CWL---Was Lee Still Looking For A Battle of Annihilation After Gettysburg?

"Lee's Search for the Battle of Annihilation", Peter Carmichael in Audacity Personified: The Generalship of Robert E. Lee, Peter Carmichael, ed., LSU Press, 2004, pp.1-26.

By the fall of 1863 did Robert E. Lee's expectations far exceed what the Army of Northern Virginia could realistically accomplish? Much has been made of Lee's spring 1863 remark that the ANV was unbeatable. Did Lee continue to believe that the ANV could annihilate the Army of the Potomac after Gettysburg? Carmichael describes how Lee did believe just that. Lee looked for a decisive victory from Early in the summer of 1864 in the Shenandoah Valley. Carmichael believes that Early's army best served Lee by forcing Grant to send troops away from Petersburg to protect Washington. Lee failed to appreciate that defensive victories could both dishearten the North during the autumn elections and sustain Southern morale. The fall of Atlanta, the march to Savannah and the battles of Fisher's Hill and Cedar Creek led to Lincoln's presidential victory.

Discussing the works of Douglas Southall Freeman, Thomas Connelly, Allan Nolan, Michael Fellman and Emory Thomas, Carmichael covers the changing interpretations of Lee's audacity during the war. Carmichael cites Lee's July 1864 remarks, "if we can defeat or drive the armies of the enemy from the field, we shall have peace. All our efforts and energies should be devoted to that object, to illustrate Lee's continuing quest for a battle of annihilation. By ordering the assaults at The Wilderness, Harris Farm, North Anna, Bethesda Church, Cold Harbor, Weldon Railroad, and Fort Harrison Robert E. Lee engages in questionable tactics Carmichael feels. With these assaults and the 1864 Valley Campaign the ANV sustained battlefield losses at a time when Confederate numbers should have been conserved Carmichael concludes. Lee does deserve credit for making the effort in 1864 but the offensive forays drained the lifeblood out of an already anemic Confederacy.

"A defensive operations strategy afforded the best chance to ruin Lincoln's reelection bide with protecting Southern manpower," Carmichael summarizes (p. 26). The goal was to break the North's will to fight and defensive tactics as long could have accomplished this goal. In 1864 Confederate defeat was non inevitable and as Gary Gallagher has pointed out, Carmichael notes, the Southern people still had the will to outlast the enemy if the armies could be preserved.

Image Source: Lee Cart d'viste 1864

CWL---Sheridan's Lieutenants And The Birth Of The Modern Army

Sheridan's Lieutenants: Phil Sheridan, His Generals, and the Final Year of the Civil War, David Coffey, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 168 pages, maps, illustrations, notes, bibliographic essay, index, hardcover, $22.95.

In a clear and concise manner, David Coffey describes and explains the career of Phil Sheridan, who was brash, arrogant, connected to Grant, lucky and someone who could recognize talent. Best known of his victory at Cedar Creek, Virginia in October 1864 and for relieving Gouvernor Warren from command of the Fifth Corps at the Battle of Five Forks in March 1865, Sheridan is usually stereotyped as scrappy Irishman whom U.S. Grant pulled from staff service and put in command of troops.

Coffey details how Sheridan's division and brigade commanders created his luck. Custer, Crook, Merrit, Mackenzie, Devin, Miles, Wilson, Torbert and Lowell served Sheridan in 1864 and 1865. In twelve months, troops commanded by Sheridan wore out the Army of Northern Virginia's cavalry, killed J.E.B. Stuart, defeated Early at Winchester and Fisher's Hill, broke Lee's right flank at Five Forks and cornered him at Appomattox. Coffey also details the success of Wright and Getty at halting the retreating Union force and initiating an counter-attack Cedar Creek before Sheridan's ride makes it close to the battlefield. In detailing the Burning of the Shenandoah Valley, Coffey allows for some doubt regarding the actual amount of destruction reported by Custer and Sheridan.

