I'm convinced our modern culture is incapable of understanding the American Civil War without engaging is a lot of prerequisite study first. The fabric of the United States, the very definition of what it means to be a citizen of my country, has changed so much that one can't idly pick up an overview of the war and read it and really understand it.
Bruce Catton was writing in the 50s. The Civil War was on it's way out as part of living memory and the recent conclusion of the biggest war ever fought dominated people's concept of what war was. But even in our time certain myths about the war persist. And none is more pervasive than the myth that the Army of Northern Virginia and its general Robert E. Lee were virtually super human. And since the Army of the Potomac was General Lee's punching bag for much of the war it's legacy comes to us as an pathetic by comparison.
Both these myths Catton seeks to dispel in writing his trilogy of narrative history The Army of the Potomac. He does this by telling the story both from a soldier's eye view and from the view of the officers of the Army of the Potomac. You won't get much else from the narrative. Political and social context as well as happenings in other theaters of the war are limited to what is necessary to understand what's going with the Army of the Potomac. In the 50s I suspect there was more common knowledge about Civil War history. In volume three, for example, General Grant pops into the narrative with out any explanation of where he came from and why. The beginning of the first volume drops the reader into the aftermath of the Second Battle of Bull Run, in medias res as they say, without any build up or preparation.
After this quick overview of General Pope's disastrous tenure, the bulk of volume one is dedicated to General George McClellan, his precipitous rise to the absolute heights of military power, his fall, his second rise, and his ultimate disgrace. McClellan loved his men, and they loved him. But he loved them too much to win a war. His over-cautiousness protracted the war by years. His fear -- I'm sure he would never have used those words -- of General Lee allowed him to be continually out matched when Lee was against the ropes and created a tradition in the Army of the Potomac of an expectation that no matter how well the battle was progressing, Lee was going to win in the end. And only the doggedness of General Grant was able to overcome it.
If McClellan instigated the tradition of Generals Hooker and Burnside kept it up in grand fashion. The second volume is devoted to their failings and culminates General Meade taking command and finally giving Lee such a sound beating he would never be able to go on the offensive again.
Finally the third volume introduces Grant as the hands on leader of all Union armies. He defines the strategy of the war in Northern Virginia from here on out though Meade is still technically in charge of the Army of the Potomac. The final year of the war is extremely bloody. Grant's methods are assault until forward momentum is lost, then move the army around the enemy's right flank. He does this until he's able to lay siege to Richmond and then continues to move around his left until finally General Sheridan is able to bust up Lee's reserves and Lee doesn't have enough men to hold his lines. Lee is forced to retreat and his army is overtaken outside Appomattox and surrenders. Speaking of Sheridan, a description of the Shenandoah campaign is included since the VI corps from the Army of the Potomac participated.
Combined with this bird's eye narrative is the description of the foot soldier's life, the horror and violence and madness of it all. Here Catton his quick to point out that the average soldier that fought for the Union was every bit as good as his opponent. But the soldiers were lead by Generals that were out matched and incapable of using them properly, soldiers who went willingly into battle even though they knew it was suicide. I kept wondering if there was something moral or ethical or good in being so devoted to a cause that one would give up one's life for no effect.
In addition to the bullets and fire there are fascinating interludes of day to day life. I was particularly interested in description of "news bearers". Grant did a much better job than his predecessors at keeping his plans secret. So news bearers, common foot soldiers, would wander up and down the lines gathering information and sharing rumors with their fellow soldiers in different outfits. They would try to synthesize an overall picture of what was going on in order to take the information back to their own units -- and they were famous for stealing anything that wasn't nailed down.
But the most striking thing to me is the camaraderie between the soldiers of the Army of the Potomac and the soldiers of the Army of Northern Virginia. When the trenches were built and the battle of the moment stopped they would almost always strike up friendly relationships with each other, trade goods, not interfere with each others outings to gather water or firewood. They'd even warn each other when they were about to start shooting. But this friendliness didn't affect their willingness to fight tooth and nail with each other when the time came. I wonder if there isn't a lesson to be learned here that can be applied to less violent situations of conflict.
