Four Great Mistakes and Their Matrices
1861–1865: Thoughts on the American Civil War
Dennis Showalter
Determining and analyzing the four greatest mistakes of the American Civil War involves confronting a compound plethora of choices—especially for an amateur on the subject whose academic focus is on the other side of the Atlantic. As John Keegan asserts in his recent The American Civil War: A Military History, the conflict may have been necessary, but was not unavoidable. It erupted like a series of wildfires, in an environment where neither combatant had made anything like consequent preparations, across a country whose founding principles emphasized peace and fraternity.
That meant the Civil War would be in every sense a war of improvisations. Improvisations cost blood and resources. Their consequences were further exacerbated by a geography offering no decisive objectives to either side. Armies were the only targets promising decision—and that in turn structured the Civil War as a series of battles, still among the fiercest ever waged.
It is correspondingly reasonable, then, to seek the Civil War’s decisive mistakes in its military aspects. Those mistakes were in turn structured by the ad hoc nature of the combatants. Both Union and Confederate armies had high learning curves—but they started at near zero in every aspect of effectiveness but enthusiasm. Leadership at all levels on both sides, retrospective mythmaking to the contrary, was characterized more by character and personality than talent or experience. The result was improvisation compounded: a continuing emphasis on solving immediate problems, with tomorrow expected to take care of itself.
The mistakes occasioned by this synergy of factors challenge enumeration and classification. They have, however, a common defining feature. They were not intentional. Military history—academic, professional, and popular—is the home of hindsight. In retrospect the mistakes of armies and generals are so pitilessly highlighted that it is easy to overlook the fact that in war, no one shows up to lose. The military mistakes of the Civil War in particular seemed like good ideas at the time—or at least the most promising alternatives. To support that position this essay offers a case study from each of the recognized levels of war making: policy, strategy, operations, and tactics.
At the policy level, the mistake with the most significant consequences involved Confederate President Jefferson Davis sustaining Braxton Bragg in command of the Army of Tennessee long after his sell-by date. That issue is by no means closed. Among the Civil War’s major combatants (a category that excludes the trans-Mississippi), the Army of Tennessee suffered the most from inadequate training, inadequate command from regiment to corps, and logistical insufficiency. Its hinterland was far less developed than the midwestern states supporting its immediate Union rivals. In staff terms Bragg can legitimately be described as doing everything possible to improve discipline and administration. As a field commander he arguably emerges as no worse, and marginally better than the generals he faced.
Without denying the negative effects of his dyspeptic, contentious personality and his ability to nurse grudges to the point of official misrepresentation of facts, Bragg’s efforts to mold at least a semimodern army from the backcountry volunteers and levies he commanded were more commendable and more successful than generally conceded at the time or understood later.
The negative element of that process involved the increasing, systematic alienation of the Army of Tennessee’s senior command structure. These men too were under a generally overlooked set of pressures. As a group they embodied the Peter Principle: struggling to cope with responsibilities at the upper limits of their existing abilities. As a rule they managed. But learning to command a corps or a division on the job, without the more developed supporting structures of the eastern theater, was the kind of strain that helps explain such compensating behaviors as alcohol abuse—or hypersensitivity. For a toxic mixture of personal and professional reasons, a reciprocal synergy emerged: from disliking Bragg and questioning his abilities to loathing him and denying his abilities. The pattern is hardly unusual in modern war. The Army of Tennessee could not afford it. Winning even marginal victories in Civil War battles involved minimizing the fog of war and friction of battle. Institutionally the Army of Tennessee was a case study in both.
There is where Davis comes in. His reasons for sustaining Bragg and his reasons for not making convincing examples, if not a clean sweep, among the dissenters were essentially the same: finding replacements likely to do any better. It was that problem, rather than indecisiveness or misguided loyalty to friends, that led the Confederate president to carry water on both shoulders from the summer of 1862 until the compound disasters in front of Chattanooga in the summer of 1863 caused him to act. In a typical Civil War improvisation, Davis appointed—actually reappointed—someone he neither liked nor trusted, Joseph E. Johnston, to a command whose fortunes he was unable to reverse.
