Having devoted the last two Substack newsletters to bemoaning the West’s lack of preparedness for a war that I think may well be coming, this week I return to history. The British army has always been fascinated by the American Civil War in which she had accredited observers on both sides. Many accounts refer to it as the first of the modern wars. I prefer to consider as the last of the Napoleonic-type wars, fought with increasingly modern weapons. I suggest that the tipping point of the war was the battle for Atlanta - if it had gone the other way, which it very easily could have, then the course of history would have changed dramatically. My American subscribers may feel differently, but I hope they will forgive a limey for poking his nose into their history.
THE FALL OF ATLANTA 2 SEPTEMBER 1864 – PART ONE
On 9 July 2015 the state government of South Carolina, after a heated thirteen hour debate, voted to remove the Confederate flag that had flown over the state capitol since 1960, originally as a protest against the civil rights movement. On 17 May 2017 a rioting mob in Charlottesville, Virginia, forced the local authorities to agree to the removal of statues of Confederate Generals Robert E Lee and ‘Stonewall’ Jackson, which had stood since 1921 and 1924 respectively. The American Civil War, the War Between the States, the War of Northern Aggression, the Freedom War, the War of Secession, may have officially ended over a century and a half ago, but the scars are deep and are still there. Perceptions over the years have changed, and now the war is seen largely as a conflict between slavery and freedom on the one hand, and resistance to oppression by over mighty government on the other. In the last fifty years the civil rights movement, demanding rights guaranteed by the constitution but widely ignored or refused in some parts of the Southern states, and more recently the adverse publicity generated by what has been widely seen as the unpunished shooting of black civilians by white policemen leading to the ‘Black Lives Matter’ movement, have all tended to crystallise views of the war as being all about slavery. Slavery was indeed an issue, but it was by no means the only issue, and Lincoln’s proclamation of January 1863 freeing the slaves was not issued for reasons of morality, but in order to cripple the labour intensive economy of the Confederacy. It was by no means universally approved of in the North; one of the Union’s most celebrated generals, Sherman, refused to employ black troops, and the post war United States Army remained segregated, in all black or all white units, until the 1950s. The Civil War resulted in more deaths – 750,000 – than in any other American war. In comparison the First World War cost the USA 111,000, the Second 405,000 and Vietnam 58,000. Of course in the Civil War both sides were Americans.
By 1860 the Thirteen Colonies of 1783 had expanded hugely. The United States had bought the ‘Louisiana purchase’ from Napoleon Bonaparte, First Consul of revolutionary France, in 1803 adding a great swathe of 828 million square miles from the Canadian border to the Gulf of Mexico, and had acquired Florida from Spain in 1819. In 1845 the Republic of Texas joined and in 1846 a tidying up exercise with the British created Oregon. A combination of purchase and the Mexican American War of 1846 – 1848 added what are now California, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah and Arizona to a nation that by 1860 was divided into States and ‘Territories’. States, of which there were thirty-one, were represented in the Congress (parliament). In the lower house, The House of Representatives, states had representatives in proportion to its population, with every state having at least one. In the upper house, The Senate, each state had two senators, regardless of population, and laws to be enacted had to be passed by both houses. The territories, of which there were seven, comprising almost half of the nation’s land area, were considered part of the United States but were as yet neither sufficiently populated nor administratively properly organised to be admitted as part of the Union. They had no representation in either house of Congress but once able to show that there was a local government which was republican and in control of the whole territory they could, again subject to population, apply to be admitted as a state with the Congressional representation the new status implied. Herein lay one of the roots of the war that was to come.
The federal constitution recognised the legality of slavery, but each state could decide whether or not to permit it within its boundaries. In order to preserve a balance, when a free state was admitted to the Union a slave state would be admitted at the same time, and when California as a free state was admitted in 1850 without a corresponding slave state, it was agreed that California would send one pro slavery senator and one anti. This balance was maintained until the years just before the Civil War: while anti-slavery legislation might be proposed in the House of Representatives, where with the greater population of the Northern, free states, it would pass, it could then be vetoed by the Senate, with its thirty senators from slave states against the same number from free states. Then between 1858 and 1861 Minnesota, Oregon and Kansas were admitted as free states, without any corresponding slave states, and the balance now lay with those opposed to slavery. The distinction between slave and free states was not one of moral principle but of economics. The major crops in the South, where climate and soil were suitable, were cotton and tobacco, both manpower intensive, with some rice, also requiring considerable labour, grown in Florida. Most of the inhabitants of the South lived and depended on the land. Eighty percent of the white inhabitants of the South worked in agriculture, compared with less than 40% in the North, and while 90% percent of Southerners were rural dwellers, the figure was only 25% in the North. The north was industrialising fast, and in any case had neither the climate not the soil conditions for the products of the South, and was increasingly urban.
In 1807 Britain, taking it upon herself to be the monitor of global morality, had outlawed the slave trade, and the Royal Navy patrolled the west coast of Africa to prevent it. In 1833 the institution itself was declared illegal throughout the British Empire, with the home government paying twenty million pounds (around £70 billion in 2024) to erstwhile slave owners in compensation for depriving them of what had legally been their property. In America, with the supply of fresh slaves prevented, slave owners simply grew their own, with the children of slaves automatically acquiring the status of their slave parents, as did the children of slave women fathered by white owners, for while such relations were disapproved of, they did happen.
