Steven Dutch University of Wisconsin - Green Bay
In reading the history of warfare, we typically read that General X met General Y onthe battlefield, X won, Y retreated, then they met again on another battlefield, and soon. Then we come to a war where the balance of power is described in terms of who has themost miles of telegraph line and railroad, and who has the most steel foundries androlling mills. That war is the U.S. Civil War. In many ways it was the first truly modernwar that depended on heavy industry, rapid transportation, and telecommunications for itsconduct. Among the technological innovations and new weapons introduced (more accuratelyin some cases, used to their full capacity for the first time) were:
The Civil War continues to attract attention because it was a struggle of mythicproportions. The ferocity of combat in the Civil War defies belief. At Spotsylvania CourtHouse in Virginia in 1864, the rifle fire was so intense it cut down a tree two feetthick. After the battle men were found on the battlefield unharmed but sound asleep; theysimply collapsed on their feet from exhaustion. By modern standards, 30 per centcasualties are considered all but suicidal; when Napoleon took 25 per cent casualties atWaterloo his army collapsed. In several battles in the Civil War both sides took 30 percent casualties, departed the battlefield in good order, regrouped, and were ready tofight again in a few days. Some of the incidents in the Civil War would be dismissed asthe wildest fiction if they were not thoroughly documented. Here are three Civil Warvignettes.
After capturing the city of Chattanooga, Tennessee in the summer of 1864, the UnionArmy of the Cumberland prepared to invade Georgia. Not far into Georgia, they ran into alarge Confederate force and a major battle developed. Because of a mixup incommunications, a Union brigade pulled out of position and relocated, leaving a gap in theUnion lines at the worst possible place and at the worst possible time. The Confederates,purely by chance, chose that time to counterattack and the full force of the counterattackcame down on - nothing at all. The Confederates punched completely through the Union linesand only some brilliant work by the Union General John Thomas, widely regarded as thegreatest defensive general in American history, saved the Union forces from utterannihilation. The battle came to be named after a small creek, a name that meant nothing aday earlier but would forever be associated with slaughter afterwards - Chickamauga.
The Union army retired to Chattanooga to lick its wounds. They were safe behind a riverbend and could not be driven out. The Confederates dug in on the ridges south of the cityand could also not be driven out. General Grant moved in troops from the Army of the Westalong the Mississippi, and also moved in troops from the Army of the Potomac (anindication of how railroads were changing the face of war.)
The Union attack came in November. The first objective was to drive the Confederatesoff the ridges around Chattanooga. After driving the Confederates off Lookout Mountain overlooking Chattanooga, the next objective was to drive them off Missionary Ridge east of town. The Army of the West and the Army of the Potomac wouldcarry out the main attack, assaulting the ridge at either end. the Army of the Cumberland,reduced to a supporting role in their own theater of operations, was assigned to attackthe Confederate positions at the base of the ridge in the center. They were only supposedto keep the Confederates busy, since nobody dreamed they would be able to overwhelm dug-inConfederate positions, climb a steep bluff, and drive the defenders off the top.
But that's exactly what they did. Infuriated at their loss of face, and being reducedto minor players in their own battle, the Army of the Cumberland overran the Confederatepositions, then, completely without orders, began climbing the ridge. The generals inChattanooga, watching through field glasses, stared in open-mouthed incredulity at whatwas going on. How demoralizing the assault was for the Confederates is shown by oneincident. A Union soldier reaching the top was faced by a Confederate officer with asword. The Union soldier dropped his weapon, went after the officer barehanded, andthe officer ran away.
Some of the troops from the Army of the West ended up having the widest travels of anysoldiers in the war. From the Mississippi, they reinforced Chattanooga, then marched withSherman through Georgia to the sea. After that, Sherman turned north into the Carolinas.When they finally entered Richmond, they came up from the south.
