I ask out of curiosity and ignorance and not because I disagree with the sentiment: What would the north fighting with both arms look like and what would they do that they weren’t already doing? How would they have raised larger armies, which I assume they would have needed, if they were already having so much trouble with the draft?
Keeping the South - close to half the states in the Union - under indefinite military occupation would have turned into a political, economic and ideological crisis for the North. You have to remember that the U.S. was founded as a constitutional government, and that the ideals of the Revolution were fresher then, than they are now. And that the national government, back then, didn’t have the amount of resources that it does, now.
I completely agree with you about Lee, and the advantages of restoring the Union as quickly as possible, once the war was lost.
I always saw the desire for a decisive battle as coming out of his talent as a general. He knew that he couldn’t win a war by traditional means. He had to convince the North to go away because he lacked the military, industrial and economic strength to force them out over the long run.
A fair question, and one I don’t have all the answers for. I’ll have to do some looking.
For one, the delay in fielding effective multi-shot rifles (which had already been developed and ftested) would have been sped up and produced in vast numbers, something the South could never match (the US Army Quartermaster Corps refused to consider buying these perfectly useful weapons, and for some reason were never forced to do so, except for some calvary units).
The North, at the same time the South was bankrupting itself and having it’s economy destroyed, was embarking on the building of the transcontinenatal railroad, industry was booming, and over 800,000 immigrants came to America (replacing more than twice over the deaths suffered by the Federal Armies).
I’ve often wondered exactly what Foote meant by that statement, as well. He may have been talking about sheer numbers. Another quotation of his that I’m fond of: “You just can’t whip 23,000,000 people with 9,000,000. Especially when nearly half the latter number are slaves.”
Grant was a drunk, with no special tactical abilities, and whose only real strategic insight was that the North could afford to lose two men for every Southern soldier lost, and still win the war. Don’t get me wrong: in the context of the Civil war, that was a colossally important insight. And though other Northern generals failed to see it, I’d argue it’s still not the kind of insight that makes a general great.
Sherman burned his way across the South, turning the war against civilians. I know the expedience argument for doing it. But it’s not admirable. That Lee did what he could to keep civilians out of the fight is one of the things that I admire about him. Similarly, I think what Sheman did was dishonorable.
Lee was the Commander of the Army of Northern Virginia. He was eventually given a higher rank, although I don’t remember anymore when that happened. Either way, as a practical matter there wasn’t much he could do about Vicksburg, although completely aware of its importance.
That isn’t an answer, though - or at least it’s a what, rather than a why. You say for you there’s an inherent emotional reaction to going on in a doomed situation, but why? Even emotional reactions have reason behind it.
This is roughly as factually correct as saying that Alexander the Great was the best admiral the Japanese had in World War II.
Maybe, after he conquered the Ottomans.
The number of states doesn’t really matter. If it did, the Confederates would have won the war. It’s an issue of manpower and resources.
The United States had the numbers. If you assume the Southern black population would have supported the federal government rather than the ongoing guerrilla movement, then the occupiers would outnumber the occupied by more than four to one.
And I don’t see ideology being a problem. We Americans love our democracy and rights - but we’ve always been willing to put them aside for groups we deem they don’t apply to. If the American people had decided that former Confederates didn’t deserve to be treated like citizens, then we’d have been willing to treat them like a subject people.
As for the size of the government, the resources existed. The government therefore could have just grown to whatever size was needed to maintain an occupation. If the United States government was strong enough to defeat the Confederates in war, it would have been strong enough to keep them down afterwards.
But how much of a fight would you expect a piece of furniture to put up?
The idea that Grant was a drunk was a rumor circulated by his rivals. Grant never drank to excess during the war.
And I feel you’re under-rating Grant’s insights. He did a lot more than realize he could afford to lost more soldiers. He applied the knowledge that he had greater manpower in a way that won the war. He coordinated attacks along multiple fronts so the Confederates couldn’t move troops back and forth to defend against them. And he designed his offensives as campaigns rather than battles so that the Confederates wouldn’t have an opportunity to rest and rebuild.