By 1860 the population of the USA was 31½ million, of which slaves made up 13% overall, but 33% in the states that would eventually secede. In South Carolina slaves constituted 57% of the population, in Mississippi 55%, in Louisiana 47%, in Alabama 45% and only in Arkansas (26%) did the number of slaves fall below 30%. Southern politicians were concerned as to the status of territories incorporated into the Union – if they were mainly anti-slavery then the Southern majority in the Senate would soon disappear, and there were numerous compromises and fudges to placate the Southern states to ensure that the balance was not altered. While the outgoing president, Buchanan, was a northerner of Ulster-Scots descent, there had been a long succession of Southern presidents, and as the composition of the Supreme Court was in the hands of the president any legislation opposed to slavery that reached it tended to be thrown out. To many in the North slavery, while not affecting them directly, was not a major issue, but occasionally some aspect of it did impinge on the general conscience. The Fugitive Slave Act, passed in 1850 as one of the many compromises between slave holding and free interests, allowed slave owners to pursue and apprehend a slave who had absconded and had reached a Northern state where slavery was illegal. In one case a slave, one Dred Scott, who had spent time in a free state with his master, petitioned that this residence entitled him to emancipation. In 1857 the case reached the Supreme Court, which fudged the issue by ruling that no black, slave or free, could be a US citizen and could not therefore petition the court for anything. This decision caused outrage amongst many to whom the issue had previously been of little account, and was followed by a raid on the Union arsenal at Harper’s Ferry in October 1859 by John Brown and eighteen of his followers. Brown was a thoroughly nasty piece of work, almost certainly guilty of a number of murders during disturbances in the 1850s concerning whether Kansas would be admitted to the Union as a free or slave state, who was probably mentally disturbed and who today would be described as a terrorist. Virulently opposed to slavery, which he claimed could only be abolished by armed insurrection, he hoped to foment a slave revolt, the slaves to be armed with weapons taken from the arsenal. A small force of soldiers and marines led by Lieutenant Colonel Robert E Lee and Major JEB Stuart soon rounded Brown and his little band up, and Brown and six of his followers were tried for treason and hanged. Ironically, John Brown’s Body became one of the Union marching songs in the war that was to come, a fame which Brown certainly did not merit.
In the 1860 presidential election the issue of slavery was addressed by all candidates. Abraham Lincoln, the Republican party candidate, promised that he would not interfere with the institution of slavery in states where it already existed, but he opposed any further extension in the Territories. He had said that he thought blacks would always be inferior, but he considered that they should be equal before the law and in politics – although it is difficult to see how these two views could be reconciled. The other major party, the Democrats, were split and fielded two candidates, the Democrat Douglas, who averred that the question of slavery was one to be decided by each state independently, and the Southern Democrat Breckinridge who supported slavery, considering it essential for the economy of the South, and opposed any prohibition of it in the Territories. A fourth candidate, Bell, who stood under the banner of the Constitutional Union Party attempted to avoid the issue by advocating no change to existing arrangements.
Americans did not and still do not vote for a president directly; rather they elect delegates to an electoral college. States were entitled to nominate delegates to the college in proportion to their populations, with some states nominating delegates on a ‘winner takes all’ basis whereas some appointed them in proportion to the votes cast for each party. Thus New York had thirty-five delegates, whereas Florida and Oregon had three each. In the event Lincoln and the Republicans won eighteen states of the thirty-three, all in the North, the ‘official’ Democrat one state (Missouri, ironically a slave state although geographically hardly in the South), the Constitutional Unionists three (Southern) states while the Southern Democrat took the remainder of the South, eleven states. Even if the Democrat vote had not been split, and assuming the voting pattern remained the same, the Republicans would still have won. The result polarised the nation.
Militarily the USA had a regular army of 16,000 in 1860, mostly stationed in Indian territory or in coastal forts, these latter originally intended to emphasise the Monroe Doctrine, a cornerstone of American policy which since 1823, and repeated frequently since, held that no European power could intervene in the US sphere of influence, which meant the whole territory south of Canada and included those South American states not already under colonial rule. Additionally each state had its own militia , under the control of the State Governor. West Point, the academy which trained officers for the regular army, had been established in 1802 and had an output of between twelve and forty young officers a year, depending on demand. The emphasis was on producing engineer officers, for the USA was still very much a developing country and it was to the army that the direction of such tasks as road building, rail track laying and the construction of bridges fell. Many of the regular officers were Southerners, considerably more than the South’s population would warrant, mostly younger sons of the Southern ‘Plantocracy’ who considered themselves gentlemen and a cut above Northern officers who were products of the middle classes.
To be continued
I think you make a very valid point. I also think that the very heavy casualties on both sides were to an extent caused by the shift by both armies from smooth bore muskets to rifles, but retaining close order manoeuvring.
Having come at serious study of the American Civil War via reenactment after long years studying the British wars I came to the conclusion that Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia was the last Napoleonic army and the Union Army especially under Grant was the first modern industrial age army, especially because of their differences in management style.