Blog 4 History

James M. McPherson’s Tried By War sought to explain how Lincoln established the function of the President as “Commander-in-Chief.”

In Tried By War I was intrigued by McPherson’s description of Lincoln’s evolving role during the Civil War as Commander-in-Chief. He writes on page 5 in the Introduction, “He [Lincoln] performed or oversaw five wartime functions in this capacity, in diminishing order of personal involvement: policy, national strategy, military strategy, operations, and tactics.”

This statement struck me as familiar but I could not at the time place it. This weekend I realized that Eliot A. Cohen in his Supreme Command: Soldiers, Statesmen, and Leadership in Wartime, 2002, said something very similar.  Writing in his chapter on Lincoln, Cohen states, “His [Lincoln's] fundamental concept [of being commander-in-chief] was simple, and may be reduced to the following five interlocking propositions…” And he goes into detail that comes close to some of the same ideas McPherson expressed.

1. Cohen listed as the first concept as the “war’s aim” which is exactly as McPherson defines “policy.”

2. The “war had to begin with acts of Southern aggression” in order to keep the Northern states, including the volatile border state, unified.

3. “The Confederacy must be deprived of external support…”

4. The Union armies needed to engage their Southern counterparts and “crush” them.

5. To accomplish this Northern armies “by a concerted offensive around the circumference of  the South, thereby allowing the numerical and material superiority of the Union to come into play.” This of course is in reference to the concentration in “time” that McPherson mentions, among others.

Yet I also remembered Allan R. Millett and Peter Maslowski’s For Common Defense: A Military History of the United States of America where in their introduction they essentially defined the role of Commander-in-Chief: “Policy is the sum of the assumptions, plans, programs, and actions taken by the citizens of the United States,” which of course would be established by the President; “War aims are the purposes for which wars are fought,” yet another concept that the President must establish and articulate to the people; “operational doctrine, which is an institutional concept for planning and conducting operations,” and once again in a Clausewitzen view, is very much something the President would be involved in; “Strategy, the general concept for the use of military force, is derived from war aims,” and therefore falls within the realm of the President; and finally, “Tactics, is the actual conduct of battle,” which on the surface appears to have little to do with the President, yet during the Civil War when Lincoln made it clear that the policy of conciliation was no more, the tactics used by Grant, Sherman and Sheridan changed to reflect the President’s beliefs.

http://www.ihistorynetwork.com/ – is “attempting” to be a directory of the very best history websites on the Internet as selected by teachers, historians, and researchers.

According to Brent Nosworthy, on average 0.68% to 1.5% of shots discharged in Civil War battles hit its intended target, an enemy soldier. (The Bloody Crucible of Courage, 182, 587-592.) According to Earl J. Hess, the average rate of fire for Civil War soldiers was about 1 shot per two minutes. (The Rifle Musket in Civil War Combat, 103). The more a soldier fired or increased rate of fire did not increase odds. So a typical soldier in the Civil War, during about 20 minutes of constant firing, would maybe hit an enemy soldier in 1 out of every 10 shots, or something like that.

One thing I have noticed that is still taught in High School history classrooms today when dealing with the Civil War is the explanation of the bloody results of the fighting as something along the lines of tactics not keeping up with technology. Better guns and firepower, while using outdated (rank and file) European style tactics, led to exposure to massive amounts of fire; which, if we trust the new(er) studies, is simply not true. Yet I have seen this taught consistently in many schools.

A prime example that supports Nosworthy can be found in a letter just recently added to SoldierStudies.org:

On Thursday night we went over into Virginia. We went about 5 miles to a little town where there is 30 cavalry comes to breakfast every morning, but they did not come all together as they usually do. There came 4 at first and the others came behind. We was waiting for to get them all in and the 4 found out that we was there and they put spurs to horses and ran by past our men before they could get out of a barn. We fired about 50 shots at them but did not kill any of them. Wounded one. It was a middling dangerous job to go over with so few men, about 40.

Of about 40/50 shots fired, only one wounded (hit) its intended target during this attempted ambush. Lots of factors above conspired to reduce accuracy, but nonetheless the data is supportive of the argument that Civil War soldiers were not very effective with their muskets and this had many reasons.

As we know from the work of Mark Grimsley and others, the Civil War was not the first modern “total war,” and this goes for Sherman’s March to the Sea. Yet again, this line of thought is still strong in many history classrooms.

