 strong, to Fort Monroe on the Virginia Peninsula—the tongue of land between the York and
James rivers. The first skirmishes occurred on April 5, as McClellan moved against a Confederate
trench line that spanned the Peninsula southeast from Yorktown. (Grant’s fight at Shiloh came two
days later.) Fort Monroe was only fifty miles from Richmond, but McClellan advanced with
excruciating slowness. It took from April 5 to June 2 for his army to reach the Richmond suburbs—
while fifteen hundred miles southwest Halleck’s army crawled at a similar turtle’s pace toward
Corinth. Now McClellan was in position for a decisive battle, with an army of over 100,000.
The War Department considered that McClellan’s prospects, when combined with the achievement
of Halleck’s western armies and the navy’s successes at New Orleans and the Carolinas, gave such
assurance of victory that it suspended recruitment to save money.
Then a series of bold Confederate countermoves, beginning in May and ending July 1, reversed the
course of events.
On the Richmond front, General Robert E. Lee assumed command of Confederate forces on June 2.
Rather than stand a siege by McClellan’s superior infantry force and heavy artillery, Lee decided to
seize the initiative and attack. He was aided by the operations of General Thomas J. “Stonewall”
Jackson in the Shenandoah Valley. With a small command of about 15,000 men, Jackson had
rampaged up and down the Shenandoah Valley from May 8 to June 9, defeating the Union forces
holding the Valley, shaking the Union army’s hold on northern Virginia, and appearing to threaten
Washington itself. Reinforcements that ought to have gone to McClellan were distracted into a futile
pursuit of Jackson. During the first week of June, Jackson broke contact with his pursuers, and Lee
ordered him to bring his Valley army to Richmond. When Jackson arrived, Lee’s force would be
increased to about 95,000 men, nearly equal to McClellan’s 105,000. Moreover, Federal units were in
a bad position, divided by the Chickahominy River, with four corps to the south and only one to the
north defending the army’s line of supply.
Lee executed a daring tactical maneuver, using a fraction of his army to hold the line south of the
Chickahominy and throwing two-thirds of his infantry, including Jackson’s troops, against the lone
Federal V Corps north of the river. In the Seven Days Battles that followed (June 25–July 1), Lee
smashed V Corps, compromised McClellan’s supply line, and forced him to retreat to Harrison’s
Landing on the James River, leaving behind his wounded, thousands of prisoners, and vast stores of
equipment with which Lee would reequip his army.
At the same time in the western theater, offensive operations by the Union army group under General
Henry W. Halleck were stultified by poor leadership and tenuous logistics. Halleck ordered Buell’s
army to take up its original mission, which had been the invasion of east Tennessee and the capture of
Chattanooga. But thanks to the concentration against Corinth, Buell would have to begin his advance
from a point much farther from his goal than Louisville, along lateral lines exposed to Rebel cavalry
raids. Meanwhile, Grant was ordered to prepare an advance against Vicksburg, the next major bastion
on the Mississippi River. However, he was unable to begin his offensive, because he had to send
several divisions to protect Buell’s supply line.
As a result, the Confederate field armies in the theater were able to break contact with the Federals
and maneuver freely. In mid-July—with Lee’s force watching an immobilized McClellan—General
Braxton Bragg, senior Confederate commander in the west, proposed a theater-wide offensive. He
would shift most of his Army of Tennessee, 35,000 men strong, eastward by rail from Tupelo,
Mississippi, to Chattanooga, easily outstripping Buell. Then, in conjunction with the small army in
eastern Tennessee, led by General Kirby Smith, he would invade Kentucky. A victory there might
compel Buell to abandon central Tennessee, and might even cause Kentuckians to reject their Unionist
government and change sides.
the Civil War had reached a turning point. The strategies that had governed the
actions of both sides for the first year of the war had exhausted their potential for producing decisive
results. There was a brief moment of equipoise, a military standoff during which Presidents Lincoln
and Davis and their military advisers could assess the lessons learned in a year of warfare and
consider new military and political measures that might lead on to victory. Each president would
reorganize his military commands and commit them to a new and more intensive program of
offensive operations. Each would also adopt a more radical political course, taking actions and
adopting policies that would test the limitations of the constitutional governments he served.
