THE CONDITIONS OF THE WAR
In recounting the history of Lincoln's Presidency, it will be necessary
to mark the course of the Civil War stage by stage as we proceed.
There are, however, one or two general features of the contest with
which it may be well to deal by way of preface.
It has seldom happened that a people entering upon a great war have
understood at the outset what the character of that war would be. When
the American Civil War broke out the North expected an easy victory,
but, as disappointment came soon and was long maintained, many clever
people adopted the opinion, which early prevailed in Europe, that there
was no possibility of their success at all. At the first the
difficulty of the task was unrecognised; under early and long-sustained
disappointment the strength by which those difficulties could be
overcome began to be despaired of without reason.
The North, after several slave States, which were at first doubtful,
had adhered to it, had more than double the population of the South; of
the Southern population a very large part were slaves, who, though
industrially useful, could not be enlisted. In material resources the
superiority of the North was no less marked, and its material wealth
grew during the war to a greater extent than had perhaps ever happened
to any other belligerent power. These advantages were likely to be
decisive in the end, if the North could and would endure to the end.
But at the very beginning these advantages simply did not tell at all,
for the immediately available military force of the North was
insignificant, and that of the South clearly superior to it; and even
when they began to tell, it was bound to be very long before their full
weight could be brought to bear. And the object which was to be
obtained was supremely difficult of attainment. It was not a defeat of
the South which might result in the alteration of a frontier, the
cession of some Colonies, the payment of an indemnity, and such like
matters; it was a conquest of the South so complete that the Union
could be restored on a firmer basis than before. Any less result than
this would be failure in the war. And the country, to be thus
completely conquered by an unmilitary people of nineteen millions, was
of enormous extent: leaving out of account the huge outlying State of
Texas, which is larger than Germany, the remaining Southern States
which joined in the Confederacy have an area somewhat larger than that
of Germany, Austria-Hungary, Holland, and Belgium put together; and
this great region had no industrial centres or other points of such
great strategic importance that by the occupation of them the remaining
area could be dominated. The feat which the Northern people eventually
achieved has been said by the English historians of the war (perhaps
with some exaggeration) to have been "a greater one than that which
Napoleon attempted to his own undoing when he invaded Russia in 1812."
On the other hand, the South was in some respects very favourably
placed for resisting invasion from the North. The Southern forces
during most of the war were, in the language of military writers,
operating on interior lines; that is, the different portions of them
lay nearer to one another than did the different portions of the
Northern forces, and could be more quickly brought to converge on the
same point; the country abounded in strong positions for defence which
could be held by a relatively small force, while in every invading
movement the invaders had to advance long distances from the base, thus
exposing their lines of communication to attack. The advantage of this
situation, if competent use were made of it, was bound to go very far
towards compensating for inferiority of numbers; the North could not
make its superior numbers on land tell in any rapidly decisive fashion
without exposing itself to dangerous counter-strokes. In naval
strength its superiority was asserted almost from the first, and by
cutting off foreign supplies caused the Southern armies to suffer
severe privations before the war was half through; but its full effect
could only be produced very slowly. Thus, if its people were brave and
its leaders capable, the South was by no means in so hopeless a case as
might at first have appeared; with good fortune it might hope to strike
its powerful antagonist some deadly blow before that antagonist could
bring its strength to bear; and even if this hope failed, a
sufficiently tenacious defence might well wear down the patience of the
North.
As soldiers the Southerners started with a superiority which the
Northerners could only overtake slowly. If each people were taken in
the mass, the proportion of Southerners bred to an outdoor life was
higher. Generally speaking, if not exactly more frugal, they were far
less used to living comfortably. Above all, all classes of people
among them were still accustomed to think of fighting as a normal and
suitable occupation for a man; while the prevailing temper of the North
thought of man as meant for business, and its higher temper was apt to
think of fighting as odious and war out of date. This, like the other
advantages of the South, was transitory; before very long Northerners
who became soldiers at a sacrifice of inclination, from the highest
spirit of patriotism or in the methodic temper in which business has to
be done, would become man for man as good soldiers as the Southerners;
but the original superiority of the Southerners would continue to have
a moral effect in their own ranks and on the mind of the enemy, more
especially of the enemy's generals, even after its cause had ceased to
exist; and herein the military advantage of the South was undoubtedly,
through the first half of the war, considerable.