At sea, the Civil War was a global, if low-level war. Confederate raiders attackedUnion shipping all over the globe. Under the rules of naval warfare, a captured merchantvessel could be sold to finance the war effort, converted to a fighting ship, or sunk ifno other alternative were available. The crew would be taken prisoner and put ashore atthe next port. Generally speaking, the rules were scrupulously followed. The most famousConfederate raider was the C.S.S. Alabama, built in England and finally sunk offCherbourg, France. The Alabama is commemorated by a monument in about the leastmaritime setting imaginable. At the base of the Sierra Nevada just below Mount Whitney arethe Alabama Hills. The few settlers in the area in the 1860's were pro-Confederacy butunable to join the war effort, so they named the hills to show their sympathies.
But the most interesting Confederate raider was the C.S.S. Shenandoah. Shesailed across the Indian and Pacific Oceans, and by early 1865 she was raiding Unionwhaling vessels in the Gulf of Alaska. (In this remote area, the Confederates wouldput crews from several captured vessels on one and allow them to sail to safety, then sinkthe others.) On one of the captured ships, the Confederates found a newspaper from whichthey learned that San Francisco was completely undefended (who expected a Confederatenaval assault on San Francisco?) So they conceived the plan of holding San Francisco forransom; they would threaten to bombard the city unless a ransom was paid, to go into theConfederate war chest.
What saved San Francisco was an encounter with a British vessel, where the Confederateslearned that the war was over. Fearing reprisal if they surrendered, the Confederatesdecided to sail to England. They sailed south around Cape Horn, up the far side of theAtlantic to avoid Union warships, and finally docked in England in November, 1865, wherethe last official Confederate flag was pulled down. The C.S.S. Shenandoah was theonly Confederate raider to sail around the world.
Mormons have such an All-American and patriotic image today, it is hard to imaginethere was once a time when they were viewed as dangerous radicals. In the 1850's, however,there was serious concern (not wholly unfounded) that they might attempt to carve out anindependent nation in Utah, and fully a third of the then-tiny U.S. Army was in Utahkeeping an eye on the Mormons.
When the Civil War broke out, volunteers in California formed a brigade and beganmarching eastward. When they got to Salt Lake City, however, the professional soldierssaid in effect, "We'll go fight the war - you stay here and watch theMormons. So, much to their disgust, the California Brigade never got further east thanUtah and spent the war on garrison duty.
The Shoshone in Idaho, however, decided that with the regular soldiers gone, the timewas ripe to recoup some of their losses, so they began raiding settlements. TheCalifornians marched north and defeated the Shoshone in a couple of battles, and therebygot to see at least some action during the war.
At first glance the South had many advantages. It had the best generals (one can hardlyask for better than Lee). It had a long coastline, impossible to blockade completely(Rhett Butler in Gone With The Wind was a blockade-runner who spent much of the warin London and Paris). The Union capital was vulnerable to attack (Lincoln resortedessentially to brute force to keep Maryland from joining the Confederacy and surroundingWashington).
The Union had a far larger population and industrial base, but all the miles oftelegraph and railroad line in the world do little good if they are in your own territory,and the Union problem was to invade the Confederacy. The Confederacy enjoyed the advantageof defense, and they had a fairly compact region to defend. The Appalachians preventedattack from the west into Virginia. Florida was an exposed peninsula, but in those days itwas largely uninhabited and played little role in the war. The Union could land anywhereit liked in Florida, but the region simply lacked the transportation to make it useful asa staging area. The same was true of the far West; neither side had the logisticalcapability to outflank the other by campaigning beyond the Mississippi. When theConfederacy surrendered, it still had an intact army in Texas, but in Bruce Catton's words"it might as well have been in Siberia."
One important factor may have been that the North realized just a bit sooner than theSouth what sort of war it was fighting. In Attack and Die: Civil War Military Tacticsand the Southern Heritage, G. McWhitney and P.D. Jamieson argued that the South heldon to the medieval concept of chivalry and individual valor on the battlefield more thanthe North. Despite the fact that the South's main objective was to defend, in almost everyearly battle of the war the South attacked. By the time the South adopted moreconservative tactics, it had been bled white. This mentality is echoed in Gone With theWind; when Rhett Butler cautions about the Union's greater industrial capacity, he ischallenged to a duel by a young romantic hothead, but simply walks away.