In a footnote, Coffey suggests that the reader consult The Shenandoah Valley, 1861-1865: The Destruction of the Granary of the Confederacy by Michael G. Mahon. Though acknowledging the immense destruction in the valley during 1861-1865, Mahon refutes stereotypes regarding the volume of destruction in the fall of 1864 and its impact on the Army of Northern Virginia, which was drawing supplies more from the deep South than it was from the Shenandoah Valley. Also, CWL has found in
Virgina 1861, edited by Davis and Robertson, an essay that describes the amount of seizures of food stuffs and farm stock by Confederate authorities in the first summer, fall and winter of the war. These 1861 seizures limited the future production of crops and livestock later in the war.

The author finds the roots of Sheridan's success in his commanders, who time and again made Sheridan look better than he was. In the epilogue, Coffey describes the careers of Sheridan's lieutenants after the war and convincingly explains that the lessons they learned during the war made a significant impact on the next fifty years of U.S. army history. The Plains Wars, the Spanish-American War's Pacific Theatre, the administration of West Point, and the institutional growth of the army itself were heavily marked by officers under Sheridan during the last twelve months of the war.

Though sponsored by Grant, Sheridan on several occasions after the Battle of Cedar Creek refused to consent to Grant's pleas for a forward movement to Lynchburg in order to break the railroad before winter. Ironically, it is the railroad at Lynchburg to which the Army of Northern Virginia marches toward after its withdrawal from Petersburg and at which Sheridan's cavalry division corners Lee's army. Treading on his relationship with Grant, Sheridan dismissed Warren from command of the Fifth Corps at Five Forks. Grants allowed it and alienated Meade and the corps commanders of the Army of the Potomac, though payback came from Grant within two months.

Immediately after Lee's surrender, Grant ordered Sheridan to take the cavalry to North Carolina and aid Sherman. Sheridan had resisted that order twice before but he began to march toward North Carolina this time. Johnson surrendered before Sheridan's force arrived; Grant quickly removed Sheridan from command and sent him to Texas with orders to force the surrender of Confederates in that region and to intimidate Maximilian of Mexico who was France's puppet. Sheridan missed the Grand Review in Washington, D.C. Meade and his corps commanders rode at the head of the Army of the Potomac with out Sheridan, though his cavalry commanders were there in the parade. Later as a remembrance and for Plains War duty, President Grant advanced Sheridan to full general though Halleck and Meade had seniority. It was a tremendous slight, if not insult, to them.

Among the accolades given Sheridan at his death, Coffey offers this quote from Crook, who delivered victories at Winchester and Fisher's Hill to Sheridan: ". . . the adulations heaped upon him by a grateful Nation for his supposed genius turned his head, which added to his natural disposition, caused him to bloat his little carcass with debauchery and dissipation, which carried him off prematurely."

Other Voices---Early Review of Noswothy's Roll-Call to Destiny

Roll Call to Destiny: The Soldier's Eye View of Civil War Battles , Brent Nosworthy, Basic Books, 336 pages, March 2008, $27.95.

Reviewed by Bruce Trinque, Amston, CT on Civil War Discussion Group, Yahoogroups.com

Although in some ways Brent Nosworthy’s new Roll-Call to Destiny: The Soldier’s Eye View of Civil War Battle can be viewed as a companion to his previous, ground-breaking The Bloody Crucible of Courage: Fighting Methods and Combat Experience of the Civil War, fundamentally Roll-Call to Destiny is independent of that earlier volume, written from a quite different perspective. Thoroughly grounded in firsthand accounts, Roll-Call to Destiny provides a vivid examination of combat during the American Civil War: infantry, cavalry, and artillery (and even naval, or at least riverine, action), from the beginning of the war until nearly its end, both Eastern and Western theaters, Union and Confederate.

The focus is not principally upon the experiences of individual soldiers, but rather upon the activities of “small units” (usually, regiments or batteries, but also brigades or larger organizations, where appropriate) at several different battles, including First Bull Run, Gettysburg, and Missionary Ridge, but also lesser-known actions such as Arkansas Post and Darbytown Road. The author does not attempt to provide detailed accounts of the whole battles, but rather focuses upon one or more selected small units at those actions to illustrate numerous facets of Civil War warfare. He is particularly careful to link the theory and practice of such American combat to European military history and technical developments, showing how the American experience fit into a broader picture and that it is impossible to really understand the battlefields of 1861-65 without taking that broader picture into account. In several cases, the author challenges conventional wisdom and provides convincing new answers to old questions.

