"PEPPER BOX" STRATEGY
The moment Virginia adopted an ordinance of secession the authorities
on both sides recognized the fact that that state was destined to be
the chief battle ground of the war, and especially that the first and
perhaps the decisive actions of the struggle were likely to occur
there. Accordingly both sides began at once to hurry troops to that
borderland--the South sending them to such vantage points in Virginia
as might most seriously threaten Washington, the North sending them
to the capital city for its defense and for that march upon Richmond
which, it was hoped at the North, might be quickly decisive of the war
in favor of the Federal arms.
The Confederate General Forrest is reported to have defined "strategy"
as the art of "getting there first with the most men." This was what
each side at that time was endeavoring to do.
Richmond was not yet selected as the Confederate capital, but its
choice as such was already foreshadowed as a necessary requirement
alike of geography and politics, and within a brief while the
foreshadowing became a fact. In the meanwhile it was accepted in
advance as a certainty, and the two capitals confronted each other at a
distance of scarcely more than a hundred miles, as the crow flies.
The Southern States poured troops into Richmond as rapidly as they
could. The Northern States poured troops into Washington for the
defense of that capital with all possible energy and enterprise.
Neither upon the one side nor upon the other were the men soldiers
in any proper acceptation of the term. They were raw levies. From
the North they were mainly men who had passed their young lives in
commerce, in study or in other peaceful pursuits. From the South they
were mainly the sons of planters or the sons of overseers, accustomed
in either case from their youth up to the use of gunpowder, and to
the employment of those arms in the use of which gunpowder is a prime
factor. The Southern youths were accustomed to outdoor life, to camp
fare, to self-dependence, to self-sacrifice, if need be. The Northern
youth in the main were accustomed to nothing of the sort.
Thus at the beginning the Southern troops had an advantage. This was
peculiarly obvious when the cavalry of the two sections met each other
in battle. The Southern horsemen had been "rough riders" from infancy.
Many of the Northern men of that arm of the service had never ridden at
all except perhaps by way of conducting a gentle and docile farm horse
to a watering trough. In the matter of horses, too, the Southerners,
and especially the Virginians, had a distinct advantage. Ever since
the first settlement of Virginia it had been the custom of men in
that nearly roadless state to go everywhere upon horseback. They had
consequently given special attention to the breeding of horses fit for
strenuous work under the saddle, while in the North horse-breeding had
been conducted mainly with a view to harness use. The wiry Virginian
thoroughbreds, or half-breds, were far fitter for cavalry service, far
more enduring, far quicker of action, far more alert and responsive
than the Conestogas or Percherons or handsome and fast trotting Morgans
of Pennsylvania, from which state came the first cavalry regiments
encountered by Stuart and his born and bred cavaliers, mounted as they
were upon "Red Eye" colts or "Revenue" fillies.
The Southern troops also had the advantage of fighting defensively in
their own country to whose climate they were inured and to the diseases
of which they were in the main immune.
But apart from these small differences the two armies that confronted
each other on the Potomac were composed of substantially the same
materials. Later in the war the large enlistment of immigrants gave to
the Union army an element that did not at any time exist in the armies
of the South. But at the outset there was no important difference. Each
army was made up of American youths, full of patriotic fervor, brave,
heroic upon occasion, but utterly untrained in the profession of arms.
On the Northern side in the early contests of the war there was the
advantage of small bodies of regulars, trained to obey orders at all
hazards and to stand firm in every moment of danger. These regulars
proved themselves of inestimable value in the early actions of the war;
but their numbers were so small that their service scarcely counts in
the historical reckoning.
For the rest, both armies were made up of volunteers, men wholly
unused to military discipline and wholly untrained in that subjection
of their own minds and wills to superior authority which constitutes
the distinction between the soldier and the raw recruit--between an
army and an armed mob. They were brave fellows, all of them. They were
devoted to the causes they severally served, but they were not yet
soldiers. They retained the unsoldierly habit of thinking and judging
for themselves, where they should instead have let their officers think
and judge for them. Under the discipline of service and of fighting
they presently reduced themselves to the ranks, as it were, and became
soldiers equal and even superior to the best regulars that any army on
earth has ever brought into the field. Their deeds at Cold Harbor, at
Fredericksburg, at Chancellorsville, in the Wilderness, at Petersburg,
at Antietam, at Gettysburg, and on a score of other desperately
contested battlefields leave no possible room for doubt that the men
who composed the Federal and Confederate armies were the peers and even
the superiors of any other men who ever fought anywhere. But at the
first they were not such. They were undisciplined and subject to such
panics as that sort of individual thinking in which they indulged is
inevitably bound to produce. It is important to bear these facts in
mind if we would read the early history of the war understandingly.
