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

at the outbreak of the Civil War, and its first use had been to convey commercial news; the railroads were only slightly older, and they had been designed first for moving people, then freight. Both soon showed how easily they could be turned to military purposes, and especially for strategic communication and movement. Less than ten years after the first successful commercial railroad line opened, the Prussian army learned how to simplify deployment schedules by moving troops on rail lines. “Every new development of railways is a military advantage,” wrote the Prussian military reformer Helmuth von Moltke as early as 1843. “A few million [spent] on the completion of our railways is far more profitably employed than on our fortresses.”

Both the railroads and the telegraph were put to their first test for the British army in the Crimean War, when a newly formed Land Transport Corps built a track from the supply port of Balaklava to the siege lines around Sevastopol, accompanied by twenty miles of telegraph wire. Five years later Napoleon III took the railroads one step further and used them for troop transportation into northern Italy against the Austrians. French railroads moved 76,000 men in just ten days, and in the runup to the battles at Magenta and Solferino, it took some of Napoleon’s regiments only five days to reach their concentration point in northern Italy from Paris.22

Almost from the start, Grant sized up the capacity of the telegraph to gather and transmit information, and to allow generals to coordinate and redeploy scattered forces. He stayed in telegraphic communication with Halleck all during the HenryDonelson campaign, laying down miles of telegraph wire as he advanced, and in later campaigns Grant stayed in constant touch with his subordinates over telegraph networks as long as 1,500 miles. Grant also grasped the potential of the railroads, largely because Grant was a mover. Indeed, hardly anyone in the Civil War demonstrated a greater skill in swiftly moving large bodies of infantry from one place to another. When Dr. John Brinton asked Grant, early in the war, what he thought of great tactical theorists such as Baron Jomini, Grant surprised him by claiming that he had never read Jomini. Rather, he had his own self-hewn alternative: “The art of war is simple enough. Find out where your enemy is. Get at him as soon as you can. Strike him as hard as you can, and keep moving on.”23

In the West, he had fewer rail lines to rely upon, but much more in the way of riverborne transport, and of all the major commanders in the Civil War, only Grant and McClellan seem to have had a real grasp of how to use the rivers and inland waterways in conjunction with the army. (If only McClellan had also had a little of Grant’s combativeness, it would have been McClellan who ended the war in 1862, and McClellan’s name rather than Grant’s would be the one celebrated in the textbooks.) The river lines became Grant’s way of overcoming the Confederacy’s advantage of interior lines, and his cooperation with Foote in the movement down the Tennessee and Cumberland was so smooth that the sheer innovation of using the navy to transport troops on the inland rivers often gets overlooked. Later in the war, when his campaigns took him away from the rivers to the East, Grant would turn to the railroads to give him the same edge, and in almost every case they would get Grant and his men to a particular point before the Confederates ever had any notion of movement. In 1864, he would supply his troops with a purpose-built military railroad, twenty-one miles long, with twenty-five locomotives and 275 cars, connecting a 3,500-acre supply zone with his front lines.24

Grant also possessed an advantage over other old regulars such as Winfield Scott in his commonsense empathy for the volunteer. Although Grant was a West Point man and an ex-regular himself, he conceded from the start that the real burden of the war was going to have to be carried by the volunteers—by civilians in uniform who remained civilians in temperament even after they donned their uniforms. Unlike the regulars, the volunteers could not simply be expected to shoot straight, keep clean, and obey orders. They would have to be reasoned with, sorted out gently, and kept from turning a parade ground into a debating society. Yet, as Grant quickly realized, for all his pigheaded independence the volunteer soldier really wanted to get on with the war, finish it up, and go home, and he would do so if only he could be put into the right hands.

When Grant was made colonel of the 21st Illinois, he learned that he had been put there to replace an earlier colonel, foolishly elected by popular ballot of the regiment, who had done nothing to teach them anything useful. To bring the regiment around, Grant was careful to appeal to the volunteers’ desire to be led, not driven, into battle. “My regiment was composed in large part of young men of as good social position as any in their section of the State,” Grant wrote. “It embraced the sons of farmers, lawyers, physicians, politicians, merchants, bankers, and ministers, and some men of maturer years who had filled such positions themselves.” These men knew nothing of discipline, and in their own democratic way, they all imagined that they were the equal of any officer. Grant “found it very hard work for a few days to bring all the men into anything like subordination.” Once Grant made it clear that discipline in battle was what saved lives and won wars—and that discipline was not the humiliating business of kowtowing to some idiot in shoulder straps—then “the great majority favored discipline, and by the application of a little regular army punishment all were reduced to as good discipline as one could ask.” What marked Grant from the beginning, wrote the editors of the Chicago Tribune, was that “he understands Northern character,