Besides this innovative and insightful assessment of Civil War combat, Roll-Call to Destiny offers plenty of more traditional military history in the form of stirring narratives of dramatic episodes peopled by soldiers whose courage and skill rose to the occasion – or sometimes did not. This is a book that should be of great interest and value to anyone seriously interested in the real nature of fighting during the American Civil War. Even those who think that they have already read everything there is to be said on the subject will come away with new information and ideas. This is definitely a book that deserves a strong thumbs-up.

Source: cwdg@yahoogroups.com

New--The Command and Control of Troops In Battle

America's Civil War: The Operational Battlefield, 1861-1863,Brian Holden Reid, Prometheus Books, 540 pages, $34.95. March 2007.

In 1861, when the Confederate States of America seceded from the Union and Civil War broke out between the North and the South, few people had much idea of the scale, intensity, and duration of the conflict they were about to enter. Politicians, generals, and common folk on both sides blithely assumed that the conflict would be over quickly and were naively convinced of the superiority of the leadership and the forces at their disposal. Three years later, after many horrendous battles and huge loss of life, the tragic realities of this war had begun to sink in. Stalemate had led to great frustration and suggested a protracted conflict with no end in sight.
In this successor volume to his acclaimed Origins of the American Civil War (1996), Civil War historian Brian Holden Reid examines in depth the operational military history during the first three years of America's Civil War. In particular, he focuses on generalship, command decisions, strategy, and tactics, as well as the experiences of ordinary soldiers.

Besides lack of experience among generals, Holden Reid reveals that for the first few years of the war there was considerable indecisiveness in the North, a hesitancy to punish the South, and a fruitless hope that the Confederacy would agree to some form of reconciliation. He highlights certain important political and social developments during the course of the war that had an effect on Union soldiers and shows how their views became a catalyst in hardening the attitudes in the North toward the South.

This important analysis makes a major contribution to Civil War military history within the larger context of a turbulent political and social climate. It will be followed by another work covering the final eighteen months of the conflict.

Brian Holden Reid (London, England) is professor of American history and military institutions and head of the Department of War Studies at King's College, London. Since 1993, he has been a member of the Council of the Society for Army Historical Research and from 1998 to 2004 served as chairman. In 2004-2005, he was the first non-American to serve as a member of the Lincoln Prize jury panel, which awards the most important literary prize in the field of Civil War history. His many books include The Origins of the American Civil War, The Civil War and the Wars of the Nineteenth Century, and Robert E. Lee: Icon for a Nation. (Text From Publisher)

Forthcoming--- Roll Call To Destiny: The Soldier's Eye View of Civil War Battles

Roll Call to Destiny: The Soldier's Eye View of Civil War Battles, Brent Nosworthy, Basic Books Inc., 336pp. $27.95. Release Date: March 2008.

Brent Nosworthy' last three books—The Bloody Crucible, The Anatomy of Victory, and With Musket, Sword, and Cannon—are each considered classic on the subject of military tactics and weaponry and how they affected warfare between the 17th and 19th centuries. In his new book, he takes a slightly different approach, choosing to focus more on the actual experiences of soldiers (in this case, concerning the American Civil War), and less on tactics and strategies from a command point of view; rather than provide a bird's-eye view of battle, he conveys a ground-level account of what the average soldier saw, smelled and felt.

Weaponry, tactics, strategy and the experience of combat are, of course, all interconnected, and Nosworthy doesn't lose sight of the fact. He has not created a simple miscellany of disconnected firsthand combat accounts. Instead, he begins Roll Call to Destiny with an enlightening chapter about Europe in the mid-19th century—a particularly progressive period when it came to weapons technology and military doctrine. America wasted no time learning about and creating new weapons and tactics, and then putting them to deadly use in the Civil War.

Having sifted through mountains of firsthand accounts (many never previously published), Nosworthy pieces together his relevant findings to paint a crisp, clear picture of the Civil War frontlines, from the perspective of soldiers standing on them. Nosworthy's subjects of interest here are infantry, artillery and cavalry. What was it like to stand behind a cannon and beat back an infantry charge? To take part in a chaotic, fast-paced cavalry raid? To confront the enemy face to face in thick, forest foliage? Nosworthy puts us in the middle of it all.

