A Patriot's History of the United States: From Columbus's Great Discovery to the War on Terror (64 page)

The commercial differences between the Union and Confederacy were even more striking. Much has been made of the railroad mileage, although depending on how one measured the tracks laid in the territories and the border states, some of the Northern advantage disappears. The North had as many as twenty thousand miles of track, whereas the South had perhaps ten thousand. But even if these numbers had been roughly equal, they would have been misleading. Southern roads tended to run east and west, which was an advantage as long as the Mississippi remained open and Texas’s cattle and horses could be brought in through Louisiana. But after New Orleans fell and Vicksburg was all but surrounded, all livestock the western Confederacy could supply were undeliverable. More important, Northern railroads often ran north-south, making for rapid delivery to the front lines of cannonballs, food, and clothing. Some Southern states actually built tracks that only connected to rivers, with no connection to other railroads, and Alabama had laid a shortcut railroad that connected two Tennessee River points.

Dominance by the North over the South in other areas was even more pronounced: 32 to 1 in firearms production, 14 to 1 in merchant shipping, 3 to 1 in farm acreage, 412 to 1 in wheat, and 2 to 1 in corn. Cotton might have been king, but Southerners soon found that their monarch did not make for good eating. And the North controlled 94 percent of manufactured cotton cloth and 90 percent of America’s boot and shoe manufacturing. Pig-iron manufacturing was almost entirely Northern, with all but a few of the nation’s 286 furnaces residing in the Union. Those facilities churned out iron for 239 arms manufacturers, again overwhelmingly located north of the Mason-Dixon Line. One county in Connecticut, which was home to nine firearms factories, manufactured guns worth ten times the value of all firearms in the entire South in 1860. The South had one cannon foundry, at the Tredegar Iron Works in Richmond. From Cyrus McCormick’s reaper factory in Chicago to the Patterson, New Jersey, locomotive works, Northern manufacturing was poised to bury the South. In its navy alone, the North had an almost insurmountable advantage, and Lincoln perceived this, announcing an immediate blockade of the South by sea. The blockade underscored Lincoln’s definition of the war as an insurrection and rebellion. Had the South had a navy, its seagoing commerce with England and France might have been substantial enough to legitimate its claims of being a nation. Winners set the rules, and the winner at sea was the Union Navy.

Yet even with these advantages, the Union still faced a daunting task. All the South had to do to succeed was to survive. The Confederates did not have to invade the North, and every year that passed brought the reality of an independent Confederate nation ever closer. The American Revolution had taught that all an army of resistance need do is avoid destruction. And more in 1861 than in 1776, the technology favored the defender. Combinations of earthworks with repeating or breech-loading rifles, long-range cannons, and mass transportation with railroads and steam vessels meant that defenders could resist many times their number, and receive timely reinforcements or perform critical withdrawals.

Moreover, the United States had only a small professional army by European standards, and after 1861, that army was reduced by about half as Southerners resigned to fight for the CSA. As a result, both sides relied heavily on militia troops. Militia units, as was learned in the Revolution and the War of 1812, had important strengths and failings. Village militia units, comprised of all men of the ages fifteen through fifty, mustered once a year, trained and drilled irregularly, and provided their own weapons. But militias lacked the critical discipline, professionalism, and experience that regular soldiers possessed, leading Samuel Clemens to refer to his militia company as a “cattle herd,” in which an argument broke out between a corporal and sergeant—neither of whom knew who outranked the other!
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To overcome these weaknesses, state militias were retained intact as units, ensuring that Ohioans, Mainers, and New Yorkers fought together. This enhanced unit cohesion and loyalty, but also produced tragic results when the order of battle hurled the manhood of entire towns into enemy guns. As a result, some towns saw an entire generation disappear in four years of war.