After doing a quick google.com search there can be fund numerous education website like this one (from the Smithsonian) in regards to a famous Sherman painting, commented that, “Sherman’s March to the Sea is considered the first example of total war because it resulted in wholesale destruction of the countryside, much like a modern bombing raid.”

From the University of Houston’s Digital History website, describing the important developments of the Civil War, “It also brought vast changes to the nation’s financial system, fundamentally altered the relationship between the states and the federal government, and became modern history’s first total war.”

Still another, this one from the CivilWar.org history education/classroom website, “Total War: A new way of conducting war appeared during the Civil War. Instead of focusing only on military targets, armies conducting total war destroyed homes and crops to demoralize and undermine the civilian base of the enemy’s war effort. (Sherman in Georgia or Sheridan in the Shenandoah Valley, for example.)”

If you look deep enough into google.com you will find university and military schools alike still teaching that the Civil War was the first modern “total war” in history and that tactics did not keep up with technology and led to the bloody nature of the war.

What we see with the usage of “total war” is the varying types of definitions; which is problematic. We need to teach the right definition of total war as: the breakdown in the recognition between combatant and non-combatant (or something like that), and then the understanding of what “modern” total war is compared to what might have seemed like total war.

So this raises a question that I have raised before, was the Civil War, taken on its own terms and without “presentism,” a war that was as “total” as war could have been at that time, place, and situation?

“He [Abraham Lincoln] was not a quick study,” McPherson wrote, “but a thorough one.” According to James. M. McPherson, Lincoln was not a natural strategist as some have argued. He was not comfortable with having to make quick decisions, facing deadlines, and having to act decisively.

McPherson goes on to quote Lincoln, “I am never easy when I am handling a thought, till I have bounded it North, and bounded it South, and bounded it East, and bounded it West.”

It’s astonishing to me that Lincoln could be described as, well, slow. Maybe we should call him, “special.” When faced with the calamitous G.W. Bush as Commander-in-Chief, it seems almost facetious to even consider Lincoln as anything but deliberate and effective.

McPherson argues in Tried by War: Abraham Lincoln as Commander in Chief, that Lincoln had to practically invent the presidential role of “Commander-in-Chief” as there were virtually no historical examples for him to follow. Yet, though he was essentially creating a policy in time of war for all future presidents, McPherson seems content to nonetheless label Abe as slow. Perhaps a ploy to sell some books?

Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy James M. McPherson and have a lot of respect for him. I always want to get his latest book, which seem to hit the presses about every other year.

Tried by War is timely and offers a fresh look at the role of the executive branch in time of war and the origins of the Commander-in-Chief role that we see today certainly owes its authority to Lincoln.

Tried By War — Abraham Lincoln as Commander in Chief
by James M. McPherson
ISBN #1594201919.
Penguin, 2008, $35, 329 pages.

James McPherson, a bestselling historian of the Civil War, illuminates how Lincoln worked with—and often against— his senior commanders to defeat the Confederacy and create the role of commander in chief as we know it.

Though Abraham Lincoln arrived at the White House with no previous military experience (apart from a couple of months spent soldiering in 1832), he quickly established himself as the greatest commander in chief in American history. James McPherson illuminates this often misunderstood and profoundly influential aspect of Lincoln’s legacy. In essence, Lincoln invented the idea of commander in chief, as neither the Constitution nor existing legislation specified how the president ought to declare war or dictate strategy. In fact, by assuming the powers we associate with the role of commander in chief, Lincoln often overstepped the narrow band of rights granted the president. Good thing too, because his strategic insight and will to fight changed the course of the war and saved the Union.

O.K., this quote below sounds familiar doesn’t it? Many a conservative apologists have spewed something similar. So when do you think this article was written? I have provided the first page or so below. Please offer up a guess (NOTE: don’t bother doing a Google search by copying and pasting a sentence of two, it will not come up.)

During the past twenty-five years there has been a marked change in the content of the courses in history as given in our schools and colleges. One of the results of this change has been the almost complete elimination of the military phase. Whereas in former years the greater part of the course in American history, in the schools at least, consisted of rather detailed accounts of the wars in which our country had become engaged, in recent years these wars have been dealt with in such reduced form as to make them constitute only a very small part of the course. The fascinating accounts of Schenectady, Louisburg, Quebec, Saratoga, Yorktown, New Orleans, Chapultepec, Bull Run and Gettysburg that adorned the pages of our earlier text-books have disappeared altogether, and in their place we have a few brief statements outlining the different campaigns with little or nothing of incident or detail.