It’s no coincidence that the war, which had been dragging on for several years, ended within one year once Grant was placed in command.
What Sherman did (with Grant’s full approval) was highly honorable. He saw that he could defeat the Confederates by destroying their resources rather than killing their soldiers. The wealthy Confederates who owned that property might have been upset but I bet a lot of the Confederate enlisted men secretly approved of Sherman’s way of conducting a war. The saying about it being “a rich man’s war and a poor man’s fight” existed before Sherman came along.
And Sherman’s methods, like Grant’s, were effective. Confederate politicians had been willing to see tens of thousands of soldiers die. But once some plantations were burnt, there was finally some serious talk about negotiating an end to the war.
If or when the United States is on the ropes, completely defeated militarily and without resources to continue the fight — and one day that time will come if war continues in this stage of civilisation, since Everything Dies * — I feel certain that 95% of Americans will say: “We will never surrender.”
And that’s because what their values are — ( and those values I don’t share in this case, being a royalist an’ all ) — are more important to Americans than what they retain by knuckling under. Even if they were each given the wealth of many Indes as recompense.
I don’t care much for Edmund Ruffin but he knew how to die. And therefore died personally undefeated.
Here on the level sand
Between the sea and land,
What shall I build or write
Against the fall of night?
Tell me what runes to grave
That hold the bursting wave,
Or bastions to design
For longer date than mine.
--A. E. Housman, 1936
Wow, asked and answered in the second post.
Little Nemo has already made several excellent points, but I’ll weigh in a throw out a couple of more…
That Grant had trouble holding his liquor was something he know from his earliest days in the Army (In California). While it is possible that he ‘fell off the wagon’ once or twice during the war, he was never drunk during battle and he had several aides (best known was John Rawlins) who monitored him closely in regards to alcohol (sp).
Like Nemo said, it was hearsay and innuendo spread mostly by those jealous of his success.
As for tactical abilities, note the climax of the Vicksburg campaign, where he moved his army across a major river, cut off from his base of supply, marched nearly 200 miles, defeated every force the Confederates had in front of him and ended up besieging Vicksburg, which as mentioned above, was critical in the final ending of the war. It is up there with Jackson’s Shenandoah Valley campaign and he did it with larger forces and more to lose.
And while his losses were heavy in Virginia, he also fought a war of maneuver, pinning Lee to his base and not allowing him to move or attack. After The Wilderness, Lee never launched a serious assault until near the end of the war. Grant held him in place while others (Sherman, Sheridan, Farragut, Thomas) carved out the heart of the Confederacy.
Sherman’s campaign up until he captured Atlanta was pretty much a war of maneuver between him a Joe Johnston. When Hood replaced Johnston and came out slugging, Sherman slugged back and his army have a 40% manpower advantage. But when Hood left Atlanta, he moved North and began menacing Sherman’s line of supply and communications (which Nathan Bedford Forrest was already doing) and threatening to move North.
Sherman had a choice; he could move North against Hood and give up all he had won, or he could move South against minimal opposition and bring the war to the enemies home territory, demonstrating that nothing could stop him. That was the decision he made, and history has backed him up.
Was it immensely destructive? Absolutely. Sherman *wanted * the Southern people to feel the war, to know that “War is Hell”. He wanted them to know that there nation was a sham and could do nothing to prevent him from his devastation. His goal was to destroy morale as much as destroy plantations. And his men, the ‘Bummers’ of legend, having fought several years of bitter conflict, were more than ready to take the war into the ‘enemy homeland’. It was not a nice thing, but it was the way wars would be fought in the future–Sherman would have been able to handle WWII better than most Civil War Generals, IMHO.
Actually, Lee could have sent troops to Johnston who was marshaling troops in Jackson, Mississippi to support Vicksburg (he was encouraged too several times by Davis, whose home state was Mississippi). Lee always declined, citing the threat from the Potomac Army.