Although Confederate forces had managed to check the wave of Union offensives that had begun in
January, the power of those offensives had taught President Davis that the South could not preserve
slavery and independence by a purely defensive strategy. In the first two weeks of July 1862, Davis
and General Lee began discussing the possibility of adopting a new and more radical strategy: a shift
in military operations from the defensive to the offensive posture. By July 13 Davis would have
authorized simultaneous counteroffensives by his three main field armies, whose ultimate goal was to
disrupt and derange the political order that sustained the Union war effort. They would invade the
slaveholding Border States of Maryland and Kentucky and invite their citizens to rise and throw off
the yoke of Yankee oppression; and by raiding into Northern territory, they would bring home to the
THUS IN JULY OF 1862
Northern people the pain and cost of war and so persuade them to reject Lincoln and the Republican
Party in the upcoming midterm elections.
At the same moment, the failure of the Union offensives had made it clear to Lincoln that the forces
deployed had failed to weaken the Confederacy’s political will or power to resist; nor had the spirit of
compromise been awakened by his assurances that slave property would be safe in a restored Union.
Between June 28, when he first learned the dimensions of McClellan’s defeat, and July 12, when he
returned from a deeply disturbing conference with McClellan, Lincoln made a series of decisions that
would transform Federal strategy in the most fundamental way. The centerpiece of his new strategy
was the political decision to declare a general emancipation of all slaves held in Confederate territory.
The effect of such a proclamation would be to make a compromise peace impossible and commit the
Union to a war of subjugation. It would therefore entail a thoroughgoing reorganization of the military
command, a drastic increase in force size, and an ambitious expansion of the army’s strategic mission.
But Lincoln could not put this new strategy into effect until he had resolved “the McClellan
problem.”
A NOTE ON
MILITARY TERMINOLOGY
F
OR READERS UNFAMILIAR WITH MILITARY TERMINOLOGY, OR WITH
the organization of Civil War armies,
some brief definitions and descriptions may be useful.
CIVIL WAR MILITARY UNITS
The
basic unit of Civil War military organization was the regiment, usually raised by state
governments and recruited from a particular city or district. The initial strength of a regiment was
1,000–1,200 officers and men, but disease shrank that number before a unit reached the field, after
which casualties and desertions took their toll. Veteran regiments in the Antietam campaign might
number 150 or fewer, while “rookie” regiments mustered nearly a thousand. A regiment was supposed
to be commanded by a colonel, but because of illness, wounds, or other causes, command often fell to
lower-ranking officers.
A brigade is a group of four or five regiments, with an attached artillery battery. Brigades were
supposed to be commanded by brigadier generals, and in the Confederate armies they generally were.
But the Union was slow to grant general’s stars, so many Federal brigades were led by colonels. The
Confederate army was more assiduous than the Federals about organizing brigades by state but was
not always able to do so. Rebel brigades were known by the name of their commander (for example,
Hood’s Brigade) or by an officially designated nickname (Stonewall Brigade). Union brigades were
designated by number, though some earned unofficial nicknames: for example, the Iron Brigade and
the Irish Brigade.
A division is a group of brigades. In the Antietam campaign, Confederate divisions ranged between
four and six brigades, and were typically commanded by major generals; while Union divisions had
three or four brigades and were commanded by colonels and brigadiers as well as major generals.
Confederate divisions were named for their commanders; Union divisions were numbered.
A corps or army corps is a group of divisions. Two or more corps were sometimes combined to form
a wing. During the Antietam campaign, the corps structure of Lee’s army was not yet firmly
established. Although Generals Longstreet and Jackson had commanded groups of divisions for
months before Antietam, Lee had often altered the composition of their commands in response to
events. How and why he did so is part of the story that follows. However, Lee consistently followed
the principle of corps command, which was to delegate control of large-scale tactical operations to a
single trusted commander with the rank of lieutenant general. Union corps were smaller than
Confederate corps and usually commanded by major generals. When Confederate corps were finally
established, they would be named for their commanders, while Union corps were numbered.
An army is a group of corps. Until 1864, the Federal government refused to authorize any grade
higher than major general. Hence Union armies were commanded by major generals, while
Confederate armies were led by generals or “full generals.” Union armies were named after rivers,
Southern armies after the territories they were initially assigned to defend. Thus McClellan’s force
was called the Army of the Potomac, while Lee’s was the Army of Northern Virginia.
The basic artillery unit was the battery, consisting of four to six horse-drawn guns and their
supporting equipment and ammunition, which was carried in wheeled limber-chests and supply
wagons. Each battery was divided into two or more sections that might maneuver separately in action.
Batteries were administratively organized into regiments and battalions, but in practice most were
distributed to brigades and divisions as autonomous units. Lightweight, short-range batteries of
smoothbore cannons (some called “Napoleons”) were attached to brigades for action with the infantry.
