Themes of the American Civil War

army group-level command, although, for convenience, by 1864–65 more than one Union army was combined under the direction of Grant and
Sherman.
The main challenge facing the commanders of both Union and Confederate armies in 1861–62 was making the conceptual leap from commanding companies (or, at most, battalions) to commanding sizable field armies,
sometimes exceeding 100,000 men. This demanded a certain kind of character. Major General J. F. C. Fuller, who pioneered the modern system of analyzing Civil War commanders, has written that Discipline makes soldiers, but it is personality which makes, and, sad to say, sometimes unmakes, generals.”
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Given its small size in peacetime and a military role protecting the Indian frontier—in effect performing the duties of an imperial constabulary—the command philosophy of the US. Army was formulated amidst a range of what the British army calls small wars Consisting of tiny units scattered over huge distances, separated from the headquarters by inhospitable terrain,
or impenetrable forests, as during the Seminole Wars (1835–41), the
American army evolved a practice of devolving a lot of responsibility onto the shoulders of quite junior officers, who, in any case, were not permitted by the constraints of geography to consult their superiors. This practice was accentuated by the American staff system, which was still in its infancy.
Regular officers were essentially administrators, and there was no conception of modern staff officers, acting as the representative of the commander,
giving orders in his name. Winfield Scott had put together the first truly professional US. army in Mexico. He welded his headquarters into an efficient decision-making apparatus, but the staff did not take decisions on
Scott’s behalf in one sense, this was unnecessary because Scott commanded an army of only 7,000 men. Although officers like Robert E. Lee, PG. T.
Beauregard, and George B. McClellan became Scott’s protégés, they lacked a sense of the staff as a cohesive grouping sharing a common operational ethos and training. There was, of course, no staff college to provide such training. Regular officers were educated at the US. Military Academy at West
Point. If officers entered the Artillery they would receive a further year of specialized training at the Artillery School of Practice at Fortress Monroe,
Virginia.
The limitations of a West Point military education have often been remarked upon by historians. West Point provided an excellent technical education, but cadets received only one week’s instruction on the higher levels of warlike strategy. Richard Ewell complained after the Civil War that officers in the old army learned everything there was to know about commanding a company of dragoons on the western plains, but nothing else.
In truth, this criticism tells us more about the deficiencies of postgraduate education in the US. Army than about the West Point system itself. It is Command and Leadership
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not the function of cadet academies to equip generals to command armies.
But in the sands West Point came under sustained attack as an anti-egalitarian nest of aristocratic martinets. It was feared that such smug and narrowly educated men would stamp out the spontaneous
“genius” of the American people, which if untrammelled would produce those moral qualities that had brought victory in earlier American wars.
Such a legacy of mistrust of West Point graduates would continue to exert its influence during the Civil War. It is therefore not surprising that this major gap in officer training and education was not filled until 1875 with the founding of the US. Command and General Staff College at Fort
Leavenworth, Kansas.
As the staff system was crude, so the command functions of the upper levels of the US. Army were rather vague. The heads of the staff bureaux based in the War Department in Washington, DC, the Adjutant General,
Quartermaster General, Judge Advocate, Chief Engineer, Inspector General, Paymaster General, Commissary of Purchases, etc, presided over their own separate domains. They tended to report directly to their political superior, the Secretary of War, and were appointed by dint of strict seniority.
Consequently, by the end of the s, many were septuagenarians and had sometimes directed their bureaux for up to thirty years. The system was hardly a dynamic one indeed, it had become fossilized. Moreover,
the role of the commanding general, the general-in-chief, had not been worked out, and this would have serious consequences. The general-in-chief commanded nothing he did not direct a general staff responsible to him.
His position was not acknowledged in the Constitution, as the President was commander-in-chief. Neither was his relationship with the Secretary of War defined. If the latter chose to assert himself, the general-in-chief was pushed to the sidelines, and this often led to unseemly squabbling. Moreover,
the authority of the general-in-chief was weakened by the universal assumption in the United States that command in war equated to the field command of armies.
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Winfield Scott was the dominant personality of the old army, and he still remained general-in-chief, at the age of seventy-five, until November 1,
1861, having been first appointed on July 5, 1841. His first reaction on the outbreak of the Mexican War in 1846 was to secure for himself afield command, which he gained on November 24, although his authority was confined by President Polk to that sole command (he was not reappointed general-in-chief until 1851). In 1861 Scott was the only officer in the United States who had commanded an army successfully in the field. By his military methods, promotion of military professionalism, and the sheer strength of his personality as general-in-chief for nearly twenty years, Scott bequeathed a huge legacy to the Civil War generation, and it is appropriate to review it briefly.
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Scott’s military outlook had been developed out of the challenges of the
“small wars waged by the US. Army before 1861. His methods were refined and taken forward by Civil War generals in an entirely different environment.
Scott favored offensive military action, and disliked the defensive however,
in battle, he preferred to avoid the main body of the enemy’s strength and sought to strike an exposed flank. This led to an emphasis in all his plans on envelopment—moving around the side of the enemy’s army to strike his rear and cause the maximum fear and dislocation. Scott also made effective use of waterways to gain strategic mobility. Once his army had attained freedom of maneuver, Scott displayed a taste for dividing his army in the face of the enemy, not only to bewilder him, but to attain the initiative, which he hoped never to relinquish.
