Origin of the States, Supplemental 6: The North and the South

This is a supplemental to my "Origin of the States" narrative, the third supplemental in a Civil War sequence and the sixth overall. We'll call it part 35.3 of 50 in a sporadic series

 

Editor's Note: If there's one post in this series that's going to get random people on the internet mad at me, it's this one. Civil War military historians are vicious.

 

So, here we are. Finally, after four score and someodd years of buildup, we’ve reached what might be the pivotal event in American history … depending on how the rest of this year goes. Our narrative has reached the moment when this collection of states I’ve been talking about finally became engaged in a great Civil War, testing whether any nation conceived with the notion that bits of it could independently decide whether it was okay to own people could long endure. I’ve already talked a lot about the Civil War on this flickr page, and not just in this “Origin of the States” series. I’ve got 19 albums totaling 232 pictures built around places important to the Civil War, and that doesn’t even count the stand-alone Civil War stories I’ve written but don't want to go track down right now. If you want to know about the Civil War just from my work, you’ve got plenty of options.

 

But this is a series about the origin of the states, and the foundational philosophies of these states were obviously a big driver of the war. So, I think it makes sense to explore a little bit about how the different notions each side of the war had of what statehood meant affected the war’s prosecution and outcome. And maybe while we’re at it we can take a look at how things might have gone differently.

 

The Blue and the Gray

 

Let’s examine our combatants.

 

In American shorthand, we divide the sides in the Civil War into the North and the South. (Or the Blue and the Gray, if you’re into what the soldiers were wearing.) On the North side, we have the remaining United States of America, simultaneously weakened by the sudden 32% reduction in the number of states and strengthened by the fact that about 80% of the disagreement in Congress was erased when all the Southern Congressmen stopped showing up for work. Everybody in government still committed to the American experiment was generally of like-minds about the slavery thing, and they were mostly on the same page about state and federal rights.

 

The still-United States had a lot of other advantages going into the war. All but two of the top ten most populated states stayed with the Union, and overall, Union states had a greater than two-to-one population advantage over secessionist states. They also had stronger economies and had seen the bulk of the nation’s industrial development. Union states east of the Mississippi had more developed infrastructure and much better transportation networks than those in the South. And the Federal government started the war with a well-established, reasonably well-equipped army that numbered about 200,000 enlisted soldiers in early 1861. That's roughly equal to the number of enlisted men the secessionists were able to scrape together by the time the real fighting started. But the Federals were able to grow their army to 600,000 men by 1863, while the states' rights secessionists … weren’t.

 

Meanwhile, the secessionists were operating under a hastily-assembled central government with a Constitution that might as well have been written on the back of a napkin and put together by people who hated the very idea centralized of government. Their whole point was that centralized government was bad (mostly because it resulted in them losing their slaves), and that states should be sovereign entities operating independently of each other in all but a few things. They envisioned something closer to what the Founding Fathers had come up with in the Articles of Confederation, which is why they named themselves the Confederate States of America. CON-federate … against Federal control.

 

And that's fine in some things, I guess, but it kind of puts you at a disadvantage when you’re trying to fight a war. War by its nature is a centralized thing that demands a single authority to make centralized decisions about strategy, and that central authority needs access to a lot of tax money. The lack of that centralized authority (and centralized tax structure) would bite the Confederates in the ass in the end. The Confederates did manage to assemble their own Congress and choose their own President, but they chose Jefferson Davis, a former U.S. senator from Mississippi who turned out to be the political equivalent of a paralyzed fish. Which, again … great for fans of a weak union, but bad for running a war.

 

But still, that didn’t necessarily mean the Confederates were doomed. Conveniently for them, most of the best-trained and best-educated officers in the U.S. Army happened to come from Southern states – which if you think about the stereotype associated with redneck states these days, makes a certain kind of sense. And those Southern officers, people like Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson and Robert E. Lee, overwhelmingly left the Union army to fight for the Confederacy. This left a leadership void at the top of the Union army that United States President Abraham Lincoln spent half the war trying to overcome.

