With a Sword in One Hand and Jomini in the Other

The Problem of Military Thought in the Civil War North

Carol Reardon

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781469642307, 9780807835609
• eBook ISBN: 9780807882573
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: American Civil War History
• Index: History

When the Civil War began, Northern soldiers and civilians alike sought a framework to help make sense of the chaos that confronted them. Many turned first to the classic European military texts from the Napoleonic era, especially Antoine Henri Jomini’s Summary of the Art of War. As Carol Reardon shows, Jomini’s work was only one voice in what ultimately became a lively and contentious national discourse about how the North should conduct war at a time when warfare itself was rapidly changing. She argues that the absence of a strong intellectual foundation for the conduct of war at its start — or, indeed, any consensus on the need for such a foundation — ultimately contributed to the length and cost of the conflict.

Reardon examines the great profusion of new or newly translated military texts of the Civil War years intended to fill that intellectual void and draws as well on the views of the soldiers and civilians who turned to them in the search for a winning strategy. In examining how debates over principles of military thought entered into the question of qualifications of officers entrusted to command the armies of Northern citizen soldiers, she explores the limitations of nineteenth-century military thought in dealing with the human elements of combat.

1
EXORCISING THE GHOST OF JOMINI

Debating Strategy in the Civil War North

In September 1863 editor William Conant Church of the new Army and Navy Journal observed that, when the Civil War began, “American strategy, so much grander and more extensive than that of Europe, was a sealed book. And when that book was to be suddenly opened,” the complexities of designing a plan to preserve the Union by force of arms entirely overwhelmed the North’s senior military and political leaders. The search for authoritative direction had reminded Church of “calling for sailors among Mongol Tartars who had never seen the sea.”¹ As a consequence, the Union’s effort to forge a victorious military strategy followed no single path and endured many false starts. Early attempts drew heavily upon the principles contained in the greatest military classics of Europe, but when the lessons of the masters did not appear to apply to the American situation, Northerners did not hesitate to consider interesting schemes posited by unheralded and often self-taught students of military affairs. Others simply viewed the struggle for the Union as a national crusade that relied most of all on the spirit of the people and rejected the utility of all military theory in favor of the exercise of an acknowledged strength of nineteenth-century American character: common sense. Never restricted to generals and political leaders alone, dialogue about the design and execution of Northern military strategy drew in soldiers, politicians, and interested observers from across the loyal states and abroad. The dynamic nature of these exchanges illuminates an unappreciated element of this “people’s war.”

Although talk of war pervaded the nation well before Fort Sumter, it fell first to General Winfield Scott to open Church’s imaginary book on American strategy. He had dreaded the time he might be called upon to do this, expressing in the fall of 1860 his concern that growing sectional tensions might lead to the “laceration and despotism of the sword.” In March 1861, as Abraham Lincoln took his oath of office as president of the United States, Scott considered four likely courses of action open to the new commander in chief. Only one required offensive military action in the form of an incursion into the seceded states, a measure that might take “two or three years by a young and able general—a Wolfe, a Desaix, a Hoche—with three hundred thousand disciplined men.” Scott clearly viewed this as the least desirable path. He feared that “the destruction of life and property on the other side would be frightful, however perfect the moral discipline of the invaders.”² The first Confederate shell arching high over Fort Sumter in the predawn hours of 12 April 1861, however, shattered most hopes for peaceful resolution. While some voices in both the North and the South still cautioned restraint, the New York Herald announced: “The Civil War has now begun.”³

Scholars have conjectured about Scott’s age, health, Virginia birth, and personal political views as possible explanations for his apparent hesitation to take immediate decisive action against the seceded states in those highly charged April days. But other reasons compelled him to wait, as well. During the Mexican-American War, Scott had observed that President James K. Polk—and not the generals—had made the most important strategic decisions. Thus, immersed in a professional culture committed to the tenet of civilian control over the military, Scott needed to know both his new commander in chief’s goals and the role Lincoln expected him and the army to play in achieving them. Although Civil War historians have shown a marked tendency to cite Clausewitz to stress the linkage of political aims and the use of armed force, Scott—who, like the great majority of the wartime generation, did not read the Prussian’s work—could find similar notions about the connections between national policy and war in the military classics readily available on his bookshelf. Indeed, as Jomini himself had written, at the start of a conflict, a general in chief must make it his “first care . . . to agree with the head of the state upon the character of the war.”⁴ The concept of contingency planning in advance of potential threats and in the absence of specific political guidance did not exist as an element of American war planning, and Scott did not initiate such a practice.