Divisions, corps, and the army also disposed of artillery reserves, which included both smoothbores
and longer-range pieces with rifled barrels, which fired heavier-weight shells. At long ranges (800–
1,800 yards), guns fired solid shot or explosive shells of various sizes, which were effective against
infantry and enemy batteries. Exploding case-shot—a hollow shell packed with six large lead or iron
balls—was used against infantry at ranges of 500 to 800 yards. The deadliest antipersonnel
ammunition was canister, a cylinder of thin metal packed with 100–120 lead or iron balls bedded in
sawdust. A cannon firing canister was like a giant shotgun, which was devastating at ranges up to 400
yards but could be effective up to 600 yards.
MILITARY TERMINOLOGY
Strategy is commonly used to describe large-scale military planning, from “grand strategy,” which
may be international in scope, to the planning of an entire war, to the design of a military campaign
for the conquest of a region or theater of operations. In this book, strategy refers to the planning of a
war as a whole, in which the use of military force is systematically tied to ideas about the nation’s war
aims—that is, the political objectives for which the war is being fought.
Operations are the actual movements planned or actually made by armies. A campaign is a series of
operations designed to achieve a significant objective, such as the capture of a major city or the
destruction of an opposing army. The region in which a campaign plays out is called a theater of
operations. Tactics are the movements and actions of military units when in contact with the enemy.
Some of the operational and tactical maneuvers described in this book may require definition. Civil
War armies fought in lines. The basic infantry weapon was the single-shot muzzle-loaded riflemusket, and the only way to deliver massed fire on the battlefield was to form the infantry in two
lines, one behind the other. The range and power of rifles and artillery were such that frontal assaults
against strong battle lines were generally doomed to failure. If two hundred riflemen advance directly
against another line of two hundred, the attackers have no advantage in firepower, and if they stop
firing and attempt a charge they are at a disadvantage. The best way to break a battle line is to attack it
from the flank, by finding a gap or open area, pushing troops through it, and wheeling one’s battle line
to face the end of the enemy’s line—as if crossing the top of a capital “T.” Now, instead of fronting an
equal number of riflemen, the attacker faces only two defenders; and his own fire enfilades the
defender’s line—rips down it from end to end. Since the attacker’s line is wider than the defender’s
flank, the attacker also threatens to hit the enemy unit from the rear or cut it off from the rest of its
army. The defenders have little choice but to retreat, or break and run.
That same principle of the flanking maneuver applies to the movement of armies. An army’s
defensive position inevitably took the form of an extended line, to defend its lines of supply and to
bring its firepower into play. To drive an army from its position without attacking frontally, an
attacker had to turn the defender’s flank. By making a turning maneuver around the end of the
defender’s line, the attacker could reach a position from which he could either attack the endmost unit
of the defending army, and “roll up” the line by striking each unit in turn from end to end; or strike at
the defender’s line of supply, cutting him off from food and ammunition and compelling him to
retreat.
PART ONE
TURNING POINT:
MILITARY STALEMATE AND
STRATEGIC INITIATIVES
July 1862
CHAPTER 1
LINCOLN’S STRATEGY: EMANCIPATION
AND THE MCCLELLAN PROBLEM
APRIL
1861–FEBRUARY 1862
UNION STRATEGY AT AN IMPASSE
JUNE 1–JULY 4, 1862
T
Washington, and in 1862 it also
brought malaria and typhoid. For their health and comfort, President Lincoln moved his family out to
a Gothic Revival cottage in the suburbs on the grounds of the Soldiers’ Home, a government hospital
and sanitarium for ill and disabled veterans. The president would dutifully ride into town on horseback
or in an open carriage in order to work in his office at the White House or to sit anxiously by the
telegraph in the War Department to get the latest intelligence from the fighting fronts.
For Lincoln the month was a time of frustration and forebodings of disaster. The depressive mood to
which he was prone took hold. He left his meals half-eaten and remained up late into the night
brooding. His dark, lean face went from gaunt to haggard.
On the surface the Union cause appeared to be riding a wave of success. The North Carolina sounds
and Sea Islands of Georgia and South Carolina were now in Federal hands, and New Orleans had been
captured. The western armies under General Halleck had driven the Rebel army out of Kentucky and
the western half of Tennessee and seized Corinth as a base for further advances. In Virginia,
“Stonewall” Jackson’s apparent threat to Washington had been repelled, and General McClellan with
the Army of the Potomac was at the gates of Richmond. There was a general consensus among both
political leaders and military professionals that the victory there, which seemed imminent, would
convince the Rebels to give up their attempt to gain independence. Secretary of War Edwin M.