 

And unlike the Union, at least at first it looked like the Confederates would be fighting on their home turf. The Confederates might not have had the resources the Union could muster, but the supply lines for the resources it did have would be a lot shorter and more easily defended. That is, assuming the Confederates decided to fight that kind of war.

 

A lot of historians look at the industrial and financial advantages of the Union and say the Confederate cause was hopeless, and on paper that assessment makes sense. But personally, I don’t think the Confederates had to lose this thing. There was a path they could have taken, and maybe they'd have seen it if they’d paid more attention to U.S. history. But it would have required a kind of thinking that Southern folk generally aren’t comfortable with. Among other things, they’d have needed patience.

 

Washington's Strategy

 

The internet is full of extremely detailed descriptions of every shot anybody ever fired anywhere in the Civil War, so I'm not going to run through my own play-by-play. The quick summary is that the actual fighting kicked off in South Carolina (of course) when a bunch of Confederates spent 34 hours throwing cannonballs at a fort in the middle of Charleston Harbor and drove off the hundred or so Union troops who'd occupied it. (Editor's Note: I'd have used a different picture for this if we'd taken that South Carolina trip we had planned.) Things went badly for the Union for a while after that, both because all the generals who hadn't gone South had heads full of rocks, and because all the early fighting took place on Confederate ground. The initial idea was that the Union would play an away game, taking the fight down into Virginia or Tennessee or wherever and keeping the Confederates on defense. But Union leadership in those early days had no concept of logistics and moved with the urgency of an army of three-toed sloths.

 

And this is precisely how the South could have won this thing. Not necessarily by making sure the Union leadership was dumb; having the other side be run by idiots isn't really something you can plan, and the Union would mostly get over that by about the middle of 1863 anyway. But by keeping on the defense. Digging in. Making the Union come to them. Keep any offensive moves quick and light and local, more harassment than anything that would eat away at Union resolve. I mean, whatever you do, Confederates, don't run your entire army up into Pennsylvania. Giving the Union the home field advantage in someplace useless like, say, Gettysburg, for no reason at all was the last thing a Southerner wanted to see happen.

 

There was already precedent for that kind of defensive rebellion in the history of American warfare, and Confederate General Robert E. Lee probably could have found the notes in his wife’s family archives. He just needed to take a good look at how his step-great-grandfather-in-law, a guy named George Washington, had won the American Revolution.

 

Let's review. There are a lot of ways the Confederate situation was analogous to what the colonial revolutionaries faced almost eighty years earlier. In the 1770s, Washington's Continental Army had been a hastily-assembled batch of poorly-trained, poorly-equipped yahoos facing off against a far superior force with far greater resources. The British had bigger supply-line issues than the Union, what with an ocean sitting there in the way, but the resources they had sitting across that ocean might as well have been infinite. If the British had wanted, they could have spent 20 years, a million men, and a billion pounds grinding the American rebels to dust. In the end, the newly United States only won because the British didn't want to do all that.

 

And why didn't the British want to do all that? I think if you boil it all down, you can pin the outcome of the American Revolution on three things:

 

One, in 1777, a large British invasion force under the command of General John Burgoyne tried to cut the colonies in two by coming down the Hudson River from Canada, but they forgot about the importance of speed and logistics. They let themselves get pinned down while running short of supplies at Saratoga in upcolony New York and were forced into a costly and embarrassing surrender.

 

Two, American diplomatic genius Ben Franklin used that victory at Saratoga as a marketing tool to convince France and Spain – nations still ticked off over the outcome of the last war they'd fought against England – that America was actually a thing, and that helping the Americans out a little would be a great way to drain their longtime enemy of resources. So France and Spain gave the Americans lots of guns, money, and troops.

 

Three, George Washington kept supporting Franklin's marketing by keeping an army in the field that could harass the Brits without ever getting caught. That's not to say Washington was winning a bunch of battles. He wasn't. People who don't know any better give George Washington a lot of credit as a great military mind, but really, he was kind of crap at tactics and strategy, and he lost far more battles than he won. He got forced out of New York City almost as soon as the fighting started, and he got forced out of Philadelphia, the colonial capital, right after that. But for Washington, getting beat didn't mean getting caught, and he was a master at making retreat look professional. His losses never cost him more than he could afford, and he always stayed a step ahead of the Brits trying to pin him down. Meanwhile, he used his true field of military genius, troop motivation, to keep the Americans coming back again, loss after loss but always as riled up as ever. So the British had to waste a lot of time, lives, and money chasing after a bunch of rowdy guys who just wouldn't sit still and admit that they'd been beaten.

