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Yet 7500
volunteer officers had to be used before the war was over. These came
mostly from the merchant service and were generally brave, capable,
first-rate men. But a nautical is not the same as a naval training;
and the dearth of good professional naval officers was felt to the
end. The number of enlisted seamen authorized by Congress rose from
7600 to 51,500. But the very greatest difficulty was found in "keeping
up to strength," even with the most lavish use of bounties.
The
number of vessels in the navy kept on growing all through. Of course
not nearly all of them were regular men-of-war or even fighting craft
"fit to go foreign." At the end of the first year there were 264 in
commission; at the end of the second, 427; at the end of the third,
588; and at the end of the fourth, 671.
Bearing
this in mind, and remembering the many other Northern odds, one might
easily imagine that the Southern armies fought only with the courage
of despair. Yet such was not the case. This was no ordinary war, to be
ended by a treaty in which compromise would play its part. There could
be only two alternatives: either the South would win her independence
or the North would have to beat her into complete submission. Under
the circumstances the united South would win whenever the divided
North thought that complete subjugation would cost more than it was
worth. The great aim of the South was, therefore, not to conquer the
North but simply to sicken the North of trying to conquer her. "Let us
alone and we'll let you alone" was her insinuating argument; and this,
as she knew very well, was echoed by many people in the North. Thus,
as regards her own objective, she began with hopes that the Northern
peace party never quite let die.
Then, so far as her patriotic feelings
were concerned, the South was not fighting for any one point at
issue--not even for slavery, because only a small minority held
slaves--but for her whole way of life, which, rightly or wrongly, she
wanted to live in her own Southern way; and she passionately resented
the invasion of her soil. This gave her army a very high morale,
which, in its turn, inclined her soldiers the better to appreciate
their real or imagined advantages over the Northern hosts. First, they
and their enemies both knew that they enjoyed the three real
advantages of fighting at home under magnificent leaders and with
interior lines. Robert Lee and Stonewall Jackson stood head and
shoulders above any Northern leaders till Grant and Sherman rose to
greatness during the latter half of the war.
Lee himself was never surpassed; and he, like
Jackson and several more, made the best use of home surroundings and
of interior lines. Anybody can appreciate the prime advantage of
interior lines by imagining two armies of equal strength operating
against each other under perfectly equal conditions except that one
has to move round the circumference of a circle while the other moves
to meet it along the shorter lines inside.
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Stonewall
Jackson.
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The army moving round the circumference is
said to be operating on exterior lines, while the army moving from point
to point of the circumference by the straighter, and therefore shorter,
lines inside is said to be operating on interior lines. In more homely
language the straight road beats the crooked one. In plain slang, it's
best to have the inside track.
Of course there is a reverse to all this. If
the roads, rails, and waterways are better around the circle than inside
it, then the odds may be turned the other way; and this happens most often
when the forces on the exterior lines are the better provided with
sea-power.
Again, if
the exterior forces are so much stronger than the interior forces that
these latter dare not leave any strategic point open in case the enemy
breaks through, then it is evident that the interior forces will suffer
all the disadvantages of being surrounded, divided, worn out, and
defeated.
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This
happened at last to the South, and was one of the four advantages she
lost. Another was the hope of foreign intervention, which died hard in
Southern hearts, but which was already moribund halfway through the war. A
third was the hope of dissension in the North, a hope which often ran high
till Lincoln's reelection in November, '64, and one which only died out
completely with the surrender of Lee. The fourth was the unfounded belief
that Southerners were the better fighting men.
They
certainly had an advantage at first in having a larger proportion of men
accustomed to horses and arms and inured to life in the open. But, other
things being equal, there was nothing to choose between the two sides, so
far as natural fighting values were concerned.
Practically
all the Southern "military males" passed into the ranks; and a military
male eventually meant any one who could march to the front or do
non-combatant service with an army, from boys in their teens to men in
their sixties. Conscription came after one year; and with very few
exemptions, such as the clergy, Quakers, many doctors, newspaper editors,
and "indispensable" civil servants. Lee used to express his regret that
all the greatest strategists were tied to their editorial chairs. But
sterner feelings were aroused against that recalcitrant State
Governor, Joseph Brown of Georgia, who declared eight thousand of his
civil servants to be totally exempt. From first to last, conscripts and
volunteers, nearly a million men were enrolled: equaling one-fifth of the
entire war-party white population of the seceding States.