Scott may have hoped for quick answers from the president, but Lincoln had much to think about. Lincoln readily had identified his fundamental goal: the Union must be preserved. But actions of any sort taken to secure it required him to consider a tangled web of domestic political imperatives and fine points in international law. Lincoln’s decision to view the unrest officially, as legal historian Stephen C. Neff has argued, as “a law-enforcement enterprise (albeit one on a large material scale), rather than as a war,” solved some of the president’s problems, but it certainly compounded Scott’s difficulties.⁵ Nearly every major work on military theory available to the general began with definitions of different kinds of war, and not one of them offered a perfect fit with Lincoln’s decision. Many military authors, including future Union Major General Henry W. Halleck and the Austrian Archduke Charles, simply acknowledged two forms of war: offensive and defensive. But others viewed it as a far more complex institution; Jomini himself analyzed at least ten different kinds of war in his Summary of the Art of War. Applying those definitions alone, Scott could identify elements of an offensive war “to reclaim rights”; a defensive war from the political point of view (to preserve the integrity of the Union) but offensive in its military operations; a war of “opinion” that pitted one ideology against another and enlisted the people’s “worst passions”; a “national” war, since the new Confederacy had begun to build military and governmental institutions to help to establish its identity as an independent political entity; or a civil war that resulted from political sectarianism—a kind of conflict that Scott found especially troublesome since, as Jomini had noted, “to give maxims in such wars would be absurd.” The Swiss writer wrote nothing about the conduct of domestic “law-enforcement operations,” of course, asserting only that “governments may in good faith intervene to prevent the spreading of a political disease whose principles threaten social order.”⁶ Scott needed a clear answer to this important question, since the nature of the war would suggest the most effective applications of military force to end it.

Even if Scott had been able to discern a clear answer, however, he knew it only led to more vexing problems. Scott confronted a challenge of unprecedented scale and scope with little institutional flexibility or readiness to respond to it. At the three-story house that served as army headquarters, he had a small personal staff, but, unlike the major European armies, he had no general staff to design, as Jomini had described it, a “system of operations in reference to a prescribed aim.”⁷ The U.S. Army had no officially adopted doctrine on strategy or the higher arts of war to consult during the Civil War; the definition of “strategy” most readily available to Scott and his staff appeared in Colonel Henry L. Scott’s Military Dictionary published the previous year. Colonel Scott had defined the concept as “the art of concerting a plan of campaign, combining a system of military operations determined by the end to be attained, the character of the enemy, the nature and resources of the country, and the means of attack and defense.”⁸ The entire entry consisted of fewer than eleven lines of text. It contained the same three elements—ends, ways, and means—that modern military professionals apply to discussions about strategic options, but it centered solely on military factors and offered no useful insights on how to translate theory to action.⁹

Beyond securing Washington from attack, Scott hardly knew where to start, even after the president made preservation of the Union his clear and unequivocal policy goal. Prodding from an ambitious subordinate forced him to clarify his thinking quickly, however. On 27 April the new commanding general of the Ohio Volunteers, Major General George B. McClellan, sent Scott a plan of operations “to relieve the pressure on Washington, & . . . to bring the war to a speedy close.” McClellan offered two possible scenarios. First, with a force of 80,000 volunteers, he planned to cross the Ohio River and march up the Kanawha River valley of western Virginia to advance upon Richmond, the Confederacy’s new capital. Alternatively, he might cross an army of the same size at Cincinnati or Louisville, march directly on Nashville, and “thence act according to circumstances.” McClellan made clear his lack of experience in thinking on the grand scale. Scott’s own notes criticized his plan to “subdue the seceded states by piecemeal, instead of enveloping them all (nearly) at once.”¹⁰ McClellan’s plan also lacked specificity about ends, ways, and means, and Lincoln’s secretaries John Nicolay and John Hay—never well-disposed toward “Little Mac”—remembered it later for its “astonishing crudeness.”¹¹

Scott’s reply to McClellan on 3 May preserves useful insight into his thinking. He made three points. First, since the Lincoln administration already had planned to call for 25,000 additional Regular troops and 60,000 three-year volunteers, he deemed it inexpedient to rely on a force of three-month volunteers for either of the ambitious options McClellan proposed. Second, he spelled out a plan to combine the naval blockade of southern ports that Lincoln already had instituted with “a powerful movement down the Mississippi to the ocean,” establishing a cordon of posts at appropriate points to “envelope the insurgent States, and bring them to terms with less blood-shed than by any other plan,” which was in concert with the president’s desire at the time to limit loss of life and property. Raising the troops and building the gunboat flotilla to transport men and supplies would take time, so Scott’s third point centered on patience. He considered “the greatest obstacle in the way of this plan” to be “the impatience of our patriotic and loyal Union friends.”¹²

Scott’s initial thoughts reveal the difficulties he faced in attempting to draw a blueprint for army operations. Scott read widely in both military history and military theory—not merely Jomini, Mahan, and Halleck but also M. A. Thiers’s History of the French Revolution (1842), French General Paul Thiébault’s Manual of staff practices (1813), and many more works—and he previously had applied their lessons to solve practical problems. As historian John F. Marszalek has asserted: “Scott was a product of these ideas. Scott’s books told him that war should be reasonable, that it should be waged according to civilized rules, and that it should be conducted only by meticulously trained army units.”¹³ Still, his comments of 3 May indicate that he could not apply his knowledge to craft a war plan on the scale now needed. He merely had built on Lincoln’s blockade by adding a very general proposal for a single line of operation down the Mississippi valley. He badly underestimated the size of the force required to execute even that limited offensive, ignored the threat of newly organized enemy armies, and underestimated the new political realities that accompanied the formation of the Confederate States of America. He proved to be entirely correct only in his assessment of the temper of the Northern people.

