Themes of the American Civil War

CHAPTER
Command and Leadership in the Civil
War, 1861–1865
BRIAN HOLDEN REID
Command, and a proper sense of the duties that belong to the commander,
are central to the conduct of war. Without a central directing brain, armies degenerate into violent mobs or apathetic hosts, and are unable to achieve the political and military objectives set for them. This chapter, therefore,
concentrates on the structures and systems of command during the
American Civil War, rather than on the personal qualities needed to bean effective commander, although these are hardly unimportant. The emperor
Napoleon, who inspired a cult in the United States in the years before was of the opinion that centralization of command in war was essential and that one bad general was better than two good ones. In war, he repeated,
it is the man who counts. The experience of the Napoleonic Wars was to cast a spell over the American imagination before 1861, the full consequences of which have yet to be investigated by historians. The simple, dramatic,
and rather glamorous appeal of the great individual in battle—the great captain—overlooked the important fact that Napoleon waged war before the full effects of the industrial revolution had made themselves felt in
Continental Europe.
The American Civil War was the greatest conflict waged during the first
(steam-driven) phase of the industrial revolution. Some of its features were anticipated in the Crimean War (1854–56), but during the great American civil conflagration they were magnified, mainly because of its scale and intensity. The broad developments that were to become so important in the first half of the twentieth century were the impact of the immense productiveness of the American economy, that could clothe and equip large
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numbers of men, the increased reliance on technology and machinery
(especially the railways, the improvement of weapons, the growth of the power of the tactical defense, the spread of the empty battlefield (as each side resorted to entrenchments, with a vacant space in between, and the lengthening of an army’s tail (its support echelons) in proportion to its
“teeth” (the fighting elements. All of these developments greatly complicated the duties of the commander in a technical sense during the mid-nineteenth century, and made his job more difficult.
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Paradoxically, a number of American social developments tended to conceal the significance of these structural changes in the art of war. The cult of Napoleon in the United States—the belief in the man of destiny”
—experienced a transmutation that gave it a different character from similar cults in Europe. Napoleon’s brother, Joseph Bonaparte, a former King of Spain, lived in Bordentown, New Jersey, while Marshal Grouchy
(whom many blamed for Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo) was a resident of Philadelphia. Their presence gave the cult a boost. The political ambitions of General Andrew Jackson, the victor of the battle of New Orleans (over the British, were presented by his Democratic publicists with a distinctly
Napoleonic hue. His enemies claimed that Jackson was a military chieftain intent on establishing a military dictatorship he was also alleged to nurse regal ambitions, and was known as King Andrew But the Democrats themselves stressed Jackson’s homespun frontier background. The egalitarian aspects of the Napoleonic legend were stressed how a man who had sprung from comparatively humble roots could command the destiny of nations.
Jackson, the untrained son of the frontier, had crushed regular soldiers commanded by the Duke of Wellington’s brother-in-law, Sir Edward
Pakenham.
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Jackson’s example encouraged the widespread assumption throughout the antebellum period that command in war was something simple that could be undertaken successfully by anybody of spirit or intelligence. If one looked further back in American history, the Revolution had shown how citizen soldiers, led by the ineffable (former colonel of militia)
General George Washington, could defeat regular armies. Washington himself became the exemplary model of the patriot-general.
The military experience of the Mexican War (1846–48) confirmed these views. Mexican soldiers were individually brave, but were no match for
American armies composed mainly of volunteers. American forces were commanded by men of civilian distinction, mostly Democratic allies of
President James K. Polk, including his former law partner, Gideon J. Pillow.
However, the most senior army commanders, Zachary Taylor and Winfield
Scott, were both Whigs, and Polk toyed with the idea that he should place
Senator Thomas Hart Benton over them both with the rank of Lieutenant
General. Consequently, by the s the notion had firmly taken root in the American imagination that warfare was a short and decisive thing, as the
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Mexican War had been, involving rapid and dramatic movements directed by charismatic personalities. Such simplistic views, that emphasized the romantic appeal of war, were to be contradicted by the Civil War.
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Moreover, this outlook tended to elevate the leaders rather than the commander. The infusion of large numbers of politically ambitious civilians into the US. Army’s ranks in 1846–47 meant that a good number of senior officers had already revealed a strong measure of skill as leaders volunteer leaders were often fine public speakers, could rouse their men to follow them, and bind them to the cause and to themselves. A good example of such a figure is the lawyer Colonel Alexander W. Doniphan, who took 856 men of the st Missouri Volunteer Regiment, composed mostly of unwashed and unshaven frontiersmen, on a 3,500 mile march comparable to Xenophon’s
anabasis, from Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, to Santa F, New Mexico, to
Monterey, Mexico, winning two victories en route.
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Throughout the era of the Civil War, command and leadership were confused. Few able commanders were bad leaders, but a good leader could sometimes make a poor commander, especially at the higher levels. Stress on the leader as moral exemplar, furthermore, resulted in military attitudes which praised nerve and imagination at the expense of intricate preparation,
and often ignored logistical reality. Enthusiasts fora Napoleonic style of warfare also failed to take into account that movement over the huge expanses of North America was just as likely to lead to disaster (as in Russia in 1812) as to crowning triumph (as at Austerlitz in 1805 or Jena–Auerstadt in 1806).

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