From the beginning this was a problem with no good solution. The Army of Tennessee’s situation demanded, if not a band of brothers, then at least a corps of comrades, able to cooperate to maximize opportunities against an increasingly powerful adversary. By the time Davis acted, no outsider, not even Lee himself, was likely to restore equilibrium, let alone harmony. The least bad alternative probably involved replacing Bragg with the steadiest pair of hands available from within the army, accepting the risks, and hoping for the best. Hope can in fact be a policy. It is seldom a winning one. The Confederacy could not afford to wait, like Charles Dickens’s Mr. Micawber, for something to turn up.
A defining example of error at the strategic level involves Abraham Lincoln’s failure to support George McClellan’s campaign against Richmond in 1862. Ethan Rafuse has recently and perceptively challenged conventional wisdom by arguing that McClellan designed the Army of the Potomac to implement his concept of limiting the war in space and time by winning a victory so overwhelming that no illusions of southern independence could survive. Tactical and technological factors combined with geography to make a Napoleonic-style “overland campaign” in northern Virginia a task as unprofitable as it was daunting. Two years later, U. S. Grant hammered the Army of the Potomac to near pulp before implementing a variant of McClellan’s proposed approach.
McClellan argued for using Virginia’s rivers to support a set piece: a campaign of sieges and positions built around Union sea power, engineering skill, and artillery superiority. Properly implemented, it would not only capture Richmond but also cripple the field forces defending it. Objections jump out of the evidence—especially McClellan’s often demonstrated shortcomings as a battle captain. Would an additional corps, would wholehearted support from an administration that in fact saw an overland line as the shortest distance between decisive points, have mattered? It requires no mastery of counterfactuals to make a case that, even without the president’s growing reluctance to leave Washington uncovered, even this measured eighteenth-century-style operation would have exceeded McClellan’s capacity to execute. Perhaps. But McClellan’s strategy reflected the North’s culture of efficiency, discipline, and management: a businesslike approach to war. It played to Union rather than Confederate strengths: top-down leadership and a deductive approach as opposed to inductive inspiration. Nor was the opposing force as yet the Army of Northern Virginia in anything but name. Lee was not Marse Robert, but then sometimes called Granny Lee and the King of Spades. Lee and Jackson had not yet honed the six-month partnership that made them icons of maneuver war. Even a poorly swung hammer can drive a nail—if the hammer is heavy enough.
As much to the point, the Army of the Potomac was not yet “imprinted” with the often remarked sense of inferiority to “our masters the rebels,” as author Michael Adams described the situation.
Even if a bulked-up methodical campaign did not capture Richmond, mounted against a stronger force Lee’s counterattacks might well have mauled the Army of Northern Virginia badly enough to imprint it in reverse: giving it a respect for the Yankees strong enough to avert the formation of the near insouciant confidence that informed it until almost the end of the war.
Lincoln’s concern for Washington’s security may have been exaggerated. It was not imaginary. Neither was his growing concern for McClellan’s wider ambitions unjustified. Nor, finally, does it denigrate Lincoln’s eventual development as a strategic thinker and a judge of generals to describe both as works in progress in the spring of 1862. Nevertheless, it can be reasonably suggested that Lincoln’s refusal to back McClellan’s strategic plan at policy levels, combined with his growing belief that McClellan should fight precisely the kind of battle he was least able to fight, led to a strategic mistake no less significant because it seemed a good idea at the time.
At the Civil War’s operational level a clear winner in the mistakes sweepstakes is the Franklin/Nashville campaign of 1864. Usually considered from tactical perspectives (the blindfold slaughterhouse at Franklin, the final destruction of the Army of Tennessee at Nashville) or command contexts (the decisions of John Bell Hood and the denigration and ultimate vindication of George Thomas), Franklin/Nashville also invites discussion in terms of a mistaken application of operational art.
To begin with, it must be understood that “operational art” is not even a neologism when applied to the Civil War. Even in Prussia, often considered the concept’s home, “operations” was barely emerging at midcentury in its now understood form as a bridge—or an O-ring—between strategy and tactics. As developed by Hood, Franklin/Nashville became a strategic plan. But a synergy of calculable, if not predictable, factors forced it downward to the operational level of theater war under circumstances where the Confederacy’s last chance was no chance at all.
The Atlanta campaign of 1864 was a study in learning curves. W. T. Sherman defeated Joe Johnston at his own game, consistently outmaneuvering him tactically until Johnston found himself in front of Atlanta with no maneuvering room left. His replacement John Bell Hood sought to break Sherman’s grip on the city by a series of desperate attacks against superior numbers, usually with the advantage of field entrenchments. Their outcomes were predictable. Unable to defend the vital rail and industrial center, Hood abandoned it.