 

Really, the colonial Americans didn't even have to win battles – though to be sure, Yorktown helped a lot. All they really had to do was just keep running around long enough for the guys back in England, all the wigged men in Parliament who were actually paying for the thing, to get bored with the sunk cost fallacy and bring the redcoats home.

 

There was a way for the Confederates to pull off the same plan, especially once the Union mucked up their own version of Saratoga. One of the first big Union pushes of the war in the summer of 1862 had Lincoln shipping a hundred-thousand troops under the command of Major General George McClellan down to the tip of the Virginia Peninsula (which first appeared in this series as the site of Jamestown and made a Revolutionary War cameo as the site of Yorktown). Once there, McClellan was supposed to sweep up the peninsula and take Richmond, the new Confederate capital, and that would be that. But while McClellan got all his troops down to Hampton Roads just fine, once there, he couldn’t work himself up to actually doing the “sweep up the peninsula” part. Lincoln kept sending him notes that said, “Go shoot those people,” and McClellan kept sending notes back that said, “Which people? You mean those people over there? I mean, are you sure that's how you want to play this? Run at all those guns, when we could just look at them with stern expressions for a while?” By the time McClellan finally got moving, the Confederates had turned the Virginia Peninsula into a shooting gallery, and they kicked McClellan’s ass.

 

So … Saratoga in Virginia, circa 1862.

 

Wrong Turn in Pennsylvania

 

That early success plus Europe’s dependence on Southern cotton were almost enough for some redneck Confederate version of Ben Franklin to talk the European powers into openly supporting the Confederacy. Second Empire France was preoccupied with its own little misadventure down in Mexico, but Great Britain found the idea of helping its former colonies slice themselves in half at least intriguing enough to send a little cash and fund a few blockade runners the Confederates could use to keep their exports going. If Lee could keep holding the Union guys at bay, then something like an actual alliance might be on the table. And wouldn’t that be historically karmic?

 

Lee followed his part of that script all through 1862 and into the first half of 1863, holding Union invaders off for the second time at Bull Run, and then at Fredericksburg, and then Chancellorsville, and on and on it went. The Union had more success in the west, where General Ulysses Grant was slowly taking control of the rivers, but in the east? Close to the District of Columbia where U.S. Congressmen were making decisions about how long they wanted to keep this fight going? Things were looking very grim to those guys in the first half of 1863. Almost three years in, and a lot of people – a lot of voters – were starting to grumble about whether it was really worth all that. If the boys in gray could keep the fight going another year, hold on until the U.S. Presidential election of 1864, and then? Then what might happen?

 

Well, we’ll never know, because Robert E. Lee was a Southerner, and he got impatient and blew it all in the summer of ’63 when he decided to take his army up into Pennsylvania for some dumbass reason.

 

A lot of military historians like to talk about Robert E. Lee as if he were the greatest thing since rifled artillery (military history joke there), but personally, I find it hard to explain why he thought it made sense to take the Army of Northern Virginia up into Pennsylvania. He was probably worried about war fatigue among the civilian population of his native Virginia, which had taken the brunt of the fight so far, and he likely thought bringing the war onto the front porches of Union residents would only further eat at Union resolve. But seriously, man. At that point, he’d already tried one out-of-town excursion into a little corner of Maryland and had lost 10,000 troops at Antietam. He’d only made it out of that mess because Cement-Foot George McClellan was still running the Union army. Lee's home game was way better than anything he managed on the north side of the Potomac. But no, Southern honor and pride just won't let a Virginian sit around and hide until his opponent gets bored. So off to Pennsylvania he went.

