Southern Strategies

Why the Confederacy Failed

Christian B. Keller, Christian B. Keller

• Publisher: University Press of Kansas
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780700632190
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: American Civil War History
• Index: History

Southern Strategies is the first-ever analysis of Confederate defeat using the lenses of classical strategic and leadership theory. The contributors bring over one hundred years of experience in the field at the junior and senior levels of military leadership and over forty years of teaching in professional military education. Well-aware that the nature of war is immutable and unchanging, they combine their firsthand experience of this truth with solid scholarship to offer new theoretical and historical perspectives about why the South failed in its bid for independence.

The contributors identify and analyze the mistakes made by the Confederate political and strategic leadership that handicapped the prospects for independence and placed immense pressure on Confederate military commanders to compensate on the battlefield for what should have been achieved by other instruments of national power. These instruments are the diplomatic, informational (including intelligence and public morale), and economic aspects of a nation's capability to exert its will internationally. When combined with military power, the acronym DIME emerges, a theoretical tool that offers historians and national security professionals alike a useful method to analyze how a state, such as the Union, the Confederacy, or the modern United States, wielded or currently wields its power at the strategic level. Each essay examines how well rebel strategic leaders employed and integrated these instruments, given that the seceded South possessed enough diplomatic, informational, military, and economic power to theoretically win its independence. The essayists also apply the ends-ways-means model of analysis to each topic to offer readers greater insight into the Confederate leadership's challenges.

Southern Strategies confirms the reality that the outcome of the American Civil War cannot be boiled down to one or two simple reasons. It offers fresh and theoretically novel interpretations at the strategic level that open new doors for future research and will increase public interest in the big questions surrounding Confederate defeat.

1

Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, and Strategic Contingencies in the 1862 Valley Campaign

Christian B. Keller

Sitting down at his desk in the famous Virginia Hotel, on the corner of Greenville Avenue and New Street in Staunton, Virginia, Maj. Gen. Thomas Jonathan “Stonewall” Jackson had mixed emotions. It was a delight to make his headquarters in the grand old hostelry, so close to his beloved home in Lexington, and the townspeople had welcomed him like a redeeming savior. Cadets from the Virginia Military Institute, his former employer, had marched up the day before to pass in review and the weather, until recently cold and rainy, had turned bright, sunshiny, and temperate. From the reports scattered in front of him, it was clear his plan to join his Valley Army with that of Brig. Gen. Edward “Allegheny” Johnson, whose small command was then moving to the west to meet the advance of Union brigadier general Robert H. Milroy, was sound. The next day, May 7, 1862, Jackson would begin the march to unify their two armies with the intent to crush Milroy, and his famous Valley Campaign, for which he would forever be renowned, began in earnest.¹

Yet his cavalry was leaderless, with both field-grade officers on the sick list. Men whom he knew to be subpar commanded some of his infantry regiments, elevated by appointments made by the War Department in Richmond. And he needed reinforcements—many of them—if he was to realize the greatest fruits of the operational plan upon which he was then embarking. It was undeniably ambitious: maul Milroy, then march quickly northward, and, combining with Maj. Gen. Richard S. Ewell’s division at Swift Run Gap, attack and destroy the main Federal army in the Valley, under Maj. Gen. Nathaniel P. Banks at Front Royal. The Shenandoah Valley would be liberated of Yankee soldiers at last, and thereafter Jackson would be free to consider other options, strategic-level ideas he had already broached with members of the Confederate high command that coincided with sympathies held by none other than President Jefferson Davis and his chief military advisor, Gen. Robert E. Lee. The ill-starred Romney Expedition of the winter months, which had almost witnessed Jackson’s resignation from the service and resulted in only modest local gains, had aborted the possibilities of transforming such big ideas into reality, but now, if all went well, new opportunities beckoned to transfer the war into the enemy’s country. If that occurred, and in the manner Stonewall wished, the Confederacy might well establish its independence before year’s end. Lee would come to agree with Jackson’s audacious theater-strategic proposals, endorsing and enabling them briefly before exigencies on the Virginia Peninsula southeast of the capital forced him to call the Valley general east.²