Hood—and Davis—understood that the Army of Tennessee, lacking the strength to respond directly to Sherman’s movements, must do something to recapture the initiative. That “something” began tactically, as a proposed army-scale raid against Sherman’s communications, drawing Sherman in pursuit. It rapidly metastasized, acquiring a strategic dimension by becoming a full-blown invasion of Union-occupied Tennessee. The offensive’s objective was relieving the hard-pressed Army of Northern Virginia by drawing troops from Grant’s front.
Hood lacked neither skill nor intelligence. Contrary to the belief of some even today, he was not consistently addled by painkillers for the arm lost at Gettysburg and the leg at Chickamauga. Nor was he contemptuous of the Army of Tennessee’s fighting power compared to its Virginia counterpart. He knew he was betting a long shot depending on shock, speed, and surprise. But operational surprise was lost when Sherman, instead of pursuing, divided his own ample army and sent half—the half he considered dispensable—north as a blocking force. Speed was lost operationally because the distances involved were too great for a poorly supplied foot-marching army to outpace a well-fed and clothed one able to make use of railroads. That left shock. And Hood’s equation of shock with speed meant that at Franklin he left his artillery behind his infantry, seeking to compensate tactically for an operational dilemma.
The butchery resulting from pitting spirit against spirit plus firepower plus entrenchments in front of Franklin left Hood out on a limb. Able to lunge forward to Nashville, he could neither advance nor retreat from there—only construct entrenchments his army was too weak to hold once Thomas prepared the massive (might one say “McClellanesque”?) counterstroke that shattered the Army of Tennessee beyond reconstruction and left Lee strategically isolated.
Operational art cannot exist in a vacuum. It either meshes with strategy or devolves to tactics. The German experience in two world wars indicates the likely outcome of the latter process. The Army of Tennessee was like short money in a table-stakes poker game—a wasted asset unless played. But John Bell Hood fatally overbet his hand.
The Civil War’s defining tactical-level mistake again fell on the Confederate side. It was Lee’s attack on the third day of Gettysburg. That event has been so thoroughly dissected there is no need to set its physical stage—or, indeed, to spend much time exploring Lee’s motives. The conclusion that the attack was a high but acceptable risk in context is reasonable. Neither in the Army of Northern Virginia nor in the Confederacy as a whole was confidence in Lee significantly diminished in its aftermath. When myth is stripped away and memory factored in, Pickett’s Charge was, in Carol Reardon’s words, “after all, simply an infantry assault that failed.”
But was it? Two factors combine to justify defining the attack of July 3 as a crucial tactical mistake with wide-reaching consequences. First, it was a charge to nowhere. A breakthrough along Cemetery Ridge was by itself unlikely to produce a decisive victory. Meade still had the fresh VI Corps in reserve. Lee had nothing behind Longstreet’s force to develop a sector victory, much less turn it into a rout. In that context the third day at Gettysburg invites interpretation as a precursor of Franklin.
More significant, Lee was staking moral as well as physical assets on July 3. After two years of war, the focal point of the Confederacy had become the Army of Northern Virginia—for the North, arguably even more than the South. Its comprehensively reported mastery over its immediate opponent generated a mystique and an aura that could not be duplicated. As the survivors of Pickett’s Charge fell back to shouts of “Fredericksburg! Fredericksburg!” the casualties they left behind marked the beginning of an end of the Army of the Potomac’s collective inferiority complex. The shortcomings remained, and would be bloodily highlighted throughout 1864. But after the first searing fights in the Wilderness, when Grant turned south toward Spotsylvania instead of taking the road to Washington, the decision was cheered by men who knew they would pay its price. Pickett’s Charge had sown the seeds of belief that the Rebs after all could be beaten in a stand-up fight—whatever they might believe or say.
Moral factors in war are easily overestimated: as the song says, “a cannonball don’t pay no mind.” But neither can they be underestimated. The mistakes discussed above were not only material but psychological. They reflected undeveloped understanding of the new nature of war in the mid–nineteenth century, which in turn reflected the Civil War’s improvised nature. And in a long war to the knife, a war defined by its battles, they had a disproportionate impact.