In the matter of leadership the South had certain very real and certain
other apparent but probably delusive advantages. The United States had
no large number of trained military officers, still capable of active
service. The armies of the North and South alike had to be commanded
and staffed to a great extent by men who first studied their profession
in that war; and the lack of ripe military judgment was likely to be
felt most in the higher commands where the forces to be employed and
co-ordinated were largest. The South secured what may be called its
fair proportion of the comparatively few officers, but it was of
tremendous moment that, among the officers who, when the war began,
were recognised as competent, two, who sadly but in simple loyalty to
the State of Virginia took the Southern side, were men of genius. The
advantages of the South would have been no advantages without skill and
resolution to make use of them. The main conditions of the war--the
vast space, the difficulty in all parts of it of moving troops, the
generally low level of military knowledge--were all such as greatly
enhance the opportunities of the most gifted commander. Lee and
"Stonewall" Jackson thus became, the former throughout the war, the
latter till he was killed in the summer of 1863, factors of primary
importance in the struggle. Wolseley, who had, besides studying their
record, conversed both with Lee and with Moltke, thought Lee even
greater than Moltke, and the military writers of our day speak of him
as one of the great commanders of history. As to Jackson, Lee's belief
in him is sufficient testimony to his value. And the good fortune of
the South was not confined to these two signal instances. Most of the
Southern generals who appeared early in the war could be retained in
important commands to the end.
The South might have seemed at first equally fortunate in the character
of the Administration at the back of the generals. An ascendency was
at once conceded to Jefferson Davis, a tried political leader, to which
Lincoln had to win his way, and the past experiences of the two men had
been very different. The operations of war in which Lincoln had taken
part were confined, according to his own romantic account in a speech
in Congress, to stealing ducks and onions from the civil population;
his Ministers were as ignorant in the matter as he; their military
adviser, Scott, was so infirm that he had soon to retire, and it proved
most difficult to replace him. Jefferson Davis, on the other hand,
started with knowledge of affairs, including military affairs; he had
been Secretary of War in Pierce's Cabinet and Chairman of the Senate
Committee on War since then; above all, he had been a soldier and had
commanded a regiment with some distinction in the Mexican War. It is
thought that he would have preferred a military command to the
Presidency of the Confederacy, and as his own experience of actual war
was as great as that of his generals, he can hardly be blamed for a
disposition to interfere with them at the beginning. But military
historians, while criticising (perhaps a little hastily) all Lincoln's
interventions in the affairs of war up to the time when he found
generals whom he trusted, insist that Davis' systematic interference
was far more harmful to his cause; and Wolseley, who watched events
closely from Canada and who visited the Southern Army in 1863, is most
emphatic in this opinion. He interfered with Lee to an extent which
nothing but Lee's devoted friendship and loyalty could have made
tolerable. He put himself into relations of dire hostility with Joseph
Johnston, and in 1864 suspended him in the most injudicious manner.
Above all, when the military position of the South had begun to be
acutely perilous, Jefferson Davis neither devised for himself, nor
allowed his generals to devise, any bold policy by which the chance
that still remained could be utilised. His energy of will showed
itself in the end in nothing but a resolution to protract bloodshed
after it had certainly become idle.
If we turn to the political conditions, on which, in any but a short
war, so much depends, the South will appear to have had great
advantages. Its people were more richly endowed than the mixed and
crudely democratic multitude of the North, in the traditional aptitude
for commanding or obeying which enables people to pull together in a
crisis. And they were united in a cause such as would secure the
sustained loyalty of any ordinary people under any ordinary leader.
For, though it was nothing but slavery that led to their assertion of
independence, from the moment that they found themselves involved in
war, they were fighting for a freedom to which they felt themselves
entitled, and for nothing else whatever. A few successful encounters
at the start tempted the ordinary Southerner to think himself a better
man than the ordinary Northerner, even as the Southern Congressmen felt
themselves superior to the persons whom the mistaken democracy of the
North too frequently elected. This claim of independence soon acquired
something of the fierce pride that might have been felt by an ancient
nation. But it would have been impossible that the Northern people as
a whole should be similarly possessed by the cause in which they
fought. They did not seem to be fighting for their own liberty, and
they would have hated to think that they were fighting for conquest.