The first blood shed in the war, however, was not shed in formal
military action. On the nineteenth of April, two days after Virginia's
secession, a Baltimore mob assailed a Massachusetts regiment on its
passage through the Maryland city to Washington, and several persons
were killed in the melée. It is not historically recorded that any of
the men who constituted the mob and made the assault ever afterwards
served in the Confederate army. On the contrary there is every reason
to believe that these men, so ready for mob violence, very carefully
avoided a service in which legitimate fighting was to be the daily
routine of life. That, however, is a detail--illustrative, perhaps, but
not otherwise important to history.
The secession of Virginia carried with it one event of vital and even
of supreme importance, namely, the secession of Robert E. Lee, without
whose genius the Confederate War would almost certainly have ended in
McClellan's capture of Richmond in the summer of 1862.
General Winfield Scott had called Lee "the flower of the American
Army." He had earnestly recommended Lee as his own fittest successor
in supreme command of the United States Army and such command had been
definitely offered to Lee. The secession of half a dozen Northern
or border states could not have been of greater consequence either
to the North or to the South than the decision of Robert E. Lee to
resign his commission and go with his native state Virginia into a
war of secession for which he saw no occasion or justification. His
problem, like that of Farragut and George H. Thomas and other officers
of Southern birth in the United States Army and Navy, was a very
perplexing one, involving a divided duty such as few men are ever
called upon to confront in the course of their lives. He himself set
forth the considerations that finally determined his course, in a
letter to his sister, the wife of a Union officer, which it is proper
to quote here in explanation. To this sister he wrote on the twentieth
of April, 1861: "We are now in a state of war which will yield to
nothing. The whole South is in a state of revolution, into which
Virginia after a long struggle has been drawn, and though I recognize
no necessity for this state of things, and would have foreborne and
pleaded to the end for the redress of grievances real or supposed,
yet in my own person I had to meet the question whether I should take
part against my native state. With all my devotion to the Union and
the feeling of loyalty and duty of an American citizen, I have not
been able to make up my mind to raise my hand against my relatives, my
children, my home. I have therefore resigned my commission in the army,
and, save in defense of my native state, with the sincere hope that my
poor services may never be needed, I hope I may never be called upon to
draw my sword."
Surely no more tragic, no more pathetic letter than that was ever
written. Yet it represented and reflected the struggle which at that
time was going on in the soul of every army or navy officer of Southern
birth and kindred. It was a part of the tragedy of a war which divided
families and set brother against brother in a strife that knew neither
mercy nor relenting for four, long, terrible years.
Lee went at once to Richmond and was promptly appointed to the task of
organizing first the Virginian and afterwards all the Southern armies
for effective service. For such work of organization he had a peculiar
genius which General Scott recognized, at the same time congratulating
the Union cause upon the fact that it had some weeks the start of Lee
in the task of creating an army out of untrained and undisciplined
volunteers.
Lee was not yet placed in any active military command, but at
every step he was the supreme military adviser of the Southern
authorities. When Beauregard, with all the laurels of popular praise
upon him, reached Richmond he and not Lee was the idol of the hour.
His spectacular and rather theatrical reduction of Fort Sumter had
advertised him to the popular attention as nothing had advertised Lee.
But Lee was his superior in rank as in genius and everything else, and
it was he who directed Beauregard to establish himself at Manassas and
along Bull Run as the fittest vantage ground from which to repel the
first serious advance of the Federal Army which was then assembling at
Washington.
At that period of the war there prevailed at Washington what a military
wit and critic afterwards called "the pepper box policy." That is to
say, the policy was to send forces into all quarters at once, to defend
large and small positions equally, and thus to scatter an army which if
concentrated upon a single point might have achieved decisive results.
Thus if the whole force available for eastern service had been brought
at once to Washington and pushed thence toward Richmond it seemingly
might have enveloped its adversary in superior numbers, and except for
the uncertainty due to the untrained character of its men it might have
been reckoned upon to achieve decisive results.
But under the "pepper box policy," a part of this force was sent under
McClellan to West Virginia; a part of it to the Valley of Virginia
under Patterson; a part of it to Fortress Monroe, and the main body to
Washington and its neighborhood, to protect the capital and presently
to advance for the overthrow of Beauregard at Manassas and for a
determined advance upon Richmond.
