When General P.G.T. Beauregard, the first commander of the newly formed Confederate Army, ordered the batteries at Charleston harbor to open fire on the U.S. Army garrison at Fort Sumter on April 12, 1861, few Americans on either side predicted the ferocity and duration of the conflict that was about to unfold. It was a moment that had often been imagined on both sides, not only because an “effusion of blood” was seen by Northerners and Southerners alike as the only means of resolving an abrasive political confrontation that had dragged on for decades, but also because many men and women on both sides had come to regard war itself as a beneficial and cathartic event. In July 1861, the Rome (Georgia) Weekly Courier hailed the “salutary influence of the war upon the popular mind in all the civil, moral, and social relations of life,” and predicted that it would have an uplifting and reinvigorating impact on an egotistical and materialistic Southern society.
Similar views were expressed in the North. In a lecture to the Alumni Society at the University of Pennsylvania in November 1861, the physician and professor of medicine Alfred Stillé described the “hideous features” of war as an antidote to the “progressive decline of national virtue” and the “national degradation” of the prewar years. Sounding more like an early-twentieth-century Italian futurist than a nineteenth-century physician, Stillé hailed the societies of the past whose creative energies had been released by “warlike engines,” in which the “flash, and blaze, and roar, and the tears of blood they wring from human hearts, prepare a harvest of heroic deeds, of soaring thoughts, of generous and humane sentiments . . . which raise a nation higher than before in the scale of mental and moral power.”1
Such romanticism was an indication of the prevailing concept of war in nineteenth-century America at the outbreak of the “War of the Rebellion” or the “War Between the States,” as it later became known in the South. Both sides anticipated a European-style war whose outcome would be decided by set-piece battles between orderly lines of uniformed armies, with cavalry charges and stirring demonstrations of élan.
Yet there were those on both sides who imagined a different kind of war. “I only pray God may be with us to give us strength to conquer them, to exterminate them, to lay waste every Northern city, town and village, to destroy them utterly,” wrote one Tennessee woman to a friend in May 1861. “All the means legitimate in civilized warfare must be freely employed,” declared the Chicago Tribune in April that year. “If necessary to burn, kill and destroy, let there be no hesitation. Temporizing is out of place, and, in the end, more destructive of life than vigorous and decisive measures.” That same month, a Boston preacher, Reverend Andrew Leete Stone, urged Union armies to “widen the streets through riotous cities” and “Raze the nests of conspirators with ax and fire. . . . Let the country burn this ulcer out.”2
Such views did not reflect the official position of the recently inaugurated administration of Abraham Lincoln, whose election the previous year had triggered the secessionist revolt. As the war unfolded, Lincoln remained initially committed to a policy of moderation and restraint that was intended to win back the population of the South to the Union through persuasion rather than coercion. The day after the fall of Fort Sumter, the president issued a call for 75,000 volunteers to “repossess the forts, places, and property which have been seized from the Union,” while simultaneously reassuring Southerners that these efforts would “avoid any devastation, any destruction of, or interference with, property, or any disturbance of peaceful citizens in any part of the country.”3
By “property,” Lincoln also meant that Southerners could keep their slaves—a concession that he was willing to make in order to woo ambivalent citizens and border states with large slave-owning populations from joining the Confederacy. By the time Sherman led his armies into Georgia three years later, Lincoln had reached very different conclusions, and American society had become familiar with a very different kind of war than the one that so many Americans had anticipated.
The Unwinnable War
The U.S. Department of Defense currently defines strategy as “a prudent idea or set of ideas for employing the instruments of national power in a synchronized and integrated fashion to achieve theater, national, and/or multinational objectives.” At the beginning of the Civil War, the respective “national” strategic objectives of the two sides were clear enough. In order to win the war, the Confederacy had to avoid losing it and sustain itself for long enough to obtain recognition from the major European powers and force the North to accept the existence of the Confederate States of America (CSA). To restore the Union, the Federal government had to invade the South and decisively defeat its armies. On paper at least, the North had more “instruments of national power” at its disposal to achieve these objectives. With a population of 20,275,000 whites, compared with 5,500,000 in the South, the Union would never run short of soldiers, and its factories and workshops would always be able to outproduce the largely agricultural South in terms of war matériel.