Political history, by the way, has been dealt with in the same summary fashion. We no longer proceed through the pages of our history by presidential administrations, noting in chronological order the events that occurred in each, whether they were of great importance or not. Indeed we have come to such a state as to ignore the existence of some of our worthy chief executives and to pass them over without even the mere mention of their names. A recent text-book for the seventh and eighth grades that has found ready favor fails to mention the names of four of our presidents. Such a thing as this would have been an impossibility when presidential administrations were mistaken as the indispensable mile-posts in American history, and when politics was given equal emphasis along with wars.

What has happened in American history has also happened in ancient, medieval and modern and English history. We no longer study at great length the Greco-Persian, the Peloponnesian, and the Punic wars. Neither do we go into detail concerning the Hundred Years War, the War of the Roses, the campaigns of Frederick the Great and of Napoleon, and the Franco-Prussian War. Marathon, Syracuse, Cannae, Crecy, Bosworth Field, Rossbach, Austerlitz, and Sedan take but little of our time, and have come to be scarcely more than mere names in a diminishing catalogue of military engagements that are still allowed to find a place in our text-books. Likewise we have discontinued to recount the personal deeds and exploits of kings and princes, and many of the heroes that once stood out very prominently in our earlier histories are now passed over in absolute silence. If we turn for an explanation for this tendency to eliminate the military and the political phases from our courses in history, we shall find it in the widespread desire to consider in some detail the social and the economic phases of history. We have lost interest in military and political strifes because we have become more concerned in finding out how men lived, what institutions they created and developed, and what ideals and motives controlled their actions. We have been pleased to let the common man crowd the ruler and the warrior off the stage of history in many of its scenes, and to make the conditions in which he lived the chief topic of our study in history.

This interest in the social and the economic phases of history that has arisen in recent times has been due primarily to the increasing interest that we have been taking in our present-day problems. Under the leadership of the sociologist, the economist, and the political scientist we have in the last few years thought more on the welfare of society than ever before. As a people we have been going through a process of socialization. It was therefore perfectly natural that our growing interest in the social and the economic conditions of to-day should react upon our interest in the past and should lead us to attempt to approach the past from the same point of view as that of the present. It is no wonder, therefore, that we shoved the purely military and political phases of history to one side and made room for these newer phases. Not to have done so would have left us out of harmony with ourselves.

In taking into account this shifting of interest from the military and the political to the social and the economic phases of history, we must not ignore the influence of the pacifist and the socialist. Their hatred of war and their repeated declarations and assurances prior to [date removed] that there would be no more [word removed] wars not only lulled us to sleep and made us feel secure against the probability of the renewal of war…

Well the first quarter out here in Colorado ended last week and we start Q2 tomorrow. I will be teaching U.S. History A and B, last quarter I taught Economics and U.S. Government.

My first unit (U.S. History A) will be on Pre-1492 America and a lot of my material is from Charles C. Mann’s excellent book 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus (Knopf, 2005).

Too often American Indians are portrayed as unmindful nomads without sophistication, education, art, and culture. Europeans landed, took over, and the rest is as they say history. But what Mann does an excellent job of pointing out, is that the Indians were not helpless and did play a role in history. They made alliances, war, and peace, and the results of which played a role in their demise. They played a role, which is the key, they were not helpless.

But most importantly, we need to teach the incredible achievements of American Indians pre-1492. They were urban dwellers, built huge cities, sophisticated with culture and religion, had a 365 day calendar and had utilized the number Zero. They had empires and built temples, one of which was bigger than some Egyptian pyramids.

The Inca, Mayan, and Aztec empires rival anything the Western world had. They cleared massive forests, build wondrous cities, and altered the earth they occupied as impressively as anyone had.

Well I received my grade on my cavalry paper. If you missed it, the prompt question was this: “Did the cavalry play a decisive role in war.”

I argued that even though there are times where cavalry played what could be argued a pivotal role in a battle, most of the time they fought dismounted and the horse was simply a vehicle for transportation.

Well, the grade is back and I earned a 93 out of a 100. I use the word “earned” as too often students and educations use the wording “you got the score of …” implying that it was like a lottery, you know, up for grabs.