 

You've probably heard of the Battle of Gettysburg even if you don’t know American history. There was a speech and everything. Military historians often say those three days in early July of 1863 were the high-water mark of the Confederacy, and the Southern cause would never get any closer than that. Both sides suffered somewhere in the neighborhood of 25,000 casualties. But the loss was worse for Lee's Confederates, because he didn't have nearly as many soldiers to lose. Gettysburg wiped out a third of the Army of Northern Virginia, and there just weren't enough able-bodied folks left down South to fill the holes. What was worse, Gettysburg poked 25,000 holes in the aura of invincibility Lee had built up over the previous 18 months. Southern brawlers had been eager to sign up for the fight while Lee was bombarding the Hell out of Fredericksburg, but now? No, I don’t think so. And Lee could forget about any help coming from the British cotton-buyers overseas. Any ideas Victoria’s England might have had about joining the Confederate cause vanished like the Confederate infantry brigades at the head of Pickett’s Charge. After Lee’s defeat at Gettysburg, no foreign power ever again considered helping the South out.

 

With Malice Toward None

 

Lee’s defeat at Gettysburg happened to coincide to the day with the final surrender of the Confederate forces 800 miles away at Vicksburg, which finally gave control of the Mississippi and all its tributaries to the Union. This all by itself would have been a significant blow to the infrastructure-starved Confederacy, but combining it with the beating the Army of Northern Virginia took at Gettysburg all but finished the thing up. I mean, think about it. Maybe if Lee hadn't lost those 25,000 troops at Gettysburg, he'd have had something more significant to slow down or stop the swath of destruction Sherman cut through Tennessee and the Carolinas to Georgia. Or perhaps he’d have been able to manage things better in Virginia when Ulysses Grant, fresh off his win at Vicksburg, took over the Union's Army of the Potomac and came storming down from Maryland. I mean, Lee didn't necessarily have to defeat Grant. 1864 was an election year, and the northern Democrats were facing off against Lincoln with none other than Cement-Foot McClellan at the head of their Presidential ticket, now retired (fired) from the army and hoping to get elected on a platform of ending the war and finding peace with the South by any means possible. If Lee could have just slowed Grant down a bit, even a just a little …

 

The thing about Grant was that he wasn’t nearly as smooth and efficient at the whole Army General thing as Lee, and few military historians think of him anything resembling brilliant. But Grant was brutal. Where Lee was clever and graceful, Grant was a sledge hammer, the kind of general who'd send 10,000 troops into a blender if it meant fifteen of them would survive long enough to give him control of another twelve feet of ground. It didn’t matter to Grant. He could just call up more troops, because he worked for a federal government with the power to draft people.

 

And this is where that whole “states' rights” thing really started biting at Lee, because it wasn't like he could just have old Jeff Davis draft a bunch of new guys to replace the soldiers he'd wasted in Pennsylvania. Sure, the Confederacy had a draft, but there wasn't really any mechanism in place for the Confederate government to enforce that draft. Once things turned the corner and started running down hill, a lot of Confederate states started saying, “No, thank you. We've got our own problems to worry about. We don't have time or money to worry about Virginia when there's a bunch of boys in blue sitting in downtown Nashville or skulking the big porches in Natchez or roaming the edge of Montgomery. Men like Ben Franklin had convinced the 13 colonies to hang together 80 years earlier, but there weren't any guys like that in the Confederacy. The whole thing was a movement based on “What's in it for me?” and it vanished as soon as it became apparent the answer was a bunch of death and taxes.

 

It all finished in a rush over the course of 1864 and into 1865, when U.S. Grant chased Bob Lee around Virginia for a while before finally pinning him down in Richmond for a 9-month siege. Lee eventually pried his army out of Richmond, but he didn't make it far. Grant finally ran Lee down in the little town in the picture above, a place called Appomattox Court House.

 

On the afternoon of April 9, 1865, Ulysses Grant sat down with Robert Lee in a house at Appomattox and worked out the peace treaty that ended the war. Grant was nice about the whole thing. He didn't take prisoners or hold anyone hostage. He let all the Southerners head home and even gave them all vouchers to buy food along the way. But that was it. The South had lost. The war was over, and the fight over States' Rights was finally settled, once and for all.

 

Only it wasn't. Next time: One last supplemental discussion of Reconstruction.

 

Done