of America,’ is hereby dissolved." Within six weeks, six other deep-South states seceded from the Union and seized Federal property inside their borders, including military installations, save Fort Pickens outside
Pensacola and Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor. (Map 21) To the seven states that formed the Confederate States of America on February 18, 1861, at Montgomery, Alabama, the U.S. government’s retention of the forts was equivalent to a warlike act. To provide his fledgling government with a military force, on March 6 the new Confederate Executive, Jefferson Davis, called for a 100,000-man volunteer force to serve for twelve months. The creation of a rival War Department south of the 35th Parallel on February 21 shattered the composition of the Regular Army and disrupted its activities, particularly in Texas, where Maj. Gen. David E. Twiggs surrendered his entire command. With an actual strength of 1,080 officers and 14,926 enlisted men on June 30, 1860, the Regular Army was based on five-year enlistments. Recruited heavily from men of foreign birth, the U.S. Army consisted of 10 regiments of infantry, 4 of artillery, 2 of cavalry, 2 of dragoons, and 1 of mounted riflemen. It was not a unified striking force. The Regular Army was deployed within seven departments, six of them west of the Mississippi. Of 198 line companies, 183 were scattered in 79 isolated posts in the territories. The remaining 15 were in garrisons along the Canadian border and on the Atlantic coast. They were patently unprepared for the mission of forcibly returning the Southern states to the union. Created by Secretary of War John C. Calhoun and expanded by Secretary of War Davis in 1853, the departments of the U.S. Army had become powerful institutions by the eve of the Civil War. Within each of the trans-Mississippi departments, a senior colonel or general officer by brevet commanded 2,000 officers and men. All the states east of the Mississippi constituted the Department of the East, where Bvt. Maj. Gen. John E. Wool controlled 929 regulars. A department commander was responsible for mobilizing and training militia and volunteer forces called into Federal service and for coordinating his resources with any expeditionary force commander who operated inside his territory or crossed through his department. A department commander often doubled in command, having responsibility for the administration of his department as well as for conduct of operations in the field. He often had a dual staff arrangement, one for the department and another for the campaign. For strategic guidance and major decisions he looked to the President and General in Chief; for administrative support he channeled his requirements through the Secretary of War to the appropriate bureau chief. In the modern sense he had no corps of staff experts who could assist him in equating his strategic goals with his logistical needs. In many respects the departmental system was a major reason why the Union armies during the Civil War operated like a team of balky horses. A system well suited to the demands of maintaining a small peacetime force could not effectively organize and manage combat forces consisting of hundreds of thousands of soldiers. The 1,676 numbered paragraphs of the U.S. Army Regulations governed the actions of a department commander. The provisions concerning Army organization and tactics were archaic in most cases |
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More serious than their numbers, |
despite Davis’ efforts in 1857 to update the regulations to reflect the experience of the Mexican War. During the Civil War the Regulations would be slightly modified to incorporate the military laws passed by two wartime Congresses. In the South, these same regulations would govern the policy and procedures of the Confederate forces. The roster of the Regular Army was altered considerably by Davis’ action in creating the Confederate Army. Of the 1,080 in the active officer corps, 286 resigned or were dismissed and entered the Confederate service. (Conversely, only 26 enlisted men are known to have violated their oaths.) West Point graduates on the active list numbered 824; of these, 184 were among the officers who turned their backs on the United States and offered their swords to the Confederacy. Of the 900 graduates then in civil life, 114 returned to the Union Army and 99 others sought Southern commissions. General in Chief Winfield Scott and Col. George H. Thomas of Virginia were among the few prominent Southerners who fought for the Union. More serious than their numbers, however, was the high caliber of the officers who joined the Confederacy; many were regimental commanders, and three had commanded at departmental level. With military preparations under way, Davis dispatched commissioners to Washington a few days after Lincoln’s inauguration on March 4, 1861, to treat for the speedy takeover of Forts Sumter and Pickens. Informally reassured that the forts would not be provisioned without proper notice, the envoys returned to Montgomery expecting an uneventful evacuation of Sumter. President Lincoln had to move cautiously, for he knew Sumter’s supplies were giving out. As each March day passed, Sumter aggravated the harshness of Lincoln’s dilemma. In case of war, the fort had