The militia/regular army volunteer units became “largely a personal thing” in which “anyone who wished could advertise to…‘raise a company’…and invite ‘all willing to join to come on a certain morning to some saloon, hotel, or public hall.’”
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Units that emerged predictably had flashy names and even glitzier uniforms, including the Buena Vista Guards, the New York Fire Zouaves, the Polish Legion, the St. Patrick’s Brigade, the Garibaldi Guards, and (again predictably) the Lincoln Guards.
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Some, such as the Wisconsin Black Hats, also known as the Iron Brigade, were famous for their headgear, while New York Zouave units copied the French army’s baggy red trousers. Some of the extremely decorative uniforms soon gave way to more practical battlefield gear, but the enthusiasm did not dim. The 6th Massachusetts, a regiment of 850 men, marched to Washington only forty-eight hours after Lincoln’s call for volunteers, and between the time the president issued the call for 75,000 volunteers in April, and the time Congress convened in July, the Northern army had swollen by more than 215,000 over its pre-Sumter troop levels.

Indeed, Massachusetts outdid herself. A state of 1.25 million people marched six regiments (or roughly 72,000 men) to war by July, and promised eleven more, a total far exceeding the state’s proportional commitment. Yet this enthusiasm itself came with a cost. Instead of too few men, the Union’s greatest problem at the outset of the conflict was too many. Secretary of War Cameron complained he was “receiving troops faster than [the government] can provide for them.”
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When the first weary soldiers marched into Washington to defend the Capitol, all that awaited them was salted red herring, soda crackers, and coffee made in rusty cauldrons. Those who marched to the front were more fortunate than others crammed into coastal vessels and steamed down from New England port cities. Regardless of their mode of transportation, most of the young men who donned the uniform of either the North or South had never been more than twenty miles from home, nor had they ever ridden a steamboat. Many had never seen a large city.

Command in the Union Army was ravaged by the departure of a large number of the U.S. Army’s officer corps, both active and retired, who left for the Confederate cause. Indeed, from 1776 to 1861 (and even to the present), Southerners filled the ranks of America’s professional fighting forces in disproportionate numbers in relation to their population. Southern soldiers outnumbered Northerners significantly in the Mexican-American War, and West Point graduated a higher rate of Southern second lieutenants than Northern. Southern officers, such as Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson, Braxton Bragg, Albert Sidney Johnston, Joseph E. Johnston, and Robert E. Lee reneged on their oath to protect the United States from enemies “foreign and domestic” to fight in gray. In all, 313 U.S. Army officers resigned to join the Confederacy, whereas 767 regular army officers stayed to form the new Union cadre. Lee was especially reluctant, having been offered the position of commander in chief of the Union Army by Lincoln. Yet he could not persuade himself to raise his hand against Virginia, and reluctantly joined the Confederates. A more touching departure occurred with the resignation of Joseph E. Johnston of Virginia, who met Secretary of War Cameron in April 1861. He wept as he said, “I must go. Though I am resigning my position, I trust I may never draw my sword against the old flag.”
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More than manpower and brains left the Union cause. Confederates stormed armories and arsenals. They captured the valuable Norfolk docks and shipyards, taking nine warships into custody at the Gosport Navy Yard. Although the
New York
and
Pennsylvania
went up in flames, the Confederates salvaged a third vessel, the
Merrimac.
Had the Union commander of the navy yard given the order, the steam-powered
Merrimac
could have escaped entirely, but he buckled to the pressure of the Rebels, providing the hull for what would become one of the world’s first two ironclads. In the larger context, however, these losses were minimal, and paled beside the substantial advantages that the North possessed.

For example, supplementing the militias and regular army enlistments, in 1862, the Union allowed free blacks to join segregated infantry units. Thousands enlisted, at first receiving only $7 per month as compared to $13 allowed for a white private. Two years later, with Lincoln’s support, Congress passed the Enrollment Act, authorizing equal pay for black soldiers. Even for white regulars, however, a military career was not exactly lucrative. Prior to the war, a general made less than $3,500 a year (compared to a senator’s $5,000), whereas a captain received $768 annually.
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Only the engineering corps seemed exempt from the low pay, attracting many of the best officers, including Robert E. Lee, who directed port improvements along the Mississippi River.

Like the North, the South hoped to avoid a draft, but reality set in. The Confederate congress enacted a Conscription Act in 1862, even before the Union, establishing the first military draft in American history. All able-bodied males eighteen to thirty-five had to serve for three years, although wartime demands soon expanded the ages from seventeen to fifty. Exemptions were granted postal employees, CSA officials, railroad workers, religious ministry, and those employed in manufacturing plants. Draftees could also hire substitutes, of which there were 70,000 in the South (compared with 118,000 in the North). Given the higher rates of Northern regular enlistments, however, it is apparent that Southerners purchased their way out of combat, or avoided going to war, at a higher overall rate than their counterparts in blue. Conscription, to many Southerners, violated the principles they seemed to be fighting for, leading to criticisms that the Confederate draft itself constituted an act of despotism.