By contrast, few Northerners outside official Washington worried over details, definitions, or theories. Moreover, they harbored no qualms about calling the conflict a “war” or demanding that the rebels be quickly crushed. Public interest in military affairs filled lecture halls, increased the sale of newspapers, and inspired hundreds of armchair generals to circulate their plans in the open forum of editorial pages, public rallies, and even the pulpit. Demand for books on military theory and military history spiked, and booksellers could not keep them on their shelves. Publishers rushed to market hastily prepared reprints of military classics; just after Fort Sumter, a New York printer reissued a translation of Napoleon’s Maxims “as a publication timely for the occasion,” its brief foreword purporting to be approved by “Winfield Scott” himself.¹⁴ “Americans are the best observers in the world,” a naval officer later noted, and the outbreak of the war encouraged “the utmost freedom of discussion by the people of every feature of it.”¹⁵

Scott learned the accuracy of that observation as soon as his first fragmentary ideas for military action became known to the public. Unimpressed Northerners countered with their own ambitious ideas, some sending lengthy screeds directly to the commander in chief himself. Long-retired Brevet Brigadier General Joseph Gardner Swift, one of the very first graduates of the U.S. Military Academy, ignored ends and means entirely in suggesting “a simultaneous movement of two forces,” one from the region around Mobile and Pensacola and a second from Memphis, against some unnamed “point or position between the Mississippi & Georgia & South Carolina.” These maneuvers were to be made before Jefferson Davis could “propose armistice or any other delay.”¹⁶ A Philadelphia journalist designated the capture of Abingdon, Virginia, to be key to a Union victory. “Richmond, Fredericksburg, Winchester, Lynchburg, and above all, Abingdon, in the extreme southwest corner of Virginia, should be occupied, and connected together by impregnable posts,” he wrote, asserting—without explanation or justification—that this “latter point may be looked upon as the great strategetical point which overlooks Tennessee and North Carolina, and holds them in check.”¹⁷

Scott’s concerns about popular impatience proved even more well founded when public opinion quickly solidified around a military operation that the general opposed. Deeming Scott’s ideas for a naval blockade and advance down the Mississippi valley too indecisive and too slow to crush the South, the editor of the New York Tribune—quickly joined by other voices in the press, on the stump, and in Congress—demanded: “Forward to Richmond at once!” After Governor Henry A. Wise of Virginia voiced his resolve to stand with the new Confederacy, even though his state’s proximity to the Union’s growing military power in the environs of Washington might make the Old Dominion “the victim of an anaconda,” Northerners quickly transformed his colorful reference into a criticism of Scott’s notions to increase the pressure on the South slowly and purposefully until it submitted.¹⁸ They did not approve of the “Anaconda Plan.” They far preferred a viper’s deadly bite, citing the authority of any military classic that touted the importance of taking possession of the enemy’s capital. After all, as Jomini himself had stated, “All capitals are strategic points, for the double reason that they are not only centers of communications, but also the seats of power and government.”¹⁹ John Nicolay and John Hay, Lincoln’s secretaries, considered the so-called Anaconda Plan to be “premature and therefore necessarily incomplete,” a series of unrelated notions that “remained in the shape of a purpose, rather than a defined project.”²⁰ That did not matter to the Northern public. In the end, the general’s name became attached to the intended insult, and “Scott’s Anaconda Plan” became synonymous with ineffective early-war strategic planning. At the time of the Civil War Centennial, military historian Theodore Ropp, who viewed the Anaconda Plan as little more than a “vague strategic notion,” challenged scholars to reconsider their use of the term, but clearly it still endures.²¹

By mid-May, for the first time and certainly not the last, inaction by Union arms quickly raised an army of critics throughout the North. Their impatience, as Scott predicted, drove some—including professional soldiers—to demand that Scott reject the conservatism of European military theory for the practicality, energy, and righteousness of the loyal men of the North eager to take the fight to the Confederates. As Colonel Samuel B. Holabird demanded, even as he completed his translation of Jomini’s 1804 Treatise on Grand Military Operations, “If we must borrow let us only accept that portion applicable to our circumstances, the necessities of our warfare and the genius of our people.” In just the few weeks after Fort Sumter, he complained, he had begun to sense that “nothing is gold with us until it has been coined in Europe” and pondered whether or not the army would ever make a move unless “some Frenchman suggests it.”²² Other Northerners rejected not merely the ideas contained in the European military classics but all military theory, regardless of its origin, suggesting that recent technological change rendered the thinking of the past obsolete. “Take our word for it,” a Pennsylvanian asserted, a Northern man would soon “produce some patented Secession-Excav...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• With a Sword in one hand & Jomini in the other
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• CONTENTS
• INTRODUCTION
• 1 EXORCISING THE GHOST OF JOMINI
• 2 WHO SHALL COMMAND?
• 3 LOST IN JOMINI’S SILENCE
• EPILOGUE
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• NOTES
• BIBLIOGRAPHY
• INDEX