In the end, it didn’t matter; as Grant (or Lincoln, I can’t recall) said “The enemy has not Army enough”. And that was the truth in the end.
While I agree with much of what you say, the bolded part is not accurate. Lincoln said, publicly and repeatedly, that ending slavery was not the goal of the war:
Then there’s the Emancipation Proclamation:
In other words, the Proclamation applied only where the Union had no power to enforce it.
The Stainless Steel Rat has it.
Grant’s basic experience of the war was to win in whatever way he could, with whatever resources he had. But he never merely threw bodies at a problem. His goal was always to get to a strong position before his opponents were ready, disrupt their defense, and force a surrender. This was the basic technique that he used throughout the war, including in Virginia. The problem there was twofold.
First, Virginia was something of a solved problem as far as the Confederates were concerned. They had marched back and forth over it for three years and knew every inch of the countryside, and had numerous prepared positions blocking the major arteries.
Second, everybody else but Sherman completely screwed up their jobs. Grant’s general in the east were unreliable and constantly hesitated, making some of the worst blunders in the entire war in 1864. Burnside, at Grant’s direction, made a perfect landing and could have functionally ended the war completely unopposed, but just stopped moving. Sigel and Hunter turned a wining position in the Shenandoah Valley into a strategic drain on Union forces. Officers in the Amy of the Potomac frequently held back and dawdled when easy victories were at hand. (If a campaign can teach anything, the Overland Campaign teaches this: if you aren’t willing to fight when you have the advantage, you’ll be forced to fight when you don’t.)
Still, this does point out several things: Grant exposed Lee to at least three fatal blows by keeping in contact with him. Between Beauregard, Early, and Lee & his corp commanders, the Confederates dodged all of them. Grant still forced Lee into a headlock within 45 days. Yes, casualties were high. On the other hand, it was not at all unusual for attackers in the Civil War to lose two men for every one the defender lost, and the ratio was actually closer to 1.67 to 1. When individual battles were racking up thousands of casualties, sustaining some more to end the entire war was not exactly a hard choice. If Grant “merely” shortened the war by a single year, it was a reasonable price to pay.
If Grant can be faulted for anything, it was that he ordered attacks on strong positions and these rarely worked. But even these can’t be sold short: on several occasions he came very close to breaking Lee’s lines and splitting one Confederate Corp from another. Had one of attacks gone farther, it could have also likely ended war in 1864. This was another of Grant’s proven skills traits: he made every move and attack a deliberate one, designed to cripple or destroy his enemy in a strategic sense. Every attack was intended to be a strategic threat to his enemy’s continued existence.
Quantrill was not the only Confederate guerrilla operating in Missouri, but he rapidly gained the greatest notoriety. He and his men ambushed Union patrols and supply convoys, seized the mail, and occasionally struck towns on either side of the Kansas-Missouri border. Reflecting the internecine nature of the guerrilla conflict in Missouri, Quantrill directed much of his effort against pro-Union civilians, attempting to drive them from the territory where he operated. Quantrill’s guerrillas attacked Jayhawkers, Union militia, and Federal forces relying primarily on ambush and raids.[4]
Confederate induction[edit]
On 15 August 1862, Quantrill was granted a field commission as a captain in the Confederate army under the Confederate Partisan Ranger Act. … His most notable operation was the Lawrence Massacre, a revenge raid on Lawrence, Kansas in August 1863.
Lawrence Massacre[edit]
… Quantrill’s men burned a quarter of the town’s buildings and killed at least 150 men and boys.[6]’
Here’s a list of the war crimes of the civil war. Yes, the North was responsible for a couple of them, but it was mostly the CSA:
Quantrill was especially out to kill James Lane, but Lane escaped into a cornfield. The Raiders descended from Mount Oread into town at about 5:00 in the morning and burned down every business and municipal building. Homes were spared torching but the families were driven outside and the husbands, fathers, and son all shot dead on their porches, in the streets, even in their beds. The women were raped, some of them and some children shot down or trampled while they fled. At least 185 men and boys as young as 11 were executed merely for being able-bodied.