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Scott had adopted the motto Be governed by circumstances yet he sought to establish opportunism on the firm basis of detailed planning, and attempted to foresee every contingency, so that opportunities could be exploited as they arose. Consequently, he was sometimes criticized for slow and excessively methodical planning. But Scott retorted that if a durable plan was formulated that enjoyed the confidence of all, then a large measure of responsibility for its execution could be delegated to subordinates.
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The main disadvantage of Scott’s approach was that his insufferable vanity and pomposity led him to make hasty or foolish judgments. Although he was not a graduate of West Point, he supported it enthusiastically and indeed tended to personify, in the eyes of the academy’s critics, its worst faults rigidity, neurotic elitism, snobbery, hostility to American egalitarianism, and inability to act speedily. Moreover, Scott was querulous in the extreme, and feuded with every other senior American general of his generation, Andrew Jackson, Alexander Macomb, Edmund P. Gaines, and Zachary
Taylor. His tactless and petulant behavior set a peevish and quarrelsome example to be followed by the US. officer corps.
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In 1861 Scott remained a dominant figure. He had attempted unsuccessfully to persuade Robert E. Lee to accept an invitation to command Union troops assembling around Washington. Eventually this was accepted by Irvin McDowell, a protégé of the Secretary of the Treasury, Salmon P. Chase.
McDowell recommended himself to Scott because he had served in France and observed the French army’s staff procedures at firsthand. During the spring of 1861 Scott was considering the scheme that the newspapers would later dub the Anaconda Plan His correspondence with other generals, but especially with George B. McClellan, then commanding the
Department of Ohio, reveals the difficulties the new generation of generals experienced in adjusting their thoughts from the level of the captains they once had been. McClellan was inexperienced in high command and was excited by the chance of emulating Napoleon, directing operations of great sweep and dynamism. McClellan urged an advance up the Great Kanawha
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Valley from Ohio with 80,000 volunteers, which should push onto Richmond with the utmost promptness his schoolboy essay in Napoleonic strategy concluded by advocating thrusts on Charleston, Pensacola, Mobile,
and New Orleans. In reply, Scott pointed out soberly that logistics, lack of training, and neglect of water transport rendered McClellan’s scheme hopelessly unrealistic.
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Similarly, in June, 1861, the Confederate general PG. T. Beauregard,
commanding forces around Manassas Junction, Virginia, urged on the
Confederate President Jefferson Davis (a former West Point graduate and
U.S. Secretary of War, 1853–57) a plan embodying bold and rapid movement that would combine his forces with those of Joseph E. Johnston in the Shenandoah Valley, either before Washington, seizing Alexandria,
or, withdrawing southwards and acting on interior lines, attempt to crush successively and in detail the several columns of the enemy Here is an example of an imaginative captain playing at being Napoleon, supposing that the enemy would do what he wanted, and neglecting not only logistics,
but the capabilities of the troops under his command.
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As for McDowell, the plan he formulated for the summer campaign that the Lincoln administration insisted on was much more sensible. Yet the government still hoped that rebel forces would be defeated, the city of
Richmond occupied, and the rebellion suppressed. His plan depended on a movement towards Manassas, Confederate forces in the Shenandoah would be distracted, and those isolated at Manassas would be enveloped. Yet it proved beyond the capability of his troops. The lack of organized, sizable armed forces in 1861 made it enormously difficult to deal an overwhelming blow against Confederacy. The command system at McDowell’s disposal was very crude. William Howard Russell, the Times war correspondent,
met McDowell in Washington, DC, on July 16 looking for two batteries of artillery. Russell observed, I was surprised to find the General engaged in such a duty, and took leave to say so McDowell’s reply was illuminating. . . I am obliged to look after them myself, as I have so small a staff, and they are all engaged outwith my headquarters.”
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The Confederates labored under comparable (perhaps greater) disadvantages, as they had to create a military system from scratch. Yet it was certainly more difficult to organize offensive operations than muster for the defensive. Even McDowell’s substantial qualities as an administrator and planner could not overcome the structural weaknesses—especially lack of training—necessary to gain a
Union victory in the first stage of the war.
Such frustrations raise the question of the moral dimension of command.
As Union forces, in order to suppress a flagrant defiance of federal authority,
had to move forward, take the offensive, and occupy Southern territory,
Northern generals faced a psychological burden not encountered by
Confederates, who simply wished to remain in control of their own territory
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and institutions. Many northerners were despondent at having to undertake such a distasteful duty. Major General Ethan Allen Hitchcock, who in briefly advised the Secretary of War, Edwin M. Stanton, complained at the war’s outbreak, Many friends urge my return to the Army. But I have no heart for engaging in a Civil War . . . If fighting could preserve the Union or restore it) I might consider what I could do to take part—but when did fighting make friends When after the defeat at Manassas a number of politicians demanded that the generals responsible should be shot,
William T. Sherman complained that civilians are more willing to start a war than military men and so it appears now Sherman himself, later to emerge as one of the most resolute of Northern generals, suffered what amounted to a nervous breakdown in October and November, 1861. The issue of putting down a rebellion was complicated by the social and political conservatism of a number of generals who believed that the Civil War should be waged for the restoration of the Union and not for the destruction of slavery. The way such generals interpreted war aims had an important influence on the command style they adopted.
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The most important conservative military figure was Major General George B. McClellan.

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