no strategic value. And if Lincoln reinforced it, Davis would have his act of provocation and Lincoln might drive eight more slaveholding states out of the Union. Yet if Sumter was not succored, the North might cool its enthusiasm for the Union concept and become accustomed to having a confederation south of the Mason-Dixon Line. There were no easy choices for the new President. President Lincoln spent two weeks listening to the conflicting counsel of his constitutional advisers and made up his own mind on March 29 to resupply Fort Sumter with provisions only. No effort would be made to increase its military power. By sea he soon dispatched a token expedition and on April 8 notified South Carolina’s governor of his decision. The next move was up to the local Confederate commander, Brig. Gen. Pierre G. T. Beauregard. On the eleventh, Maj. Robert Anderson, Sumter’s commander, politely but firmly rejected a formal surrender demand. At 4:30 the next morning Confederate batteries began a 34-hour bombardment. Anderson’s ninety-man garrison returned it in earnest, but Sumter’s guns were no match for the concentric fire from Confederate artillery. Offered honorable terms on April 14, Anderson surrendered the Federal fort, saluted his U.S. flag with fifty guns, and, with his command, was conveyed to the fleet outside the harbor to be taken to New York City. Unquestionably, the Confederates fired the first shot of the war and with that rash act removed many difficulties from Lincoln’s path in his efforts to preserve the Union. On the fifteenth Lincoln personally penned a proclamation declaring the seven Southern states in insurrec- |
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tion against the laws of the United States. To strangle the Confederacy, on the nineteenth Lincoln declared the entire coast from South Carolina to Texas under naval blockade. To augment the reduced Regular Army, Lincoln asked the governors of the loyal states for 75,000 militiamen to serve for three months, the maximum time permissible under existing
laws. With a unanimity that astonished most people, the Northern states responded with 100,000 men. Within the eight slave states still in the Union, the call for militia to suppress the rebellion was angrily and promptly rejected; and the President’s decision to coerce the Confederacy
moved Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Arkansas to join it. The border states of Missouri, Kentucky, Maryland, and Delaware were still undecided; and each side moved cautiously to avoid pushing them into the other’s camp. |
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commissioned officers proved to be enthusiastic, devoted to duty, and eager to learn, incompetents were also appointed. Before the end of 1861, however, officers were being required to prove their qualifications before examining boards of regular officers; those found unfit were allowed
to resign.
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THE BALTIMORE RIOTS
As a slave state with economic and cultural ties to both sections, Maryland required careful handling |
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less the War Department specifically released him. Most regulars were loath to resign, uncertain that they would be recalled to active duty after the war. Thus, during 1861 and part of 1862, promotion in the Regular Army was slow. All regulars could accept commissions in the volunteers by 1862, and in many cases the year they had spent in small-unit command seasoning had its reward in advancing them to higher commands. Ulysses S. Grant and William T. Sherman, both U.S. Military Academy graduates returning from civilian life, asked specifically for volunteer regimental commands at first and soon advanced rapidly to general officer posts. As North and South lined up for battle, the preponderance of productive
capacity, manpower, and agricultural potential clearly lay on the side of the North. Its crops were worth more annually than those of the South, which had concentrated on growing cotton, tobacco, and rice. Between February and May 1861 the Confederate authorities missed the opportunity to ship baled cotton to England and draw bills against it for the purchase of arms. In sea power, railroads, material wealth, and industrial capacity to produce iron and munitions, the North was vastly superior to the South. This disparity became even more pronounced as the ever-tightening blockade gradually cut off the Confederacy from foreign imports. The North had more mules and horses, a logistical advantage of great importance since supplies had to be carried to the troops from rail and riverheads. |
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Militarily, the South’s greatest advantage over the North was simply the fact that if not attacked it could win by doing nothing. To restore the Union the Federal forces would have to conquer the Confederacy. Thus the arena of action lay below the strategic line of the Potomac and Ohio Rivers. Here, geography divided the theater of war into three interrelated theaters of operations. The Eastern Theater lay between the Atlantic Ocean and the Appalachian Mountains; the Western Theater embraced the area from the Appalachians to the Mississippi; and the Trans-Mississippi Theater ran westward to the Pacific Ocean.