The Shenandoah Valley Campaign of 1862 marked the beginning of a special partnership in the Confederate national leadership, a command relationship that started with professional respect and aligned strategic thinking and grew into something more—a bona fide friendship—by the following spring. It was the Southern nation’s most important military pairing, the foundation set in the Shenandoah soon evolving into a potentially war-winning combination of personalities, professionalism, and battlefield accomplishment. First in his capacity as the president’s de facto general-in-chief and later after he became commander of the primary army defending Richmond, the son of the famous Revolutionary War general “Lighthorse” Harry Lee, and scion of one of Virginia’s most aristocratic Tidewater families, would come to admire the orphan of the hardscrabble farmer from western Virginia’s backcountry, raised by his strict half-uncle. Both were West Pointers, had fought gallantly in the Mexican War, and may have encountered each other a few times in the past, but before secession each man only knew the other through reputation.³ Then the outbreak of civil war in 1861 ensured the stars of each would rise rapidly: Lee, with the exception of the disappointing Cheat Mountain Campaign, at the side of Davis, and Jackson through hard-fighting at First Manassas, where he earned his nickname, “Stonewall.” Jackson proved to Lee to be both a trustworthy subordinate, who followed well his intent from afar, and one who resiliently adapted to circumstances as he found them, overcame herculean difficulties, and delivered much-needed victories. Lee proved to Jackson that he had a superior sympathetic to his bold plans, supportive in both thought and action, and one who never doubted his ability to succeed. It was a remarkable team in the making that created lasting strategic consequences for the Eastern Theater and the overall course of the Civil War.

Unfortunately for the South, the Lee-Jackson partnership launched during the 1862 Valley Campaign would endure less than a year. With Jackson’s death following the battle of Chancellorsville in May 1863, Lee suddenly lost the man in whom he had placed much of his professional and personal confidence, causing him great emotional anguish and irrevocably damaging his command team. Moreover, by the time the smoke cleared in the Shenandoah in 1862 the relationship between the two leaders, so critical for future success, had developed enough that Lee believed Jackson and his army indispensable for the defense of Richmond, and accordingly ordered them east. Although the shift of the Valley Army to the Tidewater was also born of temporal and numerical calculation vis-à-vis the proximate might of the Federal enemy, its removal from the Shenandoah in mid-June deprived the Confederacy of a potential opportunity to strike northward in an offensive that may have yielded decisive strategic results.

This essay posits two main theses: First, through an examination of the early Lee-Jackson relationship, it contends that the inopportune death of key generals, but especially Stonewall Jackson, created vacuums in operational and theater-strategic leadership that proved destructive to the command teams they were a part of, thereby attritting the military instrument of national power (within the DIME) and rebel chances for independence. The South had very few leaders who could consistently deliver victories, making those that did a precious commodity and underscoring the uniqueness of the combine of Lee and Jackson. Second, the timing of the transfer of Jackson’s army to Richmond, however necessary it may have been, nonetheless precluded strategic opportunities which, at that particular juncture of the war, could well have borne monumental dividends. In a larger sense, both arguments also maintain that temporal considerations—when events in the war occurred—are supremely important in determining how and why the Confederacy failed. As the weaker power in the war, it was imperative that the South take maximum advantage of the fleeting opportunities for strategic success that arose, wringing the most value from them. In nearly every campaign that offered such potential, like the Seven Days, the Maryland Campaign, the Kentucky Campaign of 1862, the Pennsylvania Campaign, and Chickamauga, Southern commanders failed to achieve strategic victory. Union decision-making had much to do with that, but so too did chance and the decisions of rebel generals.