Attack and Die?

There were powerful cultural forces at work that shaped each side’s views of everything from what to eat to how to fight.
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Historians Grady McWhiney and Perry Jamieson have proposed the famous Celtic Thesis to explain Confederate tactics.
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Northerners tended to be more Anglo-Saxon and Teutonic, Southerners more Celtic. This had tremendous implications for the way in which each side fought, with the South consumed by “self-assertion and manly pride.”
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In their controversial book,
Attack and Die,
McWhiney and Jamieson claimed that the Celtic herding and agrarian culture that dominated the South propagated a military culture based on attack and, especially, full frontal charges. Jefferson Davis, the Confederate president, urged his troops to go on the offensive and to “plant our banners on the banks of the Ohio.”
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(Historian Bernard De Voto quipped that Davis had just enough success in war in Mexico to ensure the South’s defeat.)
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Union colonel Benjamin Buell observed “an insane desire on the part of the Southern people, & some of the Generals to assume the offensive.”
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The Confederate/Celtic code of officer loyalty demanded they lead their men into battle. Such tactics devastated the Confederate command structure: 55 percent of the South’s generals were killed or wounded in battle, and many had already been shot or wounded before they received their mortal wound. More telling, Confederate casualty rates (men wounded and killed to the number of soldiers in action) were consistently higher than the Union’s in almost every major battle, regardless of the size of forces engaged, generals in command, or outcome of the engagement. Only at Fredericksburg, with Burnside’s suicidal charges against Marye’s Heights, did Union casualty rates exceed those of the supposedly better-led rebels.

Lee, for all his purported military genius, suffered 20 percent in casualties while inflicting only 15 percent on his enemy; whereas Grant suffered 18 percent in casualties but inflicted 30 percent on his foes. Overall, Lee only inflicted 13,000 more casualties on the federals than he absorbed—a ratio completely incompatible with a smaller population seeking to defeat a larger one. Grant, on the other hand, inflicted 12 percent more casualties on enemy commanders he encountered. Confederates attacked in eight of the first twelve big battles of the Civil War, losing a staggering 97,000 men—20,000 more than the Union forces lost. In only one major engagement, where the highest casualties occurred, Sharpsburg, did the Confederates substantially fight on the defensive. At Gettysburg, the worst of the Rebels’ open-field charges, Lee lost more than 30 percent of his entire command, with the majority of the losses coming in Pickett’s ill-fated charge.

Some of the propensity for taking the offensive must be blamed on the necessity for Confederate diplomatic breakthroughs. Until Gettysburg, the Confederacy pinned its dim hopes on Britain’s or France’s entering the fight on its side. But Europeans were unsure whether the Confederacy’s defensive strategy was of its own choosing or was forced on it by Northern might. Thus, taking the war to the North figured prominently in the efforts to convince Britain and France that the CSA was legitimate.
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Yet this strategy proved to be flawed.

The North, on the other hand, seriously misjudged the commitment and skill of its foe, but at least, from the outset, appreciated the nature of its initial military objectives and its economic advantages. Nevertheless, neither Lincoln nor his generals fully understood how difficult the task would be in 1861. Ultimately, however, the difference between North and South came down to Lincoln’s being “a great war president [whereas] Jefferson Davis was a mediocre one.”
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Where Davis had graduated from West Point and fought in the Mexican War, Lincoln did not know how to write a military order. But he learned: “By the power of his mind, [he] became a fine strategist,” according to T. Harry Williams and “was a better natural strategist than were most of the trained soldiers.”
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He immediately perceived that the Union had to use its manpower and economic advantage, and it had to take the offensive. Still, Lincoln had much to absorb, some of it from Union General in Chief Winfield Scott. Old Fuss and Feathers of Mexican War fame—by then seventy-four years old and notorious for falling asleep at councils of war—engineered the initial strategy for the Union Army, the Anaconda Plan.