One southerner did see exactly what the war would be like. In May, 1861 he tolda fellow officer:
I fear our people do not yet realize the magnitude of the struggle they have entered upon, nor its probable duration, and the sacrifices it will impose upon them... Their [the Union's] resources are almost without limit...They have also a navy that in a little while will blockade our ports and cut us off from the rest of the world. They have nearly all the workshops and skilled artisans of the country....We have no ships, few arms, and few manufacturers. We will not succeed until the financial power of the North is completely broken, and this can occur only at the end of a long and bloody war. The conflict will be mainly in Virginia. She will become the Flanders of America before this war is over...I wish I could talk to every man, woman and child in the State now, and impress them with these views.
The speaker was Robert E. Lee.
Historian Bruce Catton, as well as many others, believes the numerical and technicalsuperiority of the North was simply too great to resist indefinitely; that eventually theSouthern defenses had to fail somewhere, and when they did, it would be all over.
When Grant's attempt to advance on Richmond in the summer of 1864 stalled, unlike allprevious commanders, he simply moved and tried again. For the next nine months, Unionforces sidestepped to their left trying to outflank the Confederates. Eventually thetrenches formed a complete semicircle extending well south of Richmond. Both sidessuddenly saw that the city of Petersburg, about 50 miles south of Richmond, was the key tocontinuing or ending the war, because it was the only rail junction connecting Richmond tothe rest of the Confederacy. Faced with the need to defend a line running continuouslyfrom north of Richmond to Petersburg, the Confederates were stretched thinner and thinner.Eventually their line snapped. Within a little over a week it was over. The final year ofthe Civil War, chronicled in Bruce Catton's A Stillness at Appomattox, was actuallysomething new in the history of warfare - never before had two large armies remainedlocked in continuous combat for so long.
The Civil War telescoped 19th century warfare into four years; it started with pitchedbattles that would have been familiar to Napoleon (civilian observers carried picnicbaskets out to observe the first Battle of Bull Run), and ended with World War I-styletrench warfare. At the Battle of Cold Harbor in early 1865, the Union assaulted welldug-in Confederate positions and lost 6,000 men in 20 minutes. Confederate losses areunknown but it is entirely possible they were zero.
The U.S. Civil War had shown, quite conclusively, that attacks on entrenched positionswere suicidal, that railroads and telegraph lines were weapons of war, and that soldiersarmed with repeating rifles and making effective use of terrain could have devastatingimpact.
Making the carnage of World War I still more inexcusable was the fact that the Britishhad a full-scale dress rehearsal 15 years earlier. When diamonds were discovered in thethen-independent Dutch-speaking Transvaal, South Africa, the British simply moved in tooccupy the region. They expected no problems; they were not facing professional soldiers,but farmers. But they overlooked a few small details. These farmers were used to fighting,having fought several wars with local Africans. They knew the terrain intimately (likeAmerican frontiersmen, they faced adversaries who used terrain instinctively). And theywere armed with the most modern repeating rifles. The British suffered a series ofhumiliating defeats resulting from incompetence (like failing to secure a key railroad)and arrogance (failing to post guards). They finally won the war, but it took four yearsand 22,000 casualties to do it. The Boer War was the first battle experience as ajournalist for young Winston Churchill. (He previously served in the Sudan, where he observed "Nothing in life is so exhilarating as to be shot at without result.")
To cut the Boer fighters off from their base of supply, the British resorted torounding up civilians and relocating them in concentration camps. (Before the Holocaust,the term "concentration camp" had no sinister connotations - it was simply acamp where people were concentrated for easier control.) More South Africans died in thesecamps from disease than died in battle. One reason the struggle to end apartheidwas so bitter was that Dutch-speaking South Africans still held bitter memories of thecamps and regarded their critics as completely lacking in moral credibility.
