The Confederate Nation: 1861 to 1865 (16 page)

Both the image and reality of Southern nationhood prescribed a defensive strategy. The Confederacy posed to the North, to Europe, and to itself as a legitimate national state, in anticipation of the doctrine of “self-determination of peoples.” Given the legitimacy of their revolution, the Southern rebels were thus victims of a war of aggression waged by the North. Such a stance was important to attract European allies, capitalize upon sympathy for their cause in the North, and allow national feeling to congeal in the South. Thus a defensive posture militarily reinforced national policy, both foreign and domestic.
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Resources, both human and material, seemed to dictate a defensive strategy, too. The Confederacy had all too few of the prerequisites for nineteenth-century war: men, manufactures, and money. Offensive wars required more than aggressive enthusiasm; they demanded large armies and the logistical support necessary to sustain those armies during prolonged campaigns in the enemy’s country. The South in 1861 had less than half as many people as the North, less than half the railroad mileage, less than one-third the bank capital, and less than one-tenth the manufacturing output. Add to those figures the fact that the United States had an existing navy with the facilities to expand it and the Confederate States had neither, and it becomes clear that the South stood at the short end of almost every index of military might. The Confederacy would have to husband resources and spend its limited substance dearly, and the logical way to do that was to stand on the defense.
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However realistic and philosophically consistent a defensive strategy might be, though, it flew in the face of conventional military wisdom in 1861. Napoleonic strategy as codified by Henri Jomini in his
Summary of the Art of War
insisted that offensive action alone was decisive. Then, too, it was obvious that the Confederates could not conduct a static defense of every inch of Southern soil; there would always be too few Confederates and too much soil. Jomini and other authoritative military writers conceded that an energetic defense might take advantage of interior lines of communication and transportation to frustrate attacking armies. On paper at least, the defender might move troops and supplies from one front to another and thus gain local superiority against a much larger offensive aggregate forced to operate on a convex perimeter. But geography would work against the South in such a strategy. The Confederacy’s northern frontier was in fact concave; the Appalachian mountains bisected its land mass; and its river systems, both coastal and inland, were potential highways of invasion. If the thrust of Confederate strategy was to be defensive, as circumstances seemed to dictate, then the Southerners would have to accommodate both contemporary military thought and their geographical dilemma. The accommodation they made most successfully involved the use of railroads to move troops rapidly and gain superiority in numbers at crucial points and times. As long as Southern railroads were available and dependable, Confederate strategists possessed the opportunity of massing and dispersing their forces much faster than the Northern invaders.
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As it happened (and that is perhaps the best way to express the process), the Confederacy did act out a reasoned strategy. Variously described as “offensive-defense” and a “strategy of annihilation,” Southern military policy was an eclectic appropriation of the legacy of Washington, Napoleon, and jomini, modified by geography and nineteenth-century military technology.
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The Confederates believed that they, like Washington, could trade space and time for opportunity. Within limits Southern armies could stand on the defense and permit penetration by their enemies. Then at a place and time of their choosing the Confederates hoped to attack and destroy the invader.

The limits were important. Washington could surrender major cities and large land areas to the British and still fight on. The much larger armies of the nineteenth century depended for logistical support upon centers of transportation and war industry. Larger armies too, made land more critical; the Confederates required a large land base for subsistence, and invading armies could despoil an area simply by marching through it. Confederates were conditioned to look upon land as the basis of wealth and social status. The culture of the Southern folk required a stable community of landholders. No one had to tell the Confederate high command that the defense of the Southern cause was intimately bound up in a defense of the soil from which that cause sprang.
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To prosecute the war, Union armies would have to invade the South and attempt to subdue the rebellion. Sooner or later, they hoped sooner, the Confederate forces would find their opportunity and strike. At that point defense would become offense. However, emphasizing the supposedly decisive nature of offensive action, both protagonists overlooked the significance of the rifle and Minié ball. The muskets of Napoleon’s time were accurate only within one hundred yards; in the 1860s rifles increased that effective range five times. Small-arms fire rendered Napoleonic artillery tactics obsolete by forcing the bigger guns to remain at longer ranges, reducing their effectiveness in softening a point of attack. Cavalrymen, too, learned the folly of charging massed infantry whose weapons’ range and accuracy more than compensated for the speed and shock effect of a mounted attack. Consequently the defense had a much greater advantage than conventional military wisdom held, and ironically the Confederates were often more successful when they were unable to assume the offense.

The goal of the offensive-defensive strategy continued to be the destruction of the invading force; the Confederates hoped they could at least stop and at most destroy the armies sent against them. When the North had had enough killing, peace and independence would follow. Thus, in a way, the Confederates hoped to employ a strategy of annihilation to work a passive sort of exhaustion upon their enemy.
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This strategy made sense—so much sense that the Southerners adopted it naturally without thinking it out or writing it down. What Jefferson Davis did write down was the command system with which he proposed to implement his strategy. The Confederate War Office adopted a departmental command structure. This meant that Davis divided his nation into semiautonomous military departments. The Southern assumption was that each departmental commander would be able to meet the enemy threat in his department. If necessary departmental commanders could borrow troops from adjacent departments or lend battle-ready units to meet the enemy in a neighboring locale. Yet the heart of the scheme was the hope that a system of logistically self-sufficient commands arranged in a geographical cordon could fend off or destroy enemy armies. At first, when the anticipated front was limited to northern Virginia, departments were small. General P. G. T. Beauregard’s geographical command at the first Battle of Manassas (Bull Run) encompassed only three counties. As the war widened, so did the size of the departments. By the winter of 1862 and 1863, Beauregard commanded a department composed of three states.