Taking pen in hand, Jackson withdrew a piece of writing paper from the desk drawer in his newly established hotel office and started a letter to Congressman Alexander Boteler, a confidante, fellow Valley resident representing the state’s Tenth District, and occasional staff officer depending on whether Congress was in session in Richmond. Boteler served as Stonewall’s political eyes and ears, his conduit to national policy and strategy circles whereby he presented some of his more radical strategic ideas through proper channels. This day, his friend was to receive a bit of a rant, as the general was fatigued dealing with weak subordinates in his army. “The great interests of the country are being sacrificed by appointing incompetent officers,” he lamented, adding, “I wish that if such appointments are continued, that the President would come in the field and command them, and not throw the responsibility upon me.” Jackson was none too keen on his commander-in-chief lately; Davis had demonstrated some partiality against him during the uproar about the Romney Expedition, in which some of Stonewall’s “incompetent” subalterns, especially Brig. Gen. William W. Loring, complained about his strict discipline and went over his head, appealing directly to Davis and Secretary of War Judah P. Benjamin. Jackson’s threatened resignation settled the matter and Loring was sent west, but the Valley general henceforth viewed Richmond, and especially the president’s inner circle, with some suspicion. The big exception, as exemplified in this letter, was Robert E. Lee. Boteler knew this, and was also particularly well equipped to understand, with one foot in politics and the other in the field, that Stonewall needed more men to guarantee the success of his audacious operation, then about to commence. “I wish that your plan for sending reinforcements here could be carried out,” Jackson wrote, “but I have great confidence in Genl Lee, and believe that he has done all he consistently could for the Valley.” Yet a wiser national strategic approach could still be adopted that might assist Lee in better assisting him: “I would like to see adopted the policy of abandoning for the moment one section of the country, in order to concentrate forces and sweep the enemy from another, and then return and crush him in the locality which had been abandoned.” Doing so would “thus keep our troops continually employed in successful work.” Jackson well comprehended, as did Lee, that the Confederacy suffered from a paucity of strategic military means, particularly manpower, and that final victory could only be achieved by maximizing the efficient use of the means available in a strategy of concentration hallmarked by aggressive, offensive operations. Once again, however, Stonewall deferred to Lee’s good judgment, adding, “But Genl Lee sees things from a higher standpoint than I do. I know but little comparatively outside of my district.”⁴

Carte de visite taken from the famous Vannerson wartime photograph of Robert E. Lee, c. 1862–1863. (Library of Congress)

A wartime photograph of Stonewall Jackson as he appeared in the 1862 Valley Campaign. (Photograph by Nathaniel Routzen. Valentine Richmond History Center, Cook Collection.)

Although that final statement was a bit disingenuous—Jackson was an ardent student of Napoleon and had earlier visited some of the great battlefields of Europe; personally corresponded with Virginia governor (and former Lexington neighbor) John Letcher and chairman of the House Military Affairs Committee, William Porcher Miles; and was constantly apprised of national affairs by Boteler himself—it nonetheless revealed a strong sense of esteem for Lee, whose official position in the government conflicted in authority with Jackson’s immediate superior in theater, Gen. Joseph E. Johnston. “Old Jack,” as his soldiers came to call him, could therefore have chosen, at least on technical grounds, to refuse Lee’s entreaties and counsel, but instead opted to follow them to the letter. What had prompted such belief in his fellow Virginian’s military acumen?⁵

A note from Lee written on April 25 offers clues. Following in the spirit of a series of cordial exchanges when Jackson was posted with a small command at Harpers Ferry in 1861, Lee evinced a complete willingness to listen to Stonewall’s proposals, offered sound advice and support, and indicated his intent in a courteous, respectful manner that demonstrated both faith in his subordinate’s judgment and common sense. Jackson’s defeat at Kernstown in March 1862 did nothing to diminish his reputation with Lee, who admired his aggressiveness and understood that the tactical reverse bore theater-strategic fruit by alarming Federal authorities in Washington, who froze reinforcements earmarked for the campaign against Richmond. “I cannot pretend at this distance,” Lee wrote, “to direct operations depending on circumstances unknown to me and requiring the exercise of discretion and judgment as to time and execution.” Instead, he “submit[ted] these suggestions for your consideration.” Although Jackson’s superior as commander of all Virginia forces and within the auspices of his role as Davis’s advisor, Lee comprehended, as have competent generals-in-chief throughout history, that ...