Abraham Lincoln

by Baron Godfrey Rathbone Benson Charnwood

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the lengthy process of subjecting the South, we might easily become immersed in some futile story of how General X. was superseded by General Y. in a command, for which neither discovered any purpose but that of not co-operating with General Z. And this impression is not merely due to our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.