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ANACONDA PLAN General in Chief Winfield Scott devised his plan for the blockading and slow crushing of the rebellion, |
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Map 22 |
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on Washington, acceded. McDowell’s battle plan and preparations accelerated
accordingly. The plan, accepted in late June, called for Butler and Patterson to prevent the Confederates facing them from reinforcing
Beauregard while McDowell advanced against Manassas to outflank the Southern position. Scott called it a good plan on paper but knew Johnston was capable of frustrating it if given the chance. McDowell’s success against the Confederate center depended upon a rapid thirty-mile march, if 35,000 Federals were to keep 22,000 Confederates from being reinforced. On July 16, 1861, the largest army ever assembled on the North American continent up to that time advanced slowly on both sides of the Warrenton pike toward Bull Run. McDowell’s marching orders were good, but the effect was ruined by one unwise caution to the brigade commanders: "It will not be pardonable in any commander … to come upon a battery or breastwork without a knowledge of its position." The caution recalled to McDowell’s subordinates the currently sensationalized bugbear of the press of the Federal forces’ being fooled by "masked batteries." (The term originated at Sumter, where a certain battery was constructed, masked by a house that was demolished just before the guns opened fire.) Accordingly, 35,000 men moved with extreme caution just five miles on the seventeenth. The next day the Federals occupied Centreville, four miles east of Stone Bridge, which carried the Warrenton pike over Bull Run creek. (Map 23) Beauregard’s advance guards made no effort to delay the Federals but fell back across the battle line, now extending three miles along the west bank of Bull Run, which meandered from Stone Bridge southeast until it joined the Occoquan stream. The country was fairly rough, cut by streams and thickly wooded. It presented formidable obstacles to attacking raw troops, but a fair shelter for equally raw troops on the defensive. On the eighteenth, while McDowell’s main body waited at Centreville for the trains to close up, the leading division demonstrated against Beauregard’s right around Mitchell’s Ford. The Federal infantry retired after a sharp musketry fight, and a 45-minute artillery duel ensued. It was the first exchange of four standard types of artillery ammunition for all muzzleloading guns, whether rifled or smoothbore. Solid shot, shell, spherical case or shrapnel, and canister from eight Federal guns firing 415 rounds were answered by seven Confederate pieces returning 310 rounds. Steadily withdrawing its guns, the oldest and best-drilled unit of the South, the Washington Light Artillery of New Orleans, broke off the fight against well-trained U.S. regular artillery. Both sides had used rifled artillery, which greatly increased the accuracy and gave a range more than double that of the smoothbores. Yet throughout the war rifled guns never supplanted the new, easily loaded Napoleons. In the fight, defective Confederate ammunition fired from three new 3-inch iron rifles would not fly point foremost but tumbled and lost range against McDowell’s gunners. That the error went undetected for days reveals the haste in which Davis had procured his ordnance. Sure that his green troops could not flank the Confederate right, McDowell tarried two more fateful days before he attacked in force. Engineers reconnoitered for an undefended ford north of Stone Bridge. Finding no vedettes at the ford near Sudley Springs, McDowell decided to envelop the Confederate left on July 21 and destroy the Manassas |
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Map 23 |
Gap Railroad to keep Johnston from reinforcing the outnumbered Beauregard.