The balance of forces was not as unequal as it seemed. To subdue the South, the Union was obliged to conquer a vast territory of more than 750,000 square miles that included two distinct theaters of war more than a thousand miles apart in terrain often barely accessible, poorly mapped, or not mapped at all. In addition, the fact that the South had 4 million slaves at its disposal meant that virtually the entire white male population of military age was available to fight, while public support for the war in the North was often lukewarm and inconsistent. Whereas the Union was obliged to operate across extended “exterior lines,” the Confederate armies were fighting, for the most part, inside their own territory, in defense of their lands and homes.
At the beginning of the conflict, the U.S. Army consisted of just over sixteen thousand soldiers and naval personnel, in addition to volunteer state militias that could be called upon in times of national emergency, although the militias’ main priorities were the defense of America’s coasts and frontiers and the expansion of the Western frontier. Within a year, Lincoln’s “ninety-day men” had become a combined army and naval force of seven hundred thousand, while the CSA’s forces grew from a hundred thousand to just short of four hundred thousand. In total, approximately nine hundred thousand men served in the Confederate Army and nearly 2 million on the Union side in the course of the war.
American history provided no obvious strategic models for fighting a war on such a scale. Apart from the 1846–48 Mexican-American War, the army had not fought a major conflict since the War of 1812 against the British. The American officer class was steeped in European military strategies disseminated at West Point and other military academies, which emphasized the Napoleonic “decisive battle” and the principle defined by Antoine-Henri, Baron Jomini, the foremost exponent of Napoleonic military doctrine in the early nineteenth century, that “the best means of accomplishing great results was to dislodge and destroy the hostile army, since states and provinces fall of themselves when there is no organized force to protect them.”4 In the aftermath of Fort Sumter, the Union Army was commanded by General Winfield Scott, the seventy-five-year-old hero of the Mexican-American War, who proposed to defeat the South through a naval and land blockade that would “envelop” the Confederacy and cut its commercial links to the outside world.
Scott’s “Anaconda plan,” as the Northern press called it, was never formally adopted, though Lincoln did proclaim a blockade that became increasingly effective as the war wore on. Initially, however, the Confederacy was the more successful of the two protagonists; it was able to field a more effective and motivated army that quickly learned to equip itself by blockade running and rapid development of a homegrown armaments industry. In the summer of 1861, Lincoln’s volunteer army was routed at the First Battle of Bull Run, also called the First Battle of Manassas Junction, on July 21, 1861, fueling Confederate expectations that the Union would quickly fold.
Instead, the war continued to intensify as the two armies clashed repeatedly in the bloodiest battles ever fought on American soil. On April 6–7, 1862, at Shiloh, or Pittsburg Landing, 23,746 soldiers from both sides were killed in two days. In a single twelve-hour period on September 17, 1862, some 22,000 Union and Confederate troops were cut down at the Battle of Antietam Creek—the single most catastrophic day in all of America’s wars. At Gettysburg in 1863, the death toll was 43,000 over three days. Tens of thousands of soldiers died away from the battlefield, in field hospitals, army camps, and overcrowded prisoner-of-war stockades. In all, 623,026 soldiers and fighting men died, and 471,427 were wounded on both sides.