The technology of World War I was far advanced over that of the Civil War. Submarinesby now were essentially modern in design, and torpedoes had taken on their modernfeatures. Tanks made their appearance on the battlefield. Chemical weapons also appeared.Chemical warfare began as an individual venture; policemen turned soldiers used civiliantear gas to clear trenches, but soon large industrial-scale manufacture of gases, notablychlorine and phosgene, was under way. Radio had made battlefield telecommunications evenmore efficient. Finally, fully modern machine guns were in use and accounted for much ofthe slaughter in the war.
Airplanes, though primitive, were used widely. At first, they were used forobservation, but before long, opposing fliers were shooting at each other. Aerial combat,like chemical warfare, began as an individual venture, when fliers took up weapons ontheir own initiative, but soon machine guns were mounted routinely on aircraft. Thebreakthrough in aerial combat was the invention of a way to synchronize the firing of themachine guns with the propeller so that bullets flew between the blades. Bombing wascomparatively little used, since aircraft lacked the range or lifting capacity to makestrategic bombing feasible.
Although World War I had technology far more advanced than the Civil War, it wasancient in its mentality; it was widely described in ancient terms as a glorious struggle,and many people still thought in terms of ancient concepts of individual honor on thebattlefield. In one tactical respect it was ancient as well: although motor vehicles werein widespread use, so were horse cavalry and swords.
Typical of the glorious war mentality was poet Rupert Brooke, who penned thefamous lines "If I should die/ think only this of me/ that there's a cornerof some foreign field/that is forever England." In another poem, he wrote"blow out you bugles, over the rich dead." With a mentality like that,it would seem a positive tragedy if Brooke were to survive the war, and hedidn't. But he didn't die gloriously in combat. During the Gallipoli campaign he got sunstroke, developed bloodpoisoning (probably what we would now call toxic shock syndrome), and died.
The total failure by generals to revise their tactics to meet new technology led toperhaps the most senseless carnage in the history of warfare. The Germans had hoped torepeat their success of 1871, when they swept around Paris in a wide arc to attack it fromthe north. They failed to realize that improved railroads and motor vehicles made it mucheasier to move troops to meet unexpected threats. Once the initial German push into Francestalled, both sides settled into static trench warfare that eventually saw a continuousline of trenches from the Alps to the English Channel. For the first couple of years ofthe war, thanks to machine guns, the defense enjoyed an advantage not seen perhaps sincebefore the advent of gunpowder. Seeking to break the stalemate and create a war ofmovement of a more "classical" sort, opposing generals sent mass charges againstmachine gun fire, in the expectation that one more push or a bit more more willpower wouldearn victory. In 1916, at the Battle of the Somme, the Allies lost about as many men inone day as the U.S. lost in Korea. Letters and journals of soldiers in the fieldreveal desperate attempts to redefine old concepts of courage and valor to fit theradically changed conditions of warfare. Aerial combat was (and is today) probably theonly aspect of modern combat where ancient ideas of individual combat are at all valid.
Turkey made the mistake of siding with the Germans in World War I, and lost its empireand almost its nationhood as a result. The strategic importance of Turkey was that itcontrolled Russia's only access to the Mediterranean. Closing this access was vital to theGermans because it cut Russia off from easy supply and reinforcement.
In February, 1915, the British fleet attempted to force its way through theDardanelles, but was turned back by artillery fire from Turkish forts. In those days nobodydefeated the British fleet, especially not a backward, poorly equipped country likeTurkey. The defeat was a tremendous lift to Turkish morale. Next, the Allies tried toseize the narrow Gallipoli Peninsula on the north side of the Dardanelles to capture theforts and gain control of the Dardanelles. The campaign was a costly failure. The onebright spot was the final retreat. Under cover of darkness, using carefully stageddeceptions, the Allies pulled every single soldier off the beach without a singlecasualty. The debacle nearly destroyed the political career of Winston Churchill, who hadstrongly backed the campaign. Churchill spent the next 15 years in obscurity beforereturning to power and historical immortality in World War II.