Bruce Catton's three volume narrative history The Army of the Potomac is a great overview of a very specific part of the American Civil War. Catton waxes overly verbose and poetic at times. But that was the style in mid 19th century America so I let it slide. But it was a different world back then, a world we can find parallels with in our own, but few direct comparisons.
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9 comments:
Do you believe this war was really necessary, as the modern narrative seems to insist?
That's kind of a loaded question. No war is necessary. Rather it's a question of whether the benefits out weigh the costs.
While I didn't have a choice in the matter, it was certainly worth it to the people who fought the war. In the 1864 elections soldiers of the Army of the Potomac, who had just endured the deadliest campaign of the war, voted overwhelmingly in favor of Lincoln and a continuation of hostilities.
People then and now try to make the war about a lot of different things, and it was about all those things and more. The popular interpretation now days is that it was a war to end slavery between the "good" North versus the "evil" South. In my opinion that view simplifies the War to the point of pointlessness. You might as well not know anything about the War if that's all you know. However, prior to Lincoln's initial inauguration he stated that the rising contention between the North and South could be completely defused if the South would voluntarily put an end to slavery. In end the end, slavery was really the hinge that the whole war revolved around regardless of all the other factors.
The war centralized power in the federal government more than any other event in US history and emphasized the reprehensible depths that could result from an excessive emphasis on individual and states rights. It sacrificed the autonomy of the states and hundreds of thousands of lives in order to end slavery and preserve the Union.
I tend to believe that it was an overall benefit to the US in that it reversed the swing of momentum from the destructive extremes of individual rights. Unfortunately the reversed momentum didn't find a happy medium and stay there. So now we have problems in the way we currently do things because there really is no check or balance from the states to federal power.
I am a little skeptical. Lincoln stated numerous times that it was about keeping the union together. He never really believed the races were equal. he also stated it would be better if they all just went back to Africa.
It is hard to imagine how the benefit outweighed the cost. Every other civilized country somehow managed to end slavery without such massive slaughter and destruction. In my opinion it probably would have even ended anyway if Lincoln had let the south go.
Lincoln was an abolitionist which is why South Carolina seceded when he was elected. But as you say, he was much more concerned with preserving the Union and in order to accomplish that he was willing to compromise on slavery, fight a war and let congress do just about what ever they wanted as long as it didn't interfere with the war effort. The Emancipation Proclamation, for example, only freed slaves in states that refused to rejoin the Union. Regardless of abolitionists opposition to slavery wasn't everybody back then what we would call racist?
Anyway I have more to say later.
Yes, that might be true. But if he was willing to compromise that much on slavery, then it must not really have been the central hinge of the war, right?
I remember reading that there were also some prominent abolitionists who advocated secession as well. If there was a free country directly to the north, that would have been a perfect avenue for slaves to escape. And the war would have been completely avoided.
As I said before the War, like all wars, could have been avoided by at least one of the belligerents simply shrugging their collective shoulders and deciding to tolerate the status quo. The North could have let the South secede at any time.
To answer your question regarding the centrality of slavery despite Lincoln's willingness to compromise:
A foundational policy of the Republican party, as stated at the convention in 1856, was as follows: "It is the duty of Congress to prohibit in the territories those twin relics of barbarism, polygamy and slavery."
(Ironic that the Republican party is so popular in Utah considering it started out as the anti-Mormon party but that's beside the point at the moment.)
Lincoln was relatively unknown at the time he won his party's nomination. Certain southern states, particularly South Carolina, had drawn a line in the sand regarding the presidential elections. If the abolitionist party, meaning the Republican party, won they would secede. It didn't matter if Lincoln himself was a moderate. The south seceded because of slavery.
At the time of secession, the Northerners most willing to go to war were the hard core abolitionists. These are the same types of folks that moved, en mass, to Kansas to keep it from becoming a slave state. And many of them suffered for it with their lives during the "Bleeding Kansas" episode. And this isn't the only time we see the South using violence to expand the practice of slavery.