This death toll was even more shocking in that it had no obvious impact on the outcome of the war, as tactical victories failed to translate into strategic outcomes for either side. For the first two years, the North built its strategy on the conquest of the Confederate capital, Richmond, and Union armies made various skillfully executed incursions into Virginia that were thwarted by nimble Confederate generalship and the excessive caution of Federal commanding officers. Few Union generals were more inflicted with “the slows” than the gifted George B. McClellan, who replaced Winfield Scott as commander in chief of the Union armies in November 1861. In March 1862, the “Little Napoleon” took charge of the Army of the Potomac during the Peninsula Campaign. After an extraordinarily well-executed amphibious operation, which eventually placed some 120,000 Union troops south of the Confederate capital, McClellan was roundly defeated in late June and early July at the Seven Days Battles, and his army was forced to withdraw. Impatient with this progress, Lincoln appointed General John Pope as commander of the newly formed Army of Virginia to assist McClellan’s operations in Virginia and promoted General Henry W. “Old Brains” Halleck, the commander of the Department of the Mississippi, as overall commander in chief of the Union armies in McClellan’s stead.
Battles without victory: Confederate dead at Antietam, Alexander Gardner. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.
A dogged administrator and the army’s foremost military intellectual, Halleck proved himself to be no less ponderous as a field commander than his predecessor, but he nevertheless forged a crucial relationship with Brigadier General Ulysses S. Grant, commander of the Army of the Tennessee, that was to change the strategic direction of the war. In February 1862, Grant’s forces captured the key Confederate outposts of Fort Henry and Fort Donelson on the Tennessee and Cumberland Rivers, creating a springboard for further operations along the vital Mississippi waterway and into central Tennessee.
Grant’s ascendancy coincided with McClellan’s fall from grace. When Pope was defeated at the Second Battle of Bull Run, McClellan was reinstated to take charge of the defense of Washington. He was then sacked again in November for his failure to follow up his victory at Antietam; he was replaced as commander of the Army of the Potomac by Major General Ambrose Burnside. When Burnside launched his army into a bloody defeat at Fredericksburg, he too was replaced, by General Joseph “Fighting Joe” Hooker, who proved equally ineffectual against the armies of Lee and Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson at Chancellorsville in May 1863.
In June Lincoln appointed General George G. Meade as the Army of the Potomac’s fourth commander in less than a year; Meade repulsed the Confederate Army in the great Union victory at Gettysburg the following month. That same month, Grant captured the strategic fortress-city Vicksburg, on the Mississippi River, in a dazzling campaign that electrified the Northern public and established complete Union control over the Mississippi from Saint Louis to New Orleans. The fall of the Confederacy’s “Gibraltar” confirmed Grant as Lincoln’s foremost “fighting general” and shifted the focus of the war to the Western theater. In March 1864, Grant was promoted to lieutenant general and Union general in chief. By that time, the tide of war appeared to be moving irresistibly in the North’s favor. The South was now cut in half; Union armies had seized key enclaves on the Atlantic coast; and Union armies were advancing ever deeper into the Mississippi Valley and Tennessee. Yet despite these reversals, the Confederacy was far from defeated, and the inability of the two sides to achieve a decisive victory on the battlefield had begun to change the strategic direction of the war.
Beyond the Battlefield
The Civil War was an internal conflict between two groups of Americans, and it was also a relatively new kind of war whose implications were only just becoming apparent in the nineteenth century. “It was a war between the States, or better still, a war between two nations,” wrote the Georgia scientist and prominent proslavery theorist Joseph LeConte. “For each side it was really a foreign war . . . let it be distinctly understood, that there never was a war in which were more thoroughly enlisted the hearts of the whole people—men, women, and children—than were those of the South in this. To us it was literally a life and death struggle for national existence.”5
Such support was not as universal as LeConte and others imagined; the popular truism “a rich man’s war but a poor man’s fight” expressed a more ambivalent attitude toward the conflict among the Southern lower orders that its more fervent supporters rarely acknowledged. The North viewed the war in similarly existential terms. The violence of such wars tends to spill out beyond the battlefield, and the Civil War was no exception. The historian James McPherson has estimated that as many as fifty thousand civilians may have died of violence, hunger, and disease in sieges of towns and cities or punitive raids and reprisals by soldiers and guerrillas. During the siege of Vicksburg, women and children lived for weeks in snake-infested caves dug into the fortified hills, living on dogs, cats, horses, and rats during the daily artillery barrages from Grant’s armies. In the Shenandoah Valley in Virginia and in Missouri, Kentucky, and Tennessee, Federal troops and Union loyalists fought a vicious tit-for-tat war with Confederate guerrillas and bushwhackers, in which farms, towns, and villages were burned and their inhabitants made homeless or reduced to poverty and starvation. In the divided state of Missouri, Union troops and pro-Union irregulars, the Kansas “Jayhawkers,” traded blows with Confederate raiders in a war of reciprocal murder and atrocity in which the dividing line between civilians and combatants often disappeared.6 Thousands of fugitive slaves, or “contrabands,” died in the refugee camps established behind Union lines, which often lacked food, shelter, and basic sanitation.