As botched as the Gallipoli campaign was in practice, it employed a number of highlyexperimental or novel technologies: submarines, amphibious operations, and aircraft.Allied planners in World War II found little to learn from the trench warfare of World WarI but Gallipoli was a storehouse of information on amphibious warfare. The lessons ofGallipoli played a major role in planning for Dunkirk and Normandy.
One of the great what-ifs of history happened when the Turks turned back theBritish fleet. After the war, German advisors who had been in the Turkish fortswrote their memoirs. When the British gave up and turned back, the Turks werewithin five minutes of running out of ammunition. Five more minutes and thestraits would have been in Allied control. Maybe with proper supply, Russiamight have stayed in the war. Maybe the Russian Revolution would never havehappened, Communism would never have taken over, and the Cold War might not havetaken place.
Nothing is as astonishing about the American Civil War as the fact that Americasurvived it. In March, 1996 I was with the peacekeeping forces in Bosnia. A year later tothe day, I was traveling the length of Tennessee on business. Not once during the week Iwas in the South did I encounter a single rude word involving my northern accent orlicense plate. I seriously doubt we will be able to say the same of Yugoslavia in a mere130 years. Nations have vanished from the map over divisions far more trivial than ourCivil War.
Robert E. Lee was a significant factor. As tenaciously as he fought the war, hisrefusal to continue fighting once the war was clearly lost and his utter refusal to engagein recriminations or any sort of vindictiveness were powerful role models. Lee ispractically worshiped in the South and his character seems to have been as much abovereproach as anyone in history. Lee said, in effect, "We lost. let's move on",something that the defeated in many other cultures cannot bring themselves to say.
The mythic proportions of the struggle were also a factor. Perhaps wars come to a cleanend when both sides fight to utter exhaustion and are ready to quit. Almost as soon as thewar was over, participants on both sides began to show a realization that they had beenthrough something larger than life. Bruce Catton quotes one Southerner's memoirs in whichhe fantasizes about meeting his former foes in the hereafter and reminiscing about thewar, and notes in amazement "the men who lost at the Boyne and Culloden did not writethis way."
Finally, the future-orientation of Americans is important. When America began itsastonishing leap into industrialization after the war, many people who might have dwelledon the past found something else to do. The past may be noble and moving and tragic, butit's the past; it's over, and the future is coming. My travels in 1997 took me intoAlabama. Just over the State line on Interstate 65 is a rest stop with a monumentinscribed "We dare defend our rights", a bit of post-Civil War defiance. But notfar away is Huntsville, home of Redstone Arsenal, and towering over the same rest stop,literally and symbolically a hundred times taller than the monument, is a Saturn I rocket.And that's what you see first when you enter Alabama.
Bruce Catton is the dean of writers on the Civil War, and everything he wrote is worthreading, but A Stillness at Appomatox and This Hallowed Ground are Catton athis best. They go beyond skillful prose into the realm of fine literature. Shelby Foote isa highly-respected contemporary author on the Civil War. Michael Shaara won the PulitzerPrize for his novel on Gettysburg The Killer Angels, and his son Jeff Shaara haswritten Gods and Generals, a critically acclaimed precursor novel.
Among films, Glory is the superb story of a black Massachusetts regiment. Gettysburgis Ted Turner's tribute to the Civil War. It has its flaws: it is so faithful to perioddialog and costume that it sometimes looks and sounds silly, Martin Sheen would make agreat U.S. Grant but is not a very convincing Lee, and there are some technical flaws.Overshadowing all that is the fact that the film is clearly a labor of love by everyonefrom Turner to the most anonymous volunteer re-enactor, and it shows. Ken Burns issynonymous with fine documentaries, and his twelve-hour series on the Civil War is amasterpiece. Australian director Peter Weir's Gallipoli tells the story of anill-fated Australian regiment that was nearly wiped out during the Gallipoli campaign; itfeatures a then-unknown actor named Mel Gibson.
Two classic works of literature, Stephen Crane's The Red Badge of Courage andErich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front describe the Civil War andWorld War I, respectively.
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Created 13 November 1998; Last Update 15 January 2020