They were fighting for the maintenance of a national unity which they
held dear. The question how far it was worth fighting a formidable
enemy for the sake of eventual unity with him, was bound to present
itself. Thus, far from wondering that the cause of the Union aroused
no fuller devotion than it did in the whole lump of the Northern
people, we may wonder that it inspired with so lofty a patriotism men
and women in every rank of life who were able to leaven that lump. But
the political element in this war was of such importance as to lead to
a startling result; the North came nearest to yielding at a time when
in a military sense its success had become sure. To preserve a united
North was the greatest and one of the hardest of the duties of
President Lincoln.
To a civilian reader the history of the war, in spite of the
picturesque incidents of many battles, may easily be made dreary. Till
far on in the lengthy process of subjecting the South, we might easily
become immersed in some futile story of how General X. was superseded
by General Y. in a command, for which neither discovered any purpose
but that of not co-operating with General Z. And this impression is
not merely due to our failure to understand the difficulties which
confronted these gallant officers. The dearth of trained military
faculty, which was felt at the outset, could only be made good by the
training which the war itself supplied. Such commanders as Grant and
Sherman and Sheridan not only could not have been recognised at the
beginning of the war; they were not then the soldiers that they
afterwards became. And the want was necessarily very serious in the
case of the higher commands which required the movement of large
forces, the control of subordinates each of whom must have a wide
discretion, and the energy of intellect and will necessary for
resolving the more complex problems of strategy. We are called upon to
admire upon both sides the devotion of forgotten thousands, and to
admire upon the side of the South the brilliant and daring operations
by which in so many battles Lee and Jackson defeated superior forces.
On the Northern side, later on, great generals came to view, but it is
in the main a different sort of achievement which we are called upon to
appreciate. An Administration appointed to direct a stupendous
operation of conquest was itself of necessity ill prepared for such a
task; behind it were a Legislature and a public opinion equally ill
prepared to support and to assist it. There were in its military
service many intelligent and many enterprising men, but none, at first,
so combining intelligence and enterprise that he could grapple with any
great responsibility or that the civil power would have been warranted
in reposing complete confidence in him. The history of the war has to
be recounted in this volume chiefly with a view to these difficulties
of the Administration.
One of the most interesting features of the war would, in any military
study of it, be seen to be the character of the troops on both sides.
On both sides their individual quality was high; on both, circumstances
and the disposition of the people combined to make discipline weak.
This character, common to the two armies, was conspicuous in many
battles of the war, but a larger interest attaches to the policy of the
two administrations in raising and organising their civilian armies.
The Southern Government, if its proceedings were studied in detail,
would probably seem to have been better advised at the start on matters
of military organisation; for instance, it had early and long retained
a superiority in cavalry which was not a mere result of good fortune.
But here, too, there was an inherent advantage in the very fact that
the South had started upon a desperate venture. There can hardly be a
more difficult problem of detail for statesmen than the co-ordination
of military and civil requirements in the raising of an army. But in
the South all civil considerations merged themselves in the paramount
necessity of a military success for which all knew the utmost effort
was needed. The several States of the South, claiming as they did a
far larger independence than the Northern States, knew that they could
only make that claim good by being efficient members of the
Confederacy. Thus it was comparatively easy for the Confederate
Government to adopt and maintain a consecutive policy in this matter,
and though, from the conditions of a widely spread agricultural
population, voluntary enlistment produced poor results at the beginning
of the war, it appears to have been easy to introduce quite early an
entirely compulsory system of a stringent kind.
The introduction of compulsory service in the North has its place in
our subsequent story. The system that preceded it need not be dwelt
upon here, because, full of instruction as a technical study of it
(such as has been made by Colonel Henderson) must be, no brief survey
by an amateur could be useful. It is necessary, however, to understand
the position in which Lincoln's Administration was placed, without much
experience In America, or perhaps elsewhere in the world, to guide it.
It must not be contended, for it cannot be known that the problem was
fully and duly envisaged by Lincoln on his Cabinet, but it would
probably in any case have been impossible for them to pursue from the
first a consecutive and well-thought-out policy for raising an army and
keeping up its strength. The position of the North differed
fundamentally from that of the South; the North experienced neither the
ardour nor the throes of a revolution; it was never in any fear of
being conquered, only of not conquering. There was nothing, therefore,
which at once bestowed on the Government a moral power over the country
vastly in excess of that which it exercised in normal times. This,
however, was really necessary to it if the problem of the Army was to
be handled in the way which was desirable from a military point of
view. Compulsory service could not at first be thought of. It was
never supposed that the tiny regular Army of the United States
Government could be raised to any very great size by voluntary
enlistment, and the limited increase of it which was attempted was not
altogether successful. The existing militia system of the several
States was almost immediately found faulty and was discarded. A great
Volunteer Force had to be raised which should be under the command of
the President, who by the Constitution is Commander-in-Chief of the
forces of the Union, but which must be raised in each State by the
State Governor (or, if he was utterly wanting, by leading local
citizens). Now State Governors are not--it must be recalled--officers
under the President, but independent potentates acting usually in as
much detachment from him as the Vice-Chancellor of Oxford or Cambridge
from the Board of Education or a Presbyterian minister from a bishop.