The idea was excellent, but the timing was slow. While McDowell frittered away four-and-a-half days before he was ready to envelop in force, new tools of warfare swung the advantages of mobility, surprise, and mass at critical points toward Beauregard. On July 17 spies in Washington told of McDowell’s departure from Alexandria. By electric telegraph Beauregard in turn alerted Richmond. Davis, also telegraphing, ordered commanders around Richmond, at Aquia Creek, and at Winchester to concentrate their available strength at Manassas. Johnston lost no time in deceiving Patterson by using Col. J. E. B. Stuart’s cavalry as a screen and adroitly maneuvering his infantry away from the valley. Johnston selected the best overland routes for his artillery and cavalry marches and arranged for railroad officials to move his four infantry brigades. Brig. Gen. Thomas Jackson’s lead brigade, accompanied by Johnston himself, covered fifty-seven miles in twenty-five hours by road and rail to reach Beauregard on the twentieth. At daylight on the twenty-first McDowell unmasked the first phase of his attack plan. Three brigades of Brig. Gen. Daniel Tyler’s division appeared before Stone Bridge; and a huge, 30-lb. Parrott rifle dragged into place by ten horses commenced a slow fire directed by six cannoneers of the 2d U.S. Artillery. Five brigades in two divisions directly under McDowell’s command meanwhile marched on an eight-mile circuitous route toward the undefended ford at Sudley Springs. McDowell’s goal was the Confederate left rear and a chance to cut the railroad. The movement was not unobserved, however. At 9:00 A.M. a signal flag wigwag from the Henry house announced the point of the enveloping columns at Sudley’s crossing, and the intelligence was immediately relayed to Beauregard and Johnston, three miles away on the Confederate right. The first weight of the Federal attack fell against eleven Confederate companies and two guns. For an hour McDowell’s regiments, firing one by one and moving forward cautiously in piecemeal fashion, tried to overrun Beauregard’s left flank. The timid tactics gave Beauregard time to redeploy ten regiments across a three-mile front to form a second defensive line across the north face of the hill behind the Henry house. At 10:30 A.M., as the summer sun grew hotter, a portentous dust cloud ten miles northwest of Manassas heralded the arrival of Kirby Smith’s brigade, the tail of Johnston’s reinforcements from the Shenandoah Valley. For two hours the roar of the battle swelled in volume. Federal musketry crashes and the thunder from the heavier pieces indicated that McDowell was now committing whole brigades supported by four batteries of artillery. North of the Warrenton turnpike, the Confederate infantry began to lose its brigade cohesion and fall back in disorder. As Beauregard and Johnston rode to the sound of battle, 10,000 Federals were punishing 7,000 Confederates in the vicinity of the Henry and Robinson houses. Johnston, though senior in command, turned the battle over to Beauregard and galloped off toward Manassas to direct the arrival of reinforcements. Brig. Gen. Barnard E. Bee’s brigade was pushed back from its advanced position toward the flat-crested hill behind the Henry house, where Jackson’s newly arrived brigade had formed. In rallying his routed troops, Bee shouted: "Look at Jackson’s Brigade; it stands like a stone wall! Rally behind the Virginians!" (Out |
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of these words came a nickname that Jackson would carry to his grave, and after his death in 1863 the Confederate War Department officially designated his unit the Stonewall Brigade.) Screened by a wooded area, three brigades regrouped behind Jackson’s lines; and the rally became a great equalizer as McDowell’s strength dissipated to 9,000 men with no immediate infantry reserves in sight. The cloud of dust moved closer to Manassas Junction, but McDowell ignored it and allowed a lull to settle over his front for almost two hours. At 2:00 P.M., having deployed two batteries of regular artillery directly to his front around the Henry house with insufficient infantry protection, McDowell renewed the battle. By midafternoon the dust had blended sweaty uniforms into a common hue, and more and more cases of mistaken identity were confusing both sides in the smoke of the battle. Then, as part of the confusion, came a fateful episode. To the right front of McDowell’s exposed artillery, a line of advancing blue-clad infantry, the 33d Regiment, Virginia Volunteers, suddenly appeared through the smoke. The Federal artillery commander ordered canister, but the chief artillery officer on McDowell’s staff overruled the order, claiming that the oncoming blue uniforms belonged to friendly infantry arriving in support. The Virginians advanced to within seventy yards of the Federal guns, leveled their muskets, and