The Civil War also exposed Americans for the first time to the environmental devastation of war. Forests were stripped and cut down to make breastworks, trench fortifications, and chevaux-de-frise or set on fire in the course of battles. Armies burned crops and slaughtered livestock to deny food to their opponents or reduce besieged cities to starvation. Entire districts in the South were laid waste by foraging Union armies, who burned and stripped barns and fences and consumed grain and livestock, but also by Confederate soldiers, who frequently foraged with a voracious intensity that was indistinguishable from that of their enemies.7 In 1864, the Confederate general Richard Taylor was so shocked by the predatory behavior of his troops in Alabama and the lower Mississippi that he compared them to medieval brigands and threatened to have offenders shot as common highwaymen. In 1863 Colonel C. Franklin complained to Jefferson Davis that guerrillas in Missouri had “transferred to the Confederate uniform all the dread and terror which used to attach to the Lincoln blue. The last horse is taken from the widow and orphan, whose husband and father has fallen in the country’s service. No respect is shown to age, sex, or condition.”8
This panorama of devastation was not simply a result of the visceral passions of civil war. Although the war was a “national” war between two rival societies or “civilizations,” it was also a war in which the economic resources of the two antagonists were more essential than ever before. The huge Civil War armies depended on the mass production of muskets, cannons, gunpowder, ammunition, uniforms, tents, belt buckles, swords, horseshoes, and digging tools, and also on the transportation of men, animals, and war matériel from one battle zone to another.
No previous war had relied so heavily on railroads to shunt armies and supplies to and from areas of military operations, sometimes directly to and from the battlefield.9 At the beginning of the war, there were thirty thousand miles of railroad track in America, more than the rest of world put together, and this system was quickly co-opted for military purposes by both sides. A more recent invention, the electric telegraph, also played a key role in the war, enabling the respective high commands to remain in contact with advancing armies to a degree that had not previously been possible. As a result, railroad lines and junctions, telegraph wires and installations, and waterways became strategic objectives as both sides conducted campaigns along the railroads that supplied them, tried to cut off the supply lines of their adversaries, and besieged towns by breaking up track and railroad installations, cutting telegraph wires, and burning bridges.
Raiding was a well-established component of Native American warfare long before European colonization, and American colonists had adopted the practice during various Indian wars since the sixteenth century. In 1778 George Washington ordered General John Sullivan to inflict “total destruction and devastation” on Iroquois villages in Cherry Valley, New York, in retaliation for the massacre of U.S. militia in Wyoming, Pennsylvania. Abandoning their baggage trains to increase their mobility, Sullivan’s men burned 1,200 homes in forty villages, till their commander told Congress there was “not a single town left in the country of the five nations.”10 Washington’s support for such tactics earned him the nickname “Town Destroyer” among the Iroquois.