All branches
of the service suffered from a constant lack of arms and munitions. As
with the ships for the navy so with munitions for the army, the South did
not exploit the European markets while her ports were still half open and
her credit good, Jefferson Davis was spotlessly honest, an able
bureaucrat, and full of undying zeal. But, though an old West Pointer, he
was neither a foresightful organizer nor fit to exercise any of the
executive power which he held as the constitutional commander-in-chief by
land and sea. He ordered rifles by the thousand instead of by the hundred
thousand; and he actually told his Cabinet that if he could only take one
wing while Lee took the other they would surely beat the North. Worse
still, he and his politicians kept the commissariat under civilian orders
and full of civilian interference, even at the front, which, in this
respect, was always a house divided against itself.
The little
regular army of '61, only sixteen thousand strong, stood by the Union
almost to a man; though a quarter of the officers went over to the South.
Yet the enlisted man was despised even by the common loafers who would not
fight if they could help it. "Why don't you come in?" asked a zealous lady
at a distribution of patriotic gifts, "aren't you one of our heroes?" "No,
ma'am," answered the soldier, "I'm only a regular."
The question
of command was often a very vexed one; and many mistakes were made before
the final answers came. The most significant of all emergent facts was
this: that though the officers who had been regulars before the war did
not form a hundredth part of all who held commissions during it, yet these
old regulars alone supplied every successful high commander, Federal and
Confederate alike, both afloat and ashore.
The North
had four times as many whites as the South; it used more blacks as
soldiers; and the complete grand total of all the men who joined its
forces during the war reached two millions and three-quarters. But this
gives a quite misleading idea of the real odds in favor of the North,
especially the odds available in battle. A third of the Northern people
belonged to the peace party and furnished no recruits at all till after
conscription came in. The late introduction of conscription, the
abominable substitution clause, and the prevalence of bounty-jumping
combined to reduce both the quantity and quality of the recruits obtained
by money or compulsion. The Northerners that did fight were generally
fighting in the South, among a very hostile population, which, while it
made the Southern lines of communication perfectly safe, threatened those
of the North at every point and thus obliged the Northern armies to leave
more and more men behind to guard the communications that each advance
made longer still. Finally, the South generally published the numbers of
only its actual combatants, while the Northern returns always included
every man drawing pay, whether a combatant or not. On the whole, the North
had more than double numbers, even if compared with a Southern total that
includes noncombatants. But it should be remembered that a Northern army
fighting in the heart of the South, and therefore having to guard every
mile of the way back home, could not meet a Southern one with equal
strength in battle unless it had left the North with fully twice as many.
Conscription
came a year later (1863) in the North than in the South and was vitiated
by a substitution clause. The fact that a man could buy himself out of
danger made some patriots call it "a rich man's war and a poor man's
fight." And the further fact that substitutes generally became regular
bounty-jumpers, who joined and deserted at will, over and over again, went
far to increase the disgust of those who really served. Frank Wilkeson's
"Recollections of a Private Soldier in the Army of the Potomac" is a true
voice from the ranks when he explains "how the resort to volunteering, the
unprincipled dodge of cowardly politicians, ground up the choicest seed
corn of the nation; how it consumed the young, the patriotic, the
intelligent, the generous, and the brave; and how it wasted the best
moral, social, and political elements of the Republic, leaving the
cowards, shirkers, egotists, and moneymakers to stay at home and procreate
their kind." That is to say, it was so arranged that the foggy-witted
lived, while the lion-hearted died.
The
organization of the vast numbers enrolled was excellent whenever experts
were given a free hand. But this free hand was rare. One vital point only
needs special notice here: the wastefulness of raising new regiments when
the old ones were withering away for want of reinforcements. A new local
regiment made a better "story" in the press; and new and superfluous
regiments meant new and superfluous colonels, mostly of the speechifying
kind. So it often happened that the State authorities felt obliged to
humor zealots set on raising those brand-new regiments which doubled their
own difficulties by having to learn their lesson alone, halved the
efficiency of the old regiments they should have reinforced, and harassed
the commanders and staff by increasing the number of units that were of
different and ever-changing efficiency and strength. It was a system of
making and breaking all through.
The end came
when Northern sea-power had strangled the Southern resources and the
unified Northern armies had worn out the fighting force. Of the single
million soldiers raised by the South only two hundred thousand remained in
arms, half starved, half clad, with the scantiest of munitions, and
without reserves of any kind. Meanwhile the Northern hosts had risen to a
million in the field, well fed, well clothed, well armed, abundantly
provided with munitions, and at last well disciplined under the unified
command of that great leader, Grant. Moreover, behind this million stood
another million fit to bear arms and obtainable at will from the two
millions of enrolled reserves.
The cost of the war was stupendous. But the
losses of war are not to be measured in money. The real loss was the loss
of a million men, on both sides put together, for these men who died were
of the nation's best.
©
Kathy Weiser/Legends
of America, updated March, 2010.
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