This group of men, for the most part able, patriotic, and determined,
were there to be used and had to be consulted. It follows that the
policy of the North in raising and organising its armies had at first
to be a policy evolved between numerous independent authorities which
never met and were held together by a somewhat ignorant public opinion,
sometimes much depressed and sometimes, which was worse, oversanguine.
It is impossible to judge exactly how ill or how well Lincoln, under
such circumstances, grappled with this particular problem, but many
anomalies which seem to us preposterous--the raising of raw new
regiments when fine seasoned regiments were short of half their
strength, and so forth--were in these circumstances inevitable. The
national system of recruiting, backed by compulsion, which was later
set up, still required for its success the co-operation of State and
local authorities of this wholly independent character.
Northern and Southern armies alike had necessarily to be commanded to a
great extent by amateur officers; the number of officers, in the
service or retired, who had been trained at West Point, was
immeasurably too small for the needs of the armies. Amateurs had to be
called in, and not only so, but they had in some cases to be given very
important commands. The not altogether unwholesome tradition that a
self-reliant man can turn his hand to anything was of course very
strong in America, and the short military annals of the country had
been thought to have added some illustrious instances to the roll of
men of peace who have distinguished themselves in arms. So a political
leader, no matter whether he was Democrat or Republican, who was a man
of known general capacity, would sometimes at first seem suitable for
an important command rather than the trained but unknown professional
soldier who was the alternative. Moreover, it seemed foolish not to
appoint him, when, as sometimes happened, he could bring thousands of
recruits from his State. The Civil War turned out, however, to show
the superiority of the duly trained military mind in a marked degree.
Some West-Pointers of repute of course proved incapable, and a great
many amateur colonels and generals, both North and South, attained a
very fair level of competence in the service (the few conspicuous
failures seem to have been quite exceptional); but, all the same, of
the many clever and stirring men who then took up soldiering as novices
and served for four years, not one achieved brilliant success; of the
generals in the war whose names are remembered, some had indeed passed
years in civil life, but every one had received a thorough military
training in the years of his early manhood. It certainly does not
appear that the Administration was really neglectful of professional
merit; it hungered to find it; but many appointments must at first have
been made in a haphazard fashion, for there was no machinery for
sifting claims. A zealous but unknown West-Pointer put under an
outsider would be apt to write as Sherman did in early days: "Mr.
Lincoln meant to insult me and the Army"; and a considerable jealousy
evidently arose between West-Pointers and amateurs. It was aggravated
by the rivalry between officers of the Eastern army and those of the,
more largely amateur, Western army. The amateurs, too, had something
to say on their side; they were apt to accuse West-Pointers as a class
of a cringing belief that the South was invincible. There was nothing
unnatural or very serious in all this, but political influences which
arose later caused complaints of this nature to be made the most of,
and a general charge to be made against Lincoln's Administration of
appointing generals and removing them under improper political
influences. This general charge, however, rests upon a limited number
of alleged instances, and all of these which are of any importance will
necessarily be examined in later chapters.
It may be useful to a reader who wishes to follow the main course of
the war carefully, if the chief ways in which geographical facts
affected it are here summarised--necessarily somewhat dryly. Minor
operations at outlying points on the coast or in the Far West will be
left out of account, so also will a serious political consideration,
which we shall later see caused doubt for a time as to the proper
strategy of the North.
It must be noted first, startling as it may be to Englishmen who
remember the war partly by the exploits of the _Alabama_, that the
naval superiority of the North was overwhelming. In spite of many
gallant efforts by the Southern sailors, the North could blockade their
coasts and could capture most of the Southern ports long before its
superiority on land was established. Turning then to land, we may
treat the political frontier between the two powers, after a short
preliminary stage of war, as being marked by the southern boundaries of
Maryland, West Virginia, Kentucky, and Missouri, just as they are seen
on the map to-day. In doing so, we must note that at the commencement
of large operations parts of Kentucky and Missouri were occupied by
Southern invading forces. This frontier is cut, not far from the
Atlantic, by the parallel mountain chains which make up the Alleghanies
or Appalachians. These in effect separated the field of operations
into a narrow Eastern theatre of war, and an almost boundless Western
theatre; and the operations in these two theatres were almost to the
end independent of each other.