From the autumn of 1862 onward, these tactics were used by both sides. The Confederate government authorized cavalry raids behind Union lines in an attempt to disrupt Union supply routes in Kentucky, Tennessee, and Mississippi. Over the next few months, Confederate raiders, such as Nathan Bedford Forrest, Braxton Bragg, and John Hunt Morgan, carried out a string of hit-and-run attacks on railroad links and Union supply depots. On December 20, 1862, under the command of General Earl Van Dorn, 2,500 Confederate cavalrymen galloped onto the main street of Holly Springs, Mississippi, which Ulysses Grant had transformed into a supply depot for his operations against Vicksburg, and proceeded to burn and dynamite warehouses, railroad carriages, and munitions depots, causing $1.5 million in damage and forcing Grant’s army to abandon its offensive and retreat to Memphis. The Union responded in the same vein. In the spring of 1863, Colonel Benjamin Grierson led 1,700 Union cavalry on a six-hundred-mile raid through Mississippi and Louisiana, destroying railroads and railroad cars, ripping up track, and burning storehouses in order to divert Confederate attention from Grant’s movements against Vicksburg.
Civilians inevitably bore the consequences of such operations as well, and the impact of the war on the civilian population was not only an incidental by-product of attacks on economic resources and communications. In a war between two relatively evenly matched antagonists able to recover from even the most devastating battlefield defeats, the morale and will to fight of the enemy’s non-combatants as well as its soldiers was increasingly seen by both sides as a key target for destruction. For the South, Northern public opinion was a mostly remote abstraction that it sought to influence through periodic raids and incursions into the North or by inflicting demoralizing defeats on its armies in battle. Union armies, by contrast, experienced the attitudes of the civilian population as a military problem that directly threatened their security during their occupation of the South. Lincoln’s conciliatory policy toward the South reflected the administration’s assumption that support for secession was lukewarm and shared by only a small percentage of the population.
Hard war: a rebel guerrilla raid in a Western town, September 27, 1862, Thomas Nast. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.
As Federal troops penetrated the South, they encountered passive and sometimes active hostility from the civilian population, which led them to very different conclusions. “These people, safe in the knowledge of our conciliatory principles, talk their seceshism as boldly as they do in Richmond,” complained Captain Charles Wills of the 103rd Illinois Infantry from Alabama in the summer of 1862. “Many of our officers have given up all hope of our conquering them and really wish for peace. For myself . . . I believe I’d rather see the whole country red with blood, and ruined altogether, than have this 7,000,000 of invalids (these Southerners are nothing else as a people) conquer, or successfully resist the power of the North. I hate them now, as they hate us.”11
Such anger was partly due to hostility toward the Union, which many civilians openly expressed to soldiers like Wills. But the tendency to regard civilians and soldiers as a common enemy was also exacerbated by the armed resistance that Union armies encountered from nonuniformed combatants as they occupied the South, which frequently transformed occupation into a hazardous activity. In the second half of the nineteenth century, the concept of irregular “people’s war” fought by partisans and guerrillas was a relatively recent innovation, dating back only to the Napoleonic Wars, that was still regarded with horror by many European armies. In The Art of War, Antoine de Jomini nostalgically compared the lost era of eighteenth-century warfare in which “the French and English guards courteously invited each other to fire first,” with “the frightful epoch when priests, women, and children throughout Spain plotted the murder of isolated soldiers.”12 American armies were already familiar with this “frightful epoch” through their own campaigns against the British in the Revolutionary Wars and the guerrilla resistance to Winfield Scott’s invasion of Mexico. But the extent of guerrilla warfare in the Civil War appeared to many Union soldiers to be an unprecedented and entirely undesirable phenomenon. In the Shenandoah Valley, in Tennessee, Missouri, and the Mississippi Valley, Union troops came under constant and sustained attacks from bushwhackers and other partisans who shot at passenger trains and steamboats, attacked isolated outposts, killed sentries and stragglers, and terrorized pro-Union civilians, burning their homes and killing them.
