Once the Civil War begun, it seems that all the Union Army had to do was to capture Richmond and arrest or kill Jefferson Davis. Since Richmond was only 100 miles from Washington it seems that a large force could have been formed in order to surround Richmond before the commanders had a chance to pull back deep into southern held territory.
I realize that it’s easier said then done, but was that the original objective of the Union Army?
Was Richmond that well fortified to prevent easy capture by the North?
Had the Union Army had better generals would that have made a big difference?
Would arresting or killing Jeff Davis had meant the end to the war or would someone else just become president in his place?
The Union tried it. The first major battle of the war was the Battle of Bull Run on the road between Washington and Richmond. The Confederates demonstrated that they were strong enough to repulse a direct attack on their capital, and the long game was on.
The problem is not the capture of the capital. The problem is the defeat of the enemy’s army in the field. Normally, of course, that army is placed to defend the capital, because that’s what the civilians want. But it need not be.
In any event, as noted above, the Union tried the quick route of an invasion and defeat of the Confederates at Bull Run/Manassas and got their noses fairly severely bloodied. Although the casualties pale in comparison to the later Civil War battles, for the time they were shocking. Furthermore, the panicked retreat of the Federals convinced many that Washington D.C. was open to a Confederate thrust northward, and the immediate concern became forming a robust defense of Washington.
After that, the Union initially looked for less bloody ways of bringing the war to a close. Political maneuvering was still going on, id est the question of whether Delaware, Kentucky, Maryland and Missouri – all slave states – would formally secede and join the CSA (they did not). There was also hope for a maritime/Western strategy, in which the Union would take command of the Mississippi and blockade the coast through its superior naval forces, and thereby split off Texas from the CSA and ruin the export-driven economy of the South, hopefully causing it to reconsider without the necessity of huge casualties. Keep in mind in 1861 there was still a deep reluctance to set brother against brother, so to speak, and a hope that some kind of workable climb-down could be found. Not among the diehard slavocrats or abolitiionists, to be sure, but among the more moderate majority.
It is also probably relevant that Southernerns had a disproportionately large fraction of the high command posts in the Federal Government and US Army, and their departure left rather a vacuum. (And it is not unlikely that those who remained, at least in the first year or two of the war, were much more sympathetic to the South than those who came later.)
To be sure, had Lincoln and other senior officials had a prescient knowledge of what the drive on Richmond would cost in 1863-5, it is very likely they would have pressed forward in 1861 at all costs. But they did not. Indeed, it is characteristic of extremely bloody wars – the First World War in the West comes also to mind – that their ultimate cost wildly exceeds all rational expectations at the time when nations commit to them.
It’s not that “they” did not, but that Gen. McClellan did not when he had the upper hand. Lincoln wanted to and was very disappointed that McClellan sat twiddling his thumbs while the Confeds reinforced.
Sure, but how long did Lincoln wait before firing McClellan? I’m sure he was very disappointed. But had he had accurate foreknowledge of what was in store for him in, say, the election of 1864, I have a feeling Lincoln would have moved far more expeditiously. Let us also recall that the victors write the history, and in this case that would be Lincoln and Grant. Perhaps Lincoln did not suffer from such violent pangs of disapproval in 1861 as his hagiographers later said he did.
As others have already pointed out. The British occupied Washington in 1814. But I can’t help pointing out that Napoleon never gained the the Russian capitol. In 1812 the capitol of Russia was St. Petersburg, not Moscow.
the army wasn’t very large before 1861, maybe 12,000 men, and most of those were scattered in the west in case of Indian attack. It took time to raise and equip a modern army
many of the top officers sided with the Confederacy
there weren’t a whole lot of accurate maps back then and Confederates could more easily find locals who knew about roads, etc.
Virginia has a number of rivers going west to east that made crossing difficult. McClellan actually had a good idea in using the navy to circumvent these in the 1862 Peninsular campaign. But he messed it up with his constant dawdling and overestimating the rebels.
Many Union generals who knew what they were doing, such as the aged Winfield Scott, didn’t see Richmond as that important. Better to institute a naval blockade and win the war in the west (i.e Misssissippi river). But politicians and newspapers were always urging Lincoln to “do something”, as in launch an attack. They did build up a large force which in retrospect could have been smaller and more resources concentrated in the west.
I don’t know if capturing or killing Jefferson Davis would have made a lot of difference. He didn’t really want to be President, as a West Point graduate, Mexican war hero and former Secretary of the Army he wanted to be top general. But the office fell to him Richmond wasn’t the first capital, Montgomery, Alabama was. If captured, I suppose the Confederacy could have moved to another city.
Personally, I think even if the Union had captured Richmond in the first year of the war it wouldn’t have ended the rebellion. It would certainly have been a major blow to the Confederacy but I think they would have fought on. The deep southern states would have endured the loss of Virginia like they later endured the loss of Tennessee and other large areas. I think that once the war started, it wasn’t going to end until Union troops reached all the way through the south.
Hard to say. It would come down to how much of the Confederate government survived, and if Lee (or whomever) managed to stop the Federals afterward. If they marcghed all the way Charleston… well, there wouldn’t be much left to fight back. If they took Richmond and then got halted, then thigns look more positive for the Confederates.
They certainly would have lost perhsps their most important arsenal, immediate lost all hope of international recognition, lost the experimental ironclad Merrimac at Norfolk, and lost the numerous georaphic barriers which helped hold back Union attacks, as well as being forced out of the Shenandoah. Not a good situation.
I think that was kind of the point of the OP. The United States had a reasonable chance of occupying Richmond and northern Virginia in 1861. But nobody’s saying they could have marched all the way to Charleston.
McClellan was the finest general in the Union at raising up, training, equipping and supplying armies. The only thing he wasn’t good at was actually sending them into battle. It didn’t help that at the time a popular school of military thought was that actually fighting battles was secondary to moving your forces around like chess pieces, so that the enemy would either retreat or be pinned down by the potential threat your armies posed. Committing your troops to open combat without a surer-than-sure guarantee of victory was regarded as suicidally reckless. McClellan epitomized this school of thought.
Lincoln is said to have remarked, “If Gen. McClellan doesn’t want to use the Army of the Potomac, I should like to borrow it for awhile.”
Remember that the first Confederate capital was Montgomery, Ala. If they’d left it there and not moved it to Richmond as a way of binding Virginia more tightly into the CSA, the war might have taken an entirely different course, instead of so much relatively inconclusive but bloody fighting back and forth in the hundred-mile corridor between Washington and Richmond.
Top-echelon Confederate generals were generally better than Union generals early in the war, all in all, but by the end the Union forces were just as well-led.
Capturing or killing Davis would simply have meant that the Confederate VP, Alexander Stephens, would’ve taken office. The war would have ground on.