In the Eastern theatre of war lies Washington, the capital of the
Union, a place of great importance to the North for obvious reasons,
and especially because if it fell European powers would be likely to
recognise the Confederacy. It lies, on the Potomac, right upon the
frontier; and could be menaced also in the rear, for the broad and
fertile trough between the mountain chains formed by the valley of the
Shenandoah River, which flows northward to join the Potomac at a point
north-west of Washington, was in Confederate hands and formed a sort of
sally-port by which a force from Richmond could get almost behind
Washington. A hundred miles south of Washington lay Richmond, which
shortly became the capital of the Confederates, instead of Montgomery
in Alabama. As a brand-new capital it mattered little to the
Confederates, though at the very end of the war it became their last
remaining stronghold. The intervening country, which was in Southern
hands, was extraordinarily difficult. The reader may notice on the map
the rivers with broad estuaries which are its most marked features, and
with the names of which we shall become familiar. The rivers
themselves were obstacles to an invading Northern army; their
estuaries, on the other hand, soon afforded it safe communication by
sea.
In the Western theatre of war we must remember first the enormous
length of frontier in proportion to the population on either side.
This necessarily made the progress of Northern invasion slow, and its
proper direction hard to determine, for diversions could be created by
a counter-invasion elsewhere along the frontier or a stroke at the
invaders' communications. The principal feature of the whole region is
the great waterways, on which the same advantages which gave the sea to
the North gave it also an immense superiority in the river warfare of
flotillas of gunboats. When the North with its gunboats could get
control of the Mississippi the South would be deprived of a
considerable part of its territory and resources, and cut off from its
last means of trading with Europe (save for the relief afforded by
blockade-runners) by being cut off from Mexico and its ports. Further,
when the North could control the tributaries of the Mississippi,
especially the Cumberland and the Tennessee which flow into the great
river through the Ohio, it would cut deep into the internal
communications of the South. Against this menace the South could only
contend by erecting powerful fortresses on the rivers, and the capture
of some of them was the great object of the earlier Northern operations.
The railway system of the South must also be taken into account in
connection with their waterways. This, of course, cannot be seen on a
modern map. Perhaps the following may make the main points clear. The
Southern railway system touched the Mississippi and the world beyond it
at three points only: Memphis, Vicksburg, and New Orleans. A traveller
wishing to go, say, from Richmond by rail towards the West could have,
if distance were indifferent to him, a choice of three routes for part
of the way. He could go through Knoxville in Tennessee to Chattanooga
in that State, where he had a choice of routes further West, or he
could take one of two alternative lines south into Georgia and thence
go either to Atlanta or to Columbus in the west of that State. Arrived
at Atlanta or Columbus, he could proceed further West either by making
a detour northwards through Chattanooga or by making a detour
southwards through the seaport town of Mobile, crossing the harbour by
boat. Thus the capture of Chattanooga from the South would go far
towards cutting the whole Southern railway system in two, and the
capture of Mobile would complete it. Lastly, we may notice two lines
running north and south through the State of Mississippi, one through
Corinth and Meridian, and the other nearer the great river. From this
and the course of the rivers the strategic importance of some of the
towns mentioned may be partly appreciated.
The subjugation of the South in fact began by a process, necessarily
slow and much interrupted, whereby having been blockaded by sea it was
surrounded by land, cut off from its Western territory, and deprived of
its main internal lines of communication. Richmond, against which the
North began to move within the first three months of the war, did not
fall till nearly four years later, when the process just described had
been completed, and when a Northern army had triumphantly progressed,
wasting the resources of the country as it went, from Chattanooga to
Atlanta, thence to the Atlantic coast of Georgia, and thence northward
through the two Carolinas till it was about to join hands with the army
assailing Richmond. Throughout this time the attention of a large part
of the Northern public and of all those who watched the war from Europe
was naturally fastened to a great extent upon the desperate fighting
which occurred in the region of Washington and of Richmond and upon the
ill success of the North in endeavours of unforeseen difficulty against
the latter city. We shall see, however, that the long and humiliating
failure of the North in this quarter was neither so unaccountable nor
nearly so important as it appeared.