let loose. The shock of their volley cut the artillery to shreds; and for the remainder of the day nine Federal guns stood silent, unserved, and helpless between the armies. About 4:00 P.M., Beauregard, with two additional fresh brigades, advanced his entire line. Shorn of their artillery, the faltering Federal lines soon lost cohesion and began to pull back along the routes they knew; there was more and more confusion as they retired. East of Bull Run, Federal artillery, using Napoleon smoothbores in this initial pullback from the field, proved to the unsuspecting Confederate cavalry, using classic saber-charging tactics, that a determined line of artillerymen could reduce cavalry to dead and sprawling infantry in minutes. As in so many battles of the Civil War yet to come, there was no organized pursuit in strength to cut the enemy to ribbons while he fled from the immediate area of the battlefield. At Bull Run, the Federal withdrawal turned into a panic-stricken flight about 6:30 P.M., when Cub Run Bridge, about a mile west of Centreville, was blocked by overturned wagons. President Davis, just arrived from Richmond, had two daylight hours to arrive at a decision for pursuit. In council with Johnston and Beauregard, Davis instructed the whole Confederate right to advance against the Centreville road, but apparently his orders were never delivered or Beauregard neglected to follow them. Davis thus lost a splendid opportunity for seeing in person whether the unused infantry and artillery on the right of his line could have made a concerted effort to destroy McDowell’s fleeing forces. Logistically, Federal booty taken over the next two days by the Confederates would have sustained them for days in an advance against Washington. Strategically, Bull Run was important to the Confederates only because the center of their Virginia defenses had held. Tactically, the action highlights many of the problems and deficiencies that were typical of the first year of the war. Bull Run was a clash between large, ill-trained bodies of recruits who were slow in joining battle. The rumor of masked |
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batteries frightened commanders; plans called for maneuvering the enemy
out of position, but attacks were frontal; security principles were disregarded; tactical intelligence was nil; and reconnaissance was poorly executed. Soldiers were overloaded for battle. Neither commander was able to employ his whole force effectively. Of McDowell’s 35,000 men, only 18,000 crossed Bull Run and casualties among these, including the missing, numbered about 2,708. Beauregard, with 32,000 men, ordered
only 18,000 into action and lost 1,982. The Southern victory near Manassas had an immediate and long-range effect on the efforts of both the Northern and the Southern states. First, it compelled Northern leaders to face up to the nature and scope of the struggle and to begin the task of putting the Union on a full war |
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footing. Second, it made them more willing to heed the advice of professional
soldiers directing military operations along a vast continental land front from Point Lookout, Maryland, to Fort Craig in central New Mexico. Third, Confederate leaders, after their feeling of invincibility quickly wore off, called for 400,000 volunteers, sought critical military items in Europe, and turned to planning operations that might swing the remaining slaveholding states and territories into the Confederacy. Finally, the most potent immediate influence of Bull Run was upon the European powers, which eyed the Confederacy as a belligerent with much potential for political intervention and as a source of revenue. Unless the U.S. Navy could make it unprofitable for private merchant ships to deliver arms to Southern ports and depart with agricultural goods, speculative capital would flow increasingly into the contraband trade. |
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disbanded the ninety-day militia. The more experienced men entered the newly authorized volunteer force. Meanwhile, the volunteer quota and the increase of regulars, mobilized after Sumter, had so far progressed
that camps and garrisons, established at strategic points along the 1,950-mile boundary with the border states and territories, were bustling with activity. As July ended, Congress authorized the volunteers
to serve for the duration of the war and perfected their regimental organization. Four regiments were grouped into a brigade, and three brigades formed a division. The infantry corps structure would be fixed when the President directed. In effect, the Lincoln administration was building a Federal force, as opposed to one based on joint state-Federal
control and support. State governors, given a quota according to a state’s population, raised 1,000-man volunteer regiments, bought locally
