Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction Allen Guelzo (novels to read .txt) 📖

mammoth field armies of 80,000–100,000 men, which in turn required equally mammoth numbers of horses and mules for transportation and, in the case of mounted infantry and cavalry, for combat operations. Keeping both the human and animal forces fed and armed was an increasingly difficult task and probably would have been impossible had it not been for the development of railroad technology.

Even as the railroads permitted the accumulation of ever-larger armies, they tightened a leash that limited the distance armies could afford to maneuver away from those railroads. As one British military theorist put it, war had become “not like two fencers in an arena, who may shift their ground to all points of the compass,” but more like “the swordsmen on a narrow plank which overhangs an abyss.”21 At the same time, the increasing value of supply lines and railroads meant that more attention had to be paid to protecting those lines. Strategically, that meant that a general ought to take his army only along roads, rivers, or rail lines where his supply cord could not be cut, and ought to use the vulnerability of his enemy’s supply lines to force him to surrender territory and advantage.

Linked to the problem of supply was the concept of lines of operations. No matter how different in size two armies might be, the only thing that mattered was the size of the force each army could bring to a battlefield at a given moment (i.e., even an army that is numerically inferior to its opponent can still achieve victory if it can manage to pick off small sections of the enemy army and defeat them piece by piece). Consequently, Mahan impressed on his West Point pupils the vital importance of operating defensively on “interior lines” and forcing the enemy to operate on “exterior lines.” (What this means is that in any given strategic situation, an army occupying the interior of a position only has to move the chord of the arc surrounding that position to get from one end of it to the other; a commander on the exterior of a position has to occupy as well as move around the circumference of the arc, which forces him to spread his troops more thinly to cover the greater distance, and take more time in moving from point to point along the arc.) By taking up “interior lines,” a numerically inferior army could defend itself more easily, and could move to strike at exposed positions along the enemy’s arc faster than the enemy could reinforce them.

For an attacking army, the best way to overcome the advantage of interior lines was to outflank the enemy’s lines entirely by means of turning or flanking movements. Hence, Civil War battles often found themselves determined by how successful one army was at getting hold of the other’s flank and compelling a withdrawal, rather than by head-to-head attacks.22 On the other hand, turning movements were frequently stymied by a physical problem that had never bothered Napoleon: the thickly wooded terrain of North America. Napoleon could fight Wellington across a series of neatly tended farms, but battle in the American Civil War had to deal with the fact that much of the American landscape was tangled, heavily forested, and poorly mapped. Many a clever turning movement floundered off into nowhere, slowed or lost by woods, badly mapped roads, and rivers.

All of these lessons were very much in the mind of the man to whom Lincoln initially turned for military direction and advice, the senior commanding general of the United States Army, who in this case turned out to be the apostle of the American offensive: Lieutenant General Winfield Scott. Unfortunately for Lincoln, Scott in 1861 was seventy-five years old and too badly crippled by gout to mount a horse, much less think of taking active command in the field. Scott also had little faith in the military capacities of the volunteers Lincoln was calling for. Although Scott’s campaign in Mexico was the very model of the Napoleonic offensive, Scott’s army in Mexico had enjoyed a much higher ratio of regulars to volunteers than the army Lincoln was calling into being, and Scott did not mind telling people how dubious he was about the quality of the volunteers. “Our militia & volunteers, if a tenth of what is said be true, have committed atrocities—horrors—in Mexico, sufficient to make Heaven weep, & every American, of Christian morals blush for his country,” Scott wrote to the secretary of war in 1847. “Most atrocities are always committed in the absence of regulars, but sometimes in the presence of acquiescing, trembling volunteer officers.”23 Scott’s doubts about the reliability of an army of volunteers had not diminished since Mexico, and without a large stiffening of regulars, Scott wanted to take as few risks with the volunteer soldier as possible.

Instead of proposing direct action against the Confederates, Scott suggested to Lincoln what derisively became known as the “Anaconda Plan” (so named for the huge snake that squeezes its prey to death), the first comprehensive strategic military plan in the nation’s history. First, Scott proposed to use the Federal navy to blockade the entire length of the Southern coasts. He would then establish a strong defensive cordon across the northern borders of the Confederacy. Finally, he would mount a joint expedition of some 60,000 troops, plus gunboats, to move down the Mississippi and secure the entire length of the river from the southern tip of Illinois to the Gulf of Mexico.

In effect, Scott was recognizing that the Confederacy occupied its own set of interior lines, which a motley army of volunteers would be unwise to attack; consequently, the best way to bring the Confederacy to its knees would be to turn its flank (down the Mississippi) and sever its supply lines to the outside world (with the naval blockade). With the Confederacy encircled and squeezed by land and sea, Scott believed that it would only be a matter of time before secessionist fervor would pale (and Scott