I have an A in the class and will close that out obviously (still one more paper to write), but I am not sure how I feel about the grade. I felt I had a good argument and defended it with some good research. I guess in the end, students are all the same, no matter the age, we all think our grade should have been better

C

Southern Storm: Sherman’s March to the Sea
By Noah Andre Trudeau
(Price: $35.00)

Award-winning Civil War historian Noah Andre Trudeau has written a gripping, definitive new account that will stand as the last word on General William Tecumseh Sherman’s epic march—a targeted strategy aimed to break not only the Confederate army but an entire society as well. With Lincoln’s hard-fought reelection victory in hand, Ulysses S. Grant, commander of the Union forces, allowed Sherman to lead the largest and riskiest operation of the war. In rich detail, Trudeau explains why General Sherman’s name is still anathema below the Mason-Dixon Line, especially in Georgia, where he is remembered as “the one who marched to the sea with death and devastation in his wake.”

Noah Andre Trudeau has written a wonderfully colorful and sprawling work that is impressively researched and incredibly readable. Using hundreds of individual soldier recollections, he reconstructs this historic event through the eyes of the average soldier along with the commanders. The narrative is at times repetitive and cumbersome due to the amount of soldier notes, but it nonetheless plays to the mood and tone of the book.

Trudeau also upholds Mark Grimsley’s assessment of Sherman’s march as a fairly conservative expression of war with limited goals. As the author points out, Sherman was never comfortable with the later depiction of his march and always contended that is was nothing more than a “change of base,” as he later said. Though the devastation played out by his “bummers” was “significant,” Trudeau reports that the winter of 1864/65 was not marked by any wide-spread famine and therefore its affects were limited. (Unfortunately the citation for this was not in my review copy as I would question this statement.)

Though I enjoyed the book, I was hoping someone would attempt again to place the “March to the Sea” back in the realm of “total war;” but alas perhaps that can never happen again! There was not wide-spread attack on the Civilian population apparently required for such a label, and for the most part the bumming that took place did not devastate the population, or so it seems.

Pity.

I am a big fan of Chandra Manning’s book What This Cruel War Was Over: Soldiers, Slavery, and the Civil War. She was recently interviewed by Peter S. Carmichael for the Civil War Times in their August 2008, Vol. 47, Issue number four. Here’s a sample of that interview:

In your book you say the war was about slavery. Why is that difficult for so many people to embrace?

Well, I didn’t start out thinking slavery was so central. The focus on slavery surprised me, and I suspect that’s part of why it surprises others. I was interested in enlisted men — most of whom were non-slaveholders — and it was not immediately apparent why somebody who didn’t own slaves would care about slavery. Their war must have been about something different, and my job was going to be to figure out what that was. I thought that the war for them was going to be this process of discovering that they had been hoodwinked into a war over slavery, that they would have gradually begun to withdraw loyalty from the cause because of that. That’s what I went looking for when I started with Confederates.

With Union soldiers, why would an ordinary Wisconsin farmer or Massachusetts shoemaker care about slavery? This seems counterintuitive to us today — that ordinary folks would care very much one way or another about it. I think that’s one major reason why it’s difficult to accept that slavery was as central as it actually was.

I think we also had a habit of reading Civil War soldiers backward — we had present-day assumptions about soldiers who did what they were told and didn’t think too much about it, particularly where slavery was concerned.

In Mark E. Neely’s The Civil War and the Limits of Destruction he compares the War with Mexico with the Civil War in terms of the behavior of “volunteer” troops. Neely focuses on what he found to be the “brutal” treatment of Mexicans on the part of U.S. volunteers. When compared with volunteers in the American Civil War, he found that there was very little of this brutal behavior towards whites: rape, murder, ect. First off, I accept the premise as I already noted it a couple of years ago. And I like the dichotomy used, but I find it not flawless. Neely writes that the revenge factor was NOT in play during the Civil War, like it was during the Mexican War. (p.34) I’m not sure I agree with this, especially along the Trans-Mississippi region where Federal soldiers often spoke of revenge and acted on it when confronted with bushwhackers and guerrillas. Also, Neely fails to take into account one significant issue, that almost half of the volunteers in the Mexican war were foreigners (Robert Lackie, “The Wars of America,” p.328), compared to less than a 1/3 in the American Civil War. Race is a huge issue in American history, but problems arise here when the soldiers Neely cites were foreign born and therefore culturally and socially not “Americanized” in a sense.

Once again, I agree with the claims Neely makes, just that there are some issues I have with his reasoning and how he got there.