whatever the units needed, shipped them to federal training centers, and presented all bills to the U.S. government. Accordingly, Congress floated a national loan of $250 million. |
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fluence of the Tennessee, Cumberland, and Ohio Rivers lay within Kentucky;
while the vast Mississippi-Missouri river network flowed through Missouri. Whoever controlled these two states and these rivers had a great strategic advantage. At the onset of hostilities, Kentucky adopted a policy of neutrality. The loss of Kentucky, in Lincoln’s judgment, would be "nearly the same as to lose the whole game," so he carefully respected Kentucky’s decision in May to remain neutral. But a Confederate force occupied the strategically important town of Columbus, Kentucky, overlooking the Mississippi River, on fears that Brig. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant, poised across the Ohio River at Cairo, Illinois, would do so first. The rebel move into Kentucky violated that state’s neutrality stance, and Kentucky’s legislature responded by requesting that Union forces remove the Confederate invaders. On September 6 Grant launched a joint Army-Navy operation into Kentucky and occupied the towns of Paducah and Southland at the mouth of the Tennessee and Cumberland Rivers. This move prevented further Confederate advances in Kentucky and positioned Grant’s forces for campaigns in 1862. In Missouri, pro-Southern and Unionist sympathizers fought a violent campaign for control. A 6,000-man Federal force under Brig. Gen. Nathaniel Lyon defeated Southern militia to occupy the state capital at Jefferson City. A Confederate army of nearly 13,000 moved from Arkansas to destroy the smaller Union force. At Wilson’s Creek, Lyon launched a preemptive strike against the rebel camp in the early morning of 10 August, dividing his numerically inferior troops and assaulting from the north and south. The Southern army quickly recovered and regrouped. Outgunned, the Union force fought off three Confederate counterattacks against Bloody Hill before it was able to break contact and withdraw. Based on the number of troops engaged, Wilson’s Creek was the most costly Civil War battle in 1861, with the Confederates losing 1,222 killed and wounded. Union casualities were 1,317, including Lyon, the first general officer to be killed in the conflict. The victory at Wilson’s Creek buoyed Confederate morale. But Union forces under Charles C. Fremont and later Henry W. Halleck occupied central Missouri and contained rebel forces in the southwestern corner of the state for the remainder of 1861. A battle with equally long-term consequences was fought for western Virginia. Forty counties elected to secede from Virginia and asked for Federal troops to assist them in repelling any punitive expeditions emerging from the Shenandoah Valley. Between May and early July 1861, Ohio volunteers, under the command of Maj. Gen. George B. McClellan, occupied the Grafton area of western Virginia, hoping to protect the railroad that linked the Ohio Valley with Baltimore. In a series of clashes at Philippi, Beverly, and along the Cheat River, McClellan’s forces checked the invading Confederates, paving the way for West Virginia’s entrance into the Union. Even the arrival of Jefferson Davis’ principal military adviser and Commander of the Confederate forces in Virginia, not yet the Commander of the Army of Northern Virginia, General Robert E. Lee, failed to reverse Union gains. Lee attempted to coordinate several overly ambitious offensives in the Tygart and Kanawha River valleys; but poor roads, dispirited troops, miserable weather, and shortages of supply led to a series of failures. He returned to Richmond after this failure of his first major campaign by the end of |
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October 1861. His reputation as a military commander suffered, while that of his principal foe, General McClellan, soared; some saw McClellan as the "hope of the North." Although the border strife intensified in the west, Scott attended to the more important front facing Virginia. The nation’s capital was imperiled, the Potomac was directly under Confederate guns, and Maryland and Delaware were being used as recruiting areas for the Southern cause. On July 22, Lincoln, following Scott’s advice, summoned McClellan, who was thirty-five years old at the time, to Washington, and assigned him command, under Scott, of all the troops in the Washington area. McClellan’s reputation was unrivaled, and the public had acclaimed him for his victories in western Virginia. On August 21 McClellan named his force the Army of the Potomac and commenced molding it, with considerable skill, into a formidable machine. McClellan organized the Army of the Potomac into eleven 10,000-man divisions, each with three brigades of infantry, a cavalry regiment, and four six-gun