V. C. Groner to J. Cooper, September 30, 1861,
O.R.
, series IV, 631–633.

But always the home-based cordon philosophy persisted.

Davis counted on himself and his War Office to unify and direct the departmental command system. The Commander-in-Chief, however, was often less than a unifying influence, and too late did Confederates appreciate the need for unified command. Although the command structure they adopted was in some ways logical, given the Confederacy’s offensive-defensive posture and the administration’s political imperative to serve a land-oriented, localized populace, military logic did not always coincide with military necessity.
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The Confederacy’s first trial by battle occurred in July of 1861. At that time the Southern nation was as ready as it could be to test its new government, army, strategy, and command system in defense of its new capital.

During May and June of 1861 the Confederacy’s war had developed a front. By mid-July Richmond had became a rendezvous and staging point from which Southern regiments fanned out toward Virginia’s borders. Relatively small numbers of troops went west into the mountains of what is now West Virginia and east into the Virginia tidewater at Yorktown and Norfolk. The majority of the new army concentrated at three points to the north, between Richmond and Washington. About 3,000 men were just north of Fredericksburg at Aquia Landing on the Potomac River. Their commander was Brigadier General Theophilus H. Holmes, an “old army” man. At Winchester, guarding the entrance to the Shenandoah Valley, were 12,000 troops led by Brigadier General Joseph E.Johnston. Johnston was old army, too; in fact he was the highest-ranking officer among those who resigned from the United States Army and went south. Between Aquia Landing and Winchester and squarely astride the most direct invasion route from Washington to Richmond was the village of Manassas Junction. There, about 20,000 Confederates prepared to receive the first expected attack from the United States. In command of the troops and of this critical position was Brigadier General P. G. T. Beauregard, the “Hero of Sumter.”
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Beauregard was a thoughtful soldier, well versed in the military thinking of his time. He was also a charismatic personality with a flair for the dramatic; his biographer has described him as “Napoleon in Gray,” an assessment with which Beauregard himself would have agreed. In mid-July 1861, the General responded to Southern military circumstances in keeping with his personality and training and with the essentials of Confederate strategy.

Opposing the Southern departmental cordon in Virginia were two major Union armies. In front of Johnston’s force in the valley were about 18,000 Federals under the command of Robert A. Patterson, a veteran whose career had begun in the War of 1812. At Washington, Irwin McDowell had approximately 35,000 men in various stages of preparation for the march on Richmond. In an effort to complete the training of his troops, McDowell delayed as long as his government would allow him. Then on July 17 he moved, marching west from Washington to the town of Centreville. At this point McDowell’s army was situated due north of Richmond and Beauregard’s army at Manassas.
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Roughly halfway between Centreville and.Manassas, flowing generally east-west, was Bull Run. The stream was the greatest natural obstacle between the two armies, and accordingly Beauregard had positioned his troops in battle order on the southern bank. Beauregard, however, had no intention of defending his Bull Run line, and plotted much grander things; a good apostle of Jomini and Napoleon, he thought in terms of concentration and decision. He proposed to Davis that Johnston leave a covering force in the valley and move by forced march and rail to Manassas. Holmes’ force would also join the concentration. Then Beauregard could destroy McDowell and return the favor for Johnston. Reinforced by some of Beauregard’s troops, Johnston would march rapidly back into the valley, crush Patterson’s army, and sweep through Maryland to attack Washington from the north. Meanwhile Beauregard with his remnant force would move on the Union capital from the South, and at the juncture of the two armies the war would end victoriously. The entire operation, Beauregard calculated, would take less than a month.

In Richmond, President Davis, Commander of Virginia troops Robert E. Lee, and Confederate Adjutant and Inspector General Samuel Cooper heard and rejected Beauregard’s plan. Beauregard’s strategic thinking may have been sound and bold, but his estimates of troop strength and logistical planning were at best visionary. He had overestimated the size of Johnston’s army, underestimated the strength of the Federals, and made little allowance for the state of roads and railroads in northern Virginia.
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From his headquarters at Manassas, Beauregard took the rejection of his grand scheme as a personal affront and grumbled about the way Richmond was managing the war. Before he could fret too long, however, McDowell began his march, and Beauregard realized that his army was outnumbered and in peril. Frantically the General called for reinforcements. Davis responded by doing on a modest scale what Beauregard had originally proposed. The President ordered Johnston and Holmes to join Beauregard at Manassas. With 9,000 of Johnston’s troops and 3,000 of Holmes', Confederate numbers would roughly equal the Federals'. As a consequence Beauregard threw off his gloom and again began thinking about a battle of annihilation.
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On July 18 the Confederates repulsed a “reconnaissance in force” at Bull Run, and Beauregard’s confidence increased. McDowell’s march was cautious and his concentration at Centreville slow. On July 20, with the enemy still at Centreville and Holmes’ and Johnston’s troops pouring into his position, Beauregard determined to attack.
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Southern troop units were spread over an eight-mile front along Bull Run. Oddly, the largest numbers occupied the most defensible terrain, steeply wooded slopes that lay across the most direct route between Centreville and Manassas. Beauregard’s headquarters were nearby at the home of Wilbur McLean, a local farmer. West of McLean’s farm the banks of Bull Run leveled out and the countryside was open and rolling. Bull Run was fordable in several places along the Southern line, but the only bridge in the vicinity was at the extreme left of the Confederate position. Over the entire western, or left, half of his position, Beauregard had stationed only a brigade and a half of troops, comprising six regiments, or roughly 5,000 men. This imbalanced troop distribution, especially as related to terrain, did not trouble Beauregard on July 20, however; he was preparing his attack orders and cared little for considerations relating primarily to defense.
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