One of the biggest lies of Neo-Confederates.
"It proclaimed the freedom of slaves in the ten states that were still in rebellion.[3] Because it was issued under the President’s war powers, it necessarily excluded areas not in rebellion - it applied to more than 3 million of the 4 million slaves in the U.S. at the time. The Proclamation was based on the president’s constitutional authority as commander in chief of the armed forces;[4] it was not a law passed by Congress. The Proclamation also ordered that suitable persons among those freed could be enrolled into the paid service of United States’ forces, and ordered the Union Army (and all segments of the Executive branch) to “recognize and maintain the freedom of” the ex-slaves. The Proclamation did not compensate the owners, did not outlaw slavery, and did not grant citizenship to the ex-slaves (called freedmen). It made the eradication of slavery an explicit war goal, in addition to the goal of reuniting the Union.[5]
Around 20,000 to 50,000 slaves in regions where rebellion had already been subdued were immediately emancipated. It could not be enforced in areas still under rebellion, but as the Union army took control of Confederate regions, the Proclamation provided the legal framework for freeing more than 3 million slaves in those regions…
It has been inaccurately claimed that the Emancipation Proclamation did not free a single slave;… However, as a result of the Proclamation, many slaves were freed during the course of the war, beginning with the day it took effect; eyewitness accounts at places such as Hilton Head, South Carolina,[75] and Port Royal, South Carolina[72] record celebrations on January 1 as thousands of blacks were informed of their new legal status of freedom. Estimates of how many thousands of slaves were freed immediately by the Emancipation Proclamation are varied. One contemporary estimate put the ‘contraband’ population of Union-occupied North Carolina at 10,000, and the Sea Islands of South Carolina also had a substantial population. Those 20,000 slaves were freed immediately by the Emancipation Proclamation."[24] … Emancipation was immediately enforced as Union soldiers advanced into the Confederacy. Slaves fled their masters and were often assisted by Union soldiers.[77]
Booker T. Washington, as a boy of 9 in Virginia, remembered the day in early 1865:[78]
As the great day drew nearer, there was more singing in the slave quarters than usual. It was bolder, had more ring, and lasted later into the night. Most of the verses of the plantation songs had some reference to freedom… Some man who seemed to be a stranger (a United States officer, I presume) made a little speech and then read a rather long paper—the Emancipation Proclamation, I think. After the reading we were told that we were all free, and could go when and where we pleased. My mother, who was standing by my side, leaned over and kissed her children, while tears of joy ran down her cheeks. She explained to us what it all meant, that this was the day for which she had been so long praying, but fearing that she would never live to see."
You are demonstrably incorrect.
There are two things often misunderstood, both at the time and afterward. Lincoln understood that his power, even in wartime, was not absolute. He had previously pointed out the deep Constitutional problems with attempting to end slavery by Presidential fiat. But he could justify ending slavery as a war measure to attack rebel strength, and did so. He himself privately said that it was a covenant with God, and could not back down from that. In fact, he would have issued it even before Antietam but felt he could not do so until the Union forces achieved a victory.
You might reasonably ask, however, “What slaves did it free?” The problem with asking that is that the answer is obvious: the document explains clearly. Every single slave in the seceded states not in areas under Union control was now free. Which might not seem impressive except that the Union was at that very time preparing to strike deep into the heart of the Confederacy. The Emancipation Proclamation caused slavery in every corner of the Confederacy to crumble more every single day. Not only did it codify the policy of Union forces of assisting escaped slaves, but it caused mass defections among slaves, who simply decamped to Union lines. Every inch of southern soil invaded further crumpled the already-shaky system.
Finally, Lincoln made the end of slavery one of the only two plain requirements he demanded for peace, the other being restoration of the Union, which rather speaks for itself.