batteries. In general the other Union armies adopted this structure, and the Confederates deviated from the model only in their cavalry organization. In the Army of Northern Virginia, for example, General Lee treated his cavalry as a tactical arm, grouped first as a division and later as a cavalry corps. Union cavalry consisted of little more than mounted infantry, carrying out a multitude of duties, such as serving as pickets, wagon train escorts, and couriers for the division commander. McClellan planned, once Lincoln activated the corps, to withdraw one-half of the artillery pieces from each infantry division and center them at corps level as a reserve to be deployed under army command. He insisted that the .58-caliber single-shot, muzzleloading Springfield rifle be the standard weapon of the infantry, and most of the Army of the Potomac possessed it when corps were organized on March 8, 1862. McClellan completely transformed the military atmosphere around Washington before the end of 1861. He was an able administrator, but his critics doubted his abilities as a top field commander. And from the day McClellan activated the Army of the Potomac, he was politically active in trying to oust Winfield Scott. Finally, on November 1, the aged and harassed General in Chief, taking advantage of a new law, retired from the Army. That same day, acting on assurances that McClellan could handle two tasks concurrently, Lincoln made McClellan the General in Chief and retained him in command of the Army of the Potomac. By the ninth, basing his action on Scott’s earlier groundwork, McClellan carved out five new departments in the west, all commanded by Regular Army officers. In addition, he continued the work of the new Department of New England, where General Butler was already forming volunteer regiments for scheduled amphibious operations off the Carolina coast and in the Gulf of Mexico. For the Union cause in Kentucky, the new General in Chief’s move came none too soon. After Kentucky declared for the Union on September 20, both sides rapidly concentrated forces in western Kentucky. Maj. Gen. Albert S. Johnston, recently appointed to command Confederate forces in the west, fortified Bowling Green and extended his defensive line to Columbus. Union troops immediately occupied Louisville and planned advances down the railroad to Nashville, Tennessee, |
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and eastward into the Appalachians. By November 15, the commanders of the Departments of the Ohio and the Missouri, dividing their operational
boundaries in Kentucky along the Cumberland River, were exchanging strategic plans with McClellan in anticipation of a grand offensive in the spring of 1862. |
Stanton insisted that the Army re- |
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under arms. Grain, wool, leather, lumber, metals, and fuel were being
turned into food, clothing, vehicles, and guns, and thousands of draft animals were being purchased and shipped from every part of the North. A well-managed Federal authority was needed to assume the states’ obligations, to train volunteer units in the use of their tools of war, and then to deploy them along a vast continental front. By exploiting the railroad, steamship, and telegraph, the War Department provided field commanders a novel type of mobility in their operations.
Stanton’s major task was to control all aspects of this outpouring of the nation’s resources. If war contracts were tainted, the Union soldiers
might despair. Moral as well as financial bankruptcy could easily wreck Union hopes of victory. In addition, Stanton had the job of suppressing
subversion, of timing the delicate matter of enrolling African Americans in the Army, and of cooperating with a radical-dominated Congress, a strong-willed Cabinet, and a conservative-minded Army. With a lawyer’s training, Stanton, like Lincoln, knew little about military
affairs, and there was little time for him to learn. Anticipating that President Lincoln would soon call for War Department plans for the spring 1862 offensives, Stanton researched every document he could find on Army administration, consulted his bureau chiefs about readiness,
and prepared himself to work with the General in Chief on strategic
matters.
1. How was the War Department organized in 1861? Discuss the administrative and tactical organization of the U.S. Army units at the onset of the Civil War. |
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3. What advantages and disadvantages did each side have at the beginning of the war? Discuss their relative importance to the ultimate outcome. Catton, Bruce. The Coming Fury: The Centennial History of the Civil Other Readings Brooksher, William R., Bloody Hill: The Civil War Battle of Wilson’s |
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Last updated 25 August 2005
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