Stanton was so sanguine that he ordered the recruiting offices closed as a measure of economy.
Lincoln did not share that optimism. As he read the course of events, it seemed to him increasingly
clear that the strategy of conciliation had failed. It had been based on the belief that the Southern
people’s commitment to secession was shallow, and could be broken by the combination of swift and
decisive military action, with reassurances that slavery would be protected in the states where it
already existed. But the military and the political assumptions behind that strategy had demonstrably
been mistaken.
It had proved to be impossible for the Union to mount effective military offensives during the first
nine months of war, and that interval had given the Confederacy time to build up substantial military
forces and consolidate its hold on the loyalty of the populace. Although the first six months of 1862
had seen successful Federal offensives all around the Confederate periphery, none of these had been
decisive. Southern armies had escaped destruction and continued to build their powers; and
Southerners had accepted the losses suffered in these campaigns as sacrifices, which actually
HE MONTH OF JUNE BRINGS SWELTERING HEAT AND HUMIDITY TO
strengthened the public’s commitment to the Rebel cause.
The slow, seemingly interminable pace of offensive operations was partly to blame. The western
campaign had begun with swift victories by Grant at Forts Henry and Donelson in February 1862. But
the near defeat of Grant’s army at Shiloh on April 7 had given General Halleck a fright. Halleck was
not an experienced field general; rather, he was a veteran of staff appointments in the prewar army, a
military bureaucrat and scholar of strategic theory whose nickname was “Old Brains.” It took Halleck
and his army of over 100,000 men more than a month to cover the thirty miles between Shiloh and
Corinth, because he insisted on marching only half the day, and spent the rest digging entrenchments
to ward off a Confederate attack—which the Rebel army, outnumbered and weakened by battle losses,
was incapable of mounting.
As a result, the Rebel army—known as the Army of Tennessee and commanded by General Braxton
Bragg—was able to slip away from Corinth into northern Alabama, where it spent the month of June
recovering its strength and mobility. From that position the Rebels could harass and disrupt the march
of General Buell’s army, which was supposed to march east from Corinth and capture Chattanooga,
more than three hundred miles away. If Buell moved at Halleck’s pace it would take him ten months
to reach his goal. Lincoln was also worried about the possibility that Bragg might send reinforcements
over the mountains to prevent McClellan from taking Richmond.
McClellan’s advance up the Virginia Peninsula, which was nearly simultaneous with Halleck’s
march on Corinth, had stultified for similar reasons. McClellan mistakenly believed he was
outnumbered, and therefore paused to lay siege to every Rebel defense line. He had landed on the
Peninsula in the first week of April but did not close with the main Rebel army until May 31, in the
Battle of Seven Pines, a little over six miles from Richmond. It would take McClellan nearly four
weeks more, until June 25, to get his troops into positions from which it would be possible to assault
the city. Even then, his position was an awkward one. Four of his five army corps were south of the
Chickahominy River, directly fronting the Richmond defense lines. The V Corps, commanded by
General Fitz-John Porter, was north of the river, separated from the rest of the army by a rain-swollen
stream crossed by a few rickety bridges. Porter’s position was both vulnerable and vital. He was
exposed to attack by Stonewall Jackson’s troops moving south from the Shenandoah Valley; and his
was the only substantial body of troops positioned to defend the army’s line of supply, which ran back
over the Chicakahominy to the small York River port of White House.
Whatever his ideas about the likelihood of McClellan taking Richmond, Lincoln was becoming
convinced that it was no longer possible for the Union to defeat the Confederacy in a short war. He did
not share the troubled drift of his ideas with anyone. For all his affability he was an extremely
secretive man who kept his deepest thoughts to himself until he was ready to act upon them. But the
effects were visible in his dark mood and loss of appetite, his frequent outbursts of dissatisfaction
with his generals, and his new willingness to contemplate a major restructuring of the army command.
On June 23 he made a trip to West Point to consult retired lieutenant general Winfield Scott, who
had been general in chief until forced into retirement by General McClellan. Scott was seventy-six,
broken in health, his six-five frame swollen and crippled with arthritis, but Lincoln trusted his
patriotism and his professionalism. Scott had served his country for fifty years and had already been a
general in the War of 1812, and his conduct of the campaign against Mexico City in the Mexican
American War of 1846–48 had earned him an international reputation as a strategist and field
commander. Although Lincoln would not follow all of Scott’s recommendations, the meeting did