Guerrilla warfare was particularly fierce in the divided state of Missouri, where Union soldiers and pro-Union Jayhawkers fought a vicious war of tit-for-tat murders and atrocities from the earliest days of the war. Many of the leading Union generals, including Ulysses Grant, John Pope, and John Schofield, began their careers in Missouri, and their attitudes toward the South were often shaped by their disgust with a civilian population that they regarded as complicit in such attacks, a disgust summed up in a letter from two soldiers from Warsaw, Missouri, in August 1863: “There is one kind of people that is asleep with one eye open and only wait an opportunity to murder loyal people without mercy and these men are the ones that walk up to a federal soldier with outstretched hand and a smile on their face and say they have always stayed at home and never done anything.”13 Frustrated Union commanders increasingly chafed against the “sickly inoffensive war” promoted by the administration and advocated harsh measures in response to guerrilla attacks and acts of sabotage; these included martial law, summary executions, fines, and the burning of homes or whole neighborhoods. In August 1861, Lincoln publicly revoked the draconian martial law proclamation enacted by the commander of the Department of the West, John C. Frémont, in Missouri, which called for the emancipation of all slaves of disloyal citizens and the confiscation of their property. Over the coming year, the Union political and military leadership concluded that much of the South was not going to be won over by conciliation and that if Southerners would not willingly return to the Union, then they must be made to do it.
In July 1862, Lincoln sarcastically dismissed complaints from Union loyalists in Louisiana that Union troops were protecting slaves and imposing restrictions on local trade; he asked them if they expected him to wage war “with elder-stalk squirts, charged with rose water.” That same month, Lincoln responded to Robert E. Lee’s invasion of Maryland by drawing up a preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, which declared his intention to free all slaves in Confederate states that did not return to the Union by January the following year. The Emancipation Proclamation was intended to preempt the possibility of international recognition of the Confederacy and pave the way for the formation of black regiments. But it also confirmed the government’s new willingness to wage “hard war” with an “iron hand” against the South. Writing to Grant in April 1863, Henry Halleck observed, “The character of the war has changed very much with the last year. There is now no possible hope of reconciliation with the rebels. . . . There can be no peace but that which is forced by the sword. We must conquer the rebels or be conquered by them.”14
The changed mood in Washington was reflected in new powers given to Union commanders to confiscate or destroy Southern property, including slaves, farms, factories, and cotton.15 Lincoln also authorized his commanders to take many of the draconian measures proposed by the discredited John Frémont the previous year in response to guerrilla attacks against Federal troops, measures that he had previously opposed. These measures still fell considerably short of some of the more bloodthirsty and exterminatory proposals emanating from some Northern politicians and the press, but the impact of the new policy was nevertheless felt throughout the South. On July 26, 1862, the commander of the newly formed Army of Virginia, General John Pope, issued General Order No. 11, authorizing all male inhabitants to declare allegiance to the United States or be removed beyond army lines. Pope also authorized his troops to “subsist upon the country” and take food from the local population in return for vouchers by which “loyal citizens” would be reimbursed after the war, as well as to burn any houses from which they were fired upon. In April 1863, Union troops devastated the district of Deer Creek, Mississippi, in an attempt to clear the area of guerrillas, after which the expedition’s commanding officer, Brigadier General Frederick Steele, reported, “We burnt every thing & took all the Horses, Mules & Niggers that we came across.”16
In May 1863, Grant’s army occupied Jackson, the capital of Mississippi, during his operations against Vicksburg and spent thirty-six hours destroying railroad track, cotton warehouses, and factories to cut the city off from the Southern hinterland. Visiting shortly afterward, the English officer and Confederate sympathizer Lieutenant Colonel Arthur James Lyon Fremantle found that its “numerous factories have been burned by the enemy, who were of course justified in doing so.” But Freemantle also accused Grant’s forces of having “wantonly pillaged nearly all the private houses. They had gutted all the stores, and destroyed what they could not carry away. . . . I saw the ruins of the Roman Catholic church, the priest’s house, and the principal hotel, which were still smoking, together with many other buildings that could in no way be identified with the Confederate Government. . . . The whole town was a miserable wreck, and presented a deplorable aspect.”17