This policy invited defeat and met it. On the tenth of June the small
force at Fortress Monroe advanced and assailed the Confederates at
Big Bethel. It was defeated with some loss, having inflicted no
corresponding or compensatory injury upon the Confederates. Even had
the expedition succeeded in driving the Confederates from Big Bethel,
it could not possibly have accomplished anything of value to the
Federal arms or cause. It was supported by no force at Fortress Monroe
or elsewhere which was conceivably adequate to undertake an advance by
that route upon Richmond. In default of such support the expedition was
a foolish and futile one, and it must have been so reckoned even if it
had succeeded in capturing the wholly unimportant works at Big Bethel.
In the same way, early in July, McClellan gained some notable
advantages at Rich Mountain and elsewhere in West Virginia. He had
distinctly the best of it in the fighting; he dislodged his adversaries
from their chosen positions; and he made prisoners of a considerable
number of men. But his expedition led nowhither. His position and
the positions which he captured from the Confederates were alike
strategically unimportant from the point of view of an aggressive
campaign. His victories commanded no strategic points and opened no
road to any desirable objective.
In the Valley of Virginia the Confederates abandoned Harper's
Ferry--carrying off everything there that had military value, and
General Patterson occupied the place. This made good dispatches for the
newspapers and justified startling headlines of victory. But in very
truth it meant nothing whatever except that the wily Fabian, Joseph
E. Johnston, in command of the Confederate forces in that quarter,
was wisely determined to keep himself and his army within reinforcing
distance of Beauregard at Manassas, where the first great battle of the
war was obviously destined to occur. Harper's Ferry and Martinsburg
were clearly of no value whatsoever to General Johnston. By abandoning
them and retiring to Winchester he placed his army twenty-five or
thirty miles nearer to Manassas than it had been and drew Patterson by
so much farther from the fighting points. For in order to reach and
reinforce McDowell for the impending Manassas fight Patterson must
march north, recross the Potomac, move thence eastward to Washington
and then move southwest again to McDowell's assistance. Johnston
meanwhile secured to himself a short line of march which gave him a
very great advantage.
When the time came for the first great battle of the war to be fought,
it was hoped at Washington that Patterson with his strong force,
numbering about twenty-two thousand men, might be able to reinforce
McDowell, while real or pretended operations might detain Johnston in
the valley and prevent him from reinforcing Beauregard with his much
smaller force. But by retiring to Winchester Johnston had secured for
himself the certainty of joining Beauregard in time for the battle.
When Patterson threw forward a cloud of skirmishers as if intending to
offer battle at Winchester and secure the mountain passes into eastern
Virginia, it did not take the ceaselessly active cavalry leader J.
E. B. Stuart many hours of continuous skirmishing within his enemy's
lines to discover that the movement was a feint and that Patterson was
in fact hurrying the main body of his army toward Manassas, by way of
Harper's Ferry and Washington.
Even before Stuart definitely reported this fact, Johnston had so far
penetrated Patterson's purpose that he began his own movement toward
Manassas, sending first the heavier and more slowly moving corps
across the mountains to a point where railroad transportation was to
meet them, and thus clearing the way for the cavalry and the lighter
infantry and the well-horsed field batteries to proceed over country
roads without the assistance of railroad cars.
Thus the "pepper box" system of strategy which prevailed at Washington
met its first defeat. If Patterson had been sent at the outset to
strengthen McDowell the result of the battle of Manassas might or
might not have been different from what it was. But at any rate that
arrangement would have given to McDowell a much greater preponderance
of strength than he actually had on that battlefield. If Patterson had
not gone to the valley of course Johnston would not have gone thither
to meet him, and the bulk of Johnston's force would have been added to
Beauregard's. But Patterson's army very largely outnumbered the force
that Johnston had at Winchester within striking distance of Manassas,
so that the total result of the plan of concentration would have been
to strengthen McDowell.
More important still is the fact that while Johnston actually got
a large part of his army to Manassas in time to decide the battle,
Patterson never got there at all. So in considering the policy that
sent Patterson to the valley instead of sending him to the line of Bull
Run, we are entitled to reckon it as the cause of Patterson's complete
absence from a field on which his valley adversary was present with
timely and sorely needed strength.
In the meantime and throughout the summer there was a civil war going
on in Missouri with varying fortunes. It occupied many thousands of
men who might perhaps have been more wisely and effectively employed
in aid of the one great movement upon Richmond, which if it had been
thus made conspicuously successful, would pretty certainly have made an
end of the war before it had had time to develop its strength. Those
operations in Missouri had a dramatic interest of their own. But they
in no way bore upon the problems of grand strategy which were meanwhile
the proper and legitimate objects of supreme concern and consideration
by the two stalwart contestants.