To illustrate the average soldier's experience, Nosworthy uses a number of case studies, including Burnside's advance during Bull Run, the Marye's Heights artillery battle at Fredericksburg, cavalry versus cavalry on the third day at Gettysburg, and the defense of Fort Sanders during the Knoxville campaign. He includes three lengthy sections under the rubric “Tactical Observations,” which function as mini chapters examining how the soldiers' experiences covered under the previous chapter are connected with certain issues concerning tactics, training and weapons that made their appearance during the fight, along with the terrain on which the battle took place. These sections are typical of the author's detailed, insightful and original thinking, and will be of great value to Civil War scholars and buffs.

With Roll Call to Destiny, Nosworthy has honed his characteristic approach to military history into an extraordinarily detailed study that is both supremely informative and inviting to read. This is a fascinating, superbly researched work that belongs on the shelves of anyone interested in the Civil War.

Source: Text from Publisher

CWL --- A Single Grand Victory: Manassas 1861

You may recall from you public library or you middle school/high school library a book, Edward Creasy's Fifteen Decisive Battles of the World from Marathon to Waterloo. You may have encountered a revised version that included all the 19th century or even the edition that included WWII.

The original edition was 1851 and became an immediate and constant bestseller for the remainder of the 19th century. John Keegan writes that Creasy's intention was to offer a 'jolly good read' and oversimplied his analysis in order to reach a general audience. Creasy's idea of indentifably decisive battles took hold among the general readership.

On a single day on a single battlefield an army could be annihilated or rescued, a nation could be destroyed or saved, and an empire could be founded or meet its demise. The general of the victorious army must be brilliant. Logistics, political factors, and strategy are secondary factors. The virtue and character of the commanders is the decisive factor of the decisive battle. Brillant commanders with courageous armies make decisive victories.

The expectations for a single, grand victory by Northerners and Southerners, their newspaper editors, and their political leaders were based up on the virtue of their societies. Having honor-bound societies with God-on-their-side, with superior versions of capitalism, the North and the South contemplated each other. In the eyes of the South, the North was a mud-sill society of wage slaves, ruled by Yankee merchants and bankers and the seedbed of radical, free love abolitionists. In the eyes of the North, the South was an indolent society of poor farmers and wealthly slaveholders, ruled by a Slave Power Conspiracy and the seedbed of mercenaries eager expand slavery into the American West and Latin America.

Aristocratic and chivalrous Southerners expected to be embraced by the aristocratic and chivalrous monarchs of Europe, who would despise the egalitarian North and who would submit to King Cotton. Southerners believed that the North did not have the capacity to accept the economic sacrafice of a war with the Kingdom of Cotton.

For the South, 'One Single Grand Victory' would be the story of the Southern War for Independence.

for the North, 'One Single Grand Victory' would be the story of the War of the Slaveholders Rebellion.

Looking back from the early 21st century upon the war and its interpretations, the Single Grand Victory notion worked its way into the Lost Cause interpretation of the Civil War as well at the Centenial writings (and videos) of the 1960-2000 era.

Gettysburg is the turning point of the war.
Pickett's Charge was the turning point of the turning point.
Where did these ideas come from?

From Creasy's book written in 1851.

A Single Grand Victory: The First Campaign and the Battle of Manassas, Ethan S. Rafuse, Scholarly Resources, 2002.

CWL --- A Single Grand Victory

An immensely powerful idea---A Single Grand Victory--a victory that would be sufficient to convince the other side of the hopelessness of its cause and persuade its adherents to abandon their war aims.

Austerlitz, 1805, The War of the Third Coalition
Solferino, 1859, The Austro-Franco War
Sadowa, 1866, Prussia-Austrian War

These are single battles that ended a 19th century war.
In a era when leadership alone was viewed as the sole factor that could lead to a truely decisive victory, Davis, Lee, and McClellan were reading military history at West Point
Were they really looking for such a battle in 1862? 1863? 1864?

Ethan S. Rafuse examines the origins of the 'Single Grand Victory' perspective in his book on the first Manassas Campaign. The next entry will follow the development of this 19th century mind set and the constraints it put upon CW generalship as Rafuse describes the beginning of the war.