Southern newspapers routinely raged against the “Yankee Vandals” who carried out such raids and urged their own armies to respond in kind. In June 1863, the Charleston Courier called on Robert E. Lee’s invading armies in Pennsylvania to “wage war, even as it has been waged against us, sparing neither public nor private property, but ravaging and destroying in every direction.” Lee did not respond to these exhortations and placed his troops under strict orders to pay the local population for food and supplies. These orders were more or less obeyed, but such restraint was not always present. Confederate bushwhackers had no compunctions about shooting at passenger trains or passenger-carrying steamboats on the Mississippi. John Singleton Mosby, the Confederate lawyer-turned-guerrilla known as the Gray Ghost, ordered the shelling of Union trains even when they had women and children aboard, on the grounds that he “did not understand that it hurts women and children to be killed any more than it hurts men.”18 On August 20, 1863, more than four hundred Confederate raiders led by William Clarke Quantrill occupied the town of Lawrence, Kansas, and proceeded to murder more than four hundred unarmed men and boys before looting and burning much of the town.
On July 30, 1864, Confederate cavalry numbering 2,800 under the command of Brigadier General John McCausland raided the town of Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, in retaliation for a punitive antiguerrilla campaign conducted by the Union general David “Black Dave” Hunter in the Shenandoah Valley during the summer, which culminated in the burning of the Virginia Military Institute at Lexington. McCausland ordered Chambersburg’s inhabitants to pay compensation, and when they proved unable to provide it his men burned some 550 buildings, creating what the Richmond Enquirer called “a blaze that will arrest the view of the Northern people, and illustrate the destruction of villages, homesteads, and towns in every Southern state.”
Such raids were sporadic, if only because the Confederacy lacked the capacity to carry them out on a regular basis. For the Union, on the other hand, physical destruction was not only intended to punish civilians for their real or alleged collusion in guerrilla attacks; it also became an instrument of pacification and subjugation. Such destruction was generally aimed at property rather than people, but it could nevertheless have devastating consequences for those on the receiving end. As Philip Sheridan, one of the toughest Union generals and an implacable proponent of destructive raiding, observed in his memoirs, “Death is popularly considered the maximum of punishment in war, but it is not; reduction to poverty brings prayers for peace more surely and more quickly than does the destruction of human life, as the selfishness of man has demonstrated in more than one great conflict.”19
Sheridan destroyed a great deal of Southern property. He rejected the concept of war as a “duel” in which “lines of men shall engage each other in battle, and material interests be ignored” and insisted that it was legitimate to extend “deprivation and suffering” to “those who rest at home in peace and plenty” yet still supported the war from a distance. The Lincoln administration’s hard-war policy was based on similar assumptions. Though the government never ceased to offer amnesties to Southerners who took the oath of allegiance, it was increasingly taken for granted that some sections of the population would have to be forced back into the Union if they could not be attracted to it. This was the general consensus in Washington in March 1864, when Ulysses Grant replaced Halleck as general in chief of the Union armies.
Grant’s promotion took place at a time when the war had to all intents and purposes shifted irresistibly in the Union’s favor. Large swathes of Southern territory were under Union occupation; the Confederate Army and Navy had experienced huge losses; some 33 percent of its nominally available troops were absent without leave; and the civilian population had seen its living standards drastically decline under the impact of war-induced inflation, high food prices, and the increasingly tight blockade. Yet despite these reversals, the Confederacy remained undefeated. Its heartlands in the Deep South were largely untouched, its capital remained unconquered, and it retained powerful and well-entrenched armies in both theaters. It was against this background that Grant was authorized to devise a new strategic plan that would bring the war to a conclusion, together with the man who was soon to prove himself the most destructive of all the Union raiding generals.