Lincoln's largest obstacle in motivating the country to war was the fact that much of the north didn't care about black people enough to fight and die to free them from slavery. As such he played a political balancing act at the outset of the war. To the abolitionists it was a war against slavery, to the western states like Illinois and Ohio it was a war for the Union.
However, the War as a war against slavery became the dominant idea after the Battle of Antietam and the Emancipation Proclamation, despite how watered down the proclamation appears to us today.
And make no doubt about it, just because Lincoln prioritized the Union over slavery, he had no interest in putting up with slavery any longer than he could politically manage.
Prior to the Emancipation Proclamation the South had close political and economic ties with England. England, however, had already outlawed slavery and Southern slavery was extremely unpopular there. As soon as the Emancipation Proclamation was issued and the War coalesced as a war against slavery it effectively knocked England and all her European allies, France in particular, out of participation in the War.
For all these reasons, slavery dominated the political landscape of the war.
Regarding your statement that slavery would probably have ended anyway, how long are we talking? Jim Crow laws, legal attempts to maintain the same social structure in the south that existed under slavery, lasted until the 1960s and showed no sign of letting up until the Federal government got involved (again).
Prior to the war, the South was aggressively trying to expand the practice of slavery, see the Missouri compromise and the Southern response to the Kansas-Nebraska act for examples. Southern politicians even advocated overturning the law that made importing slaves to the US illegal. During the Civil War the South invaded New Mexico with the intention of forcibly making it a pro-slave territory.
If the South had won the war it would be denied a Manifest Destiny because California and the far west was anti-slavery. An alternate plan was espoused by such prominent Southerners as the Confederate President Jefferson Davis to head south and conquer Mexico and expand the practice of Slavery in the process.
This is not just a far fetched scenario. During the Mexican-American war the US learned how easy it was to conquer Mexico. And it turns out France actually did take over Mexico during the American Civil war with a paltry 35,000 soldiers. This caused a lot of trepidation to the Lincoln administration because, of all the European powers, France was most desirous to ally with the South and was only restrained because they were afraid of upsetting England.
I agree with this writer:
http://www.lewrockwell.com/blog/lewrw/archives/113605.html
Roberts's first example of "deadly hubris" is the first battle of the American "Civil War," the Battle of Bull Run (known to some as the Battle of First Manassas) in Virginia. In that battle the Confederate Army sent the entire U.S. Army, accompanied by the wives and girlfriends of officers and Republican politicians dressed in their Sunday best and riding in carriages, fleeing back to Washington, D.C. while the Confederates lobbed artillery shells at them. It was a horrific, bloody defeat for the federal army. Roberts points out that had the Confederate Army pursued the federals the war could have ended then and there, sparing some 750,000 lives (the latest estimate of "Civil War" deaths). And since Lincoln had just promised to explicitly enshrine slavery in the U.S. Constitution just three months earlier in his first inaugural address, the outcome of the battle did not affect the prospects for emancipation. Southern hubris led to the opinion that Northern city slickers were such poor fighters that they posed no threat to the South, therefore, there was no need to follow up their victory and conquer Washington, D.C., prosecute and hang Lincoln as a traitor, and put an end to the war.
An interesting historical fact that Roberts did not mention was that when President Jefferson Davis appeared on the battlefield at the very end of the battle, an unknown officer who was a former physics professor at VMI named Thomas Jackson abruptly approached him and said, "Give me 10,000 men and I will take Washington tomorrow." Davis refused the request, for Thomas Jackson was not yet known by his eternal nickname, "Stonewall Jackson," who would certainly have succeeded had he been given those 10,000 men.
By the way, had the South become a separate country on that day, then the federal Fugitive Slave Act would have become defunct so that a slave in Virginia who escaped into Pennsylvania (or any other U.S. state) would have been free forever with no federal bounty on his head. This would have quickly broken the economic back of slavery in Virginia, causing the state to do what states like New York had done just a couple of years earlier (1853) and end slavery there by peaceful, legal, and constitutional means. Southern hubris and the Yankee lust for imperialism, empire, and plunder prevented this from happening.
Agreeing with someone is fine, but why do you agree with him?
Are his claims historically valid?
Do you have any evidence that that guy is a reliable authority on this particular subject?
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