Stardate 20020830.2212

(On Screen): Carol has been reading recently about the American Civil War, and writes to me the following comments:

One of the problems I didn't see before (but now see, since I'm finishing up Supreme Command), is that the northern commanders didn't want to finish any rout and follow Lee's army, once they were on the run, because their motives were to EXHAUST Lee ... not defeat him! Nothing politically was in place for a defeat. What was hoped was that the rebels would agree to accept the Constitution as written, so that slavery would still be allowed in seven states. It just would be stopped.

Actually, it's more complicated than that. It's important to note that in some ways the war was about slavery and in some ways it was not. Lincoln engaged in war against the Confederacy not because they kept slaves, but because they seceded from the Union and he interpreted his oath of office as compelling him to return them to the Union, by force if need be.

It isn't right to think of Lincoln as a hypocrite about slavery; he hated it and I think he wanted it eradicated. But he was no do-gooder and not on any holy quest, and it's noteworthy that the Emancipation Proclamation applied to rebellious states, but not to slave-states which hadn't seceded. It wasn't until the 13th Amendment was ratified after the war that slavery was actually abolished everywhere in the Union. I think he believed in the principle behind the Emancipation Proclamation, but it's also true that he understood its value as propaganda, both internationally and also in its effect on the slaves in the South, which represented a substantial asset in terms of producing war materiel to support the armies of the Confederacy.

The nature of war had changed by 1861. In many ways, the American Civil War was the first industrial war. Some in Europe will claim that the Crimean War actually was, but in more ways than not, the Crimean war was actually the last of the pre-industrial wars, and the arms and tactics and strategies used in it were much more like that of Napoleon than like that of Grant and Lee. For instance, in the Crimean War, neither side had much in the way of ability to use interdiction against the other side's supplies. There was still a reliance on the use of cavalry on the battlefield, something you never saw in the American Civil War (where they were heavily involved in battle but fought dismounted).

The Crimean War was little influenced by the most important advances which altered the American Civil War: the river steamboat (as both cargo carrier and gunboat), the railroad, and the telegraph. News of major battles in the Crimean War had to be delivered to London and Paris by ship, but the results of major battles in the Civil War were known in Washington and Richmond within hours, even if they were fought in the state of Mississippi.

The defining characteristic of preindustrial war is the primacy of maneuver and battlefield tactics. The defining characteristic of industrial war is attrition. In battles between two industrial-age armies, when maneuver was critical it was strategic maneuver rather than tactical maneuver. That's how the Prussians beat the French in 1872, for instance; they used their superb railroad network. In that kind of warfare you don't win by clever decisions about where to deploy regiments; you win by clever decisions about where to deploy army groups.

Some officers in the American Civil War recognized this. Winfield Scott, in particular, was a visionary. He saw exactly how the war should be fought and exactly how to win it. He was head of the Union Army. Problem was, he was old and in poor health, and the plan he gave Lincoln was for a slow, incremental campaign of attrition against the South, and Lincoln wanted a quick victory for political reasons.

In many ways, the Civil War has to be divided into two parts: before Grant, and after Grant. The war was fought in many theaters by many armies commanded by many generals, but the main show was in the East, and the main players were the Army of the Potomac and the Army of Northern Virginia, and that was where both sides expected the war to be won or lost, though early on they both thought that the war could be won by capturing the other's capital (Washington or Richmond respectively). Over a period of a couple of years, LIncoln went through commander after commander, looking for someone to give him that quick victory.

Some of them were more aggressive than others, but it's not correct to say that they were at that time trying to win by attrition. And in most cases, the reason that after a battle there was no pursuit by the North of the South was because it was usually the North who withdrew from the battlefield.

Meanwhile, out west where there was a bit of psychological isolation from Washington and Lincoln's tendency to meddle, Grant and Sherman and Sheridan were fighting a different kind of war. Instead of relying on straightforward straight-up-the-middle battles looking for quick victories, they were trying to use technology in all new ways. One example of that was in how Grant used steamships to move troops and supplies in the Vicksburg campaign. In a very real way, the cooperation between Grant and Farragut showed the way to modern combined-arms warfare. It was certainly true that there had been cooperation between soldiers and sailors before, but not like this.

It's instructive to compare how they did it to how McClellan botched up the Peninsula campaign. (Of course, part of that