Alan Axelrod - Armies South, Armies North

Alan Axelrod is the author of many books on leadership, history, military history, corporate history, and more. After receiving his PhD in English from the University of Iowa in 1979, Axelrod taught early American literature and culture at Lake Forest College (Lake Forest, Illinois) and at Furman University (Greenville, South Carolina). He then entered scholarly publishing in 1982 as associate editor and scholar with the Henry Francis du Pont Winterthur Museum (Winterthur, Delaware), an institution specializing in the history and material culture of America prior to 1832. Axelrod was a featured speaker at the 2004 Conference on Excellence in Government (Washington, DC), at the Leadership Institute of Columbia College (Columbia, South Carolina), and at the 2005 Annual Conference of the Goizueta Business School, Emory University (Atlanta), and the 2014 annual conference of Ecopetrol (Bogot, Colombia).

Assigning numbers of stars and half stars to various aspects of the armies of the South and the North should get people arguingperhaps even arguing in more productive directions than they otherwise might. Since what I have done in this book has produced numbers, it is difficult to resist adding them up and averaging them out on the chance that the result may actually tell us something interesting about the reasons why the Civil War ended the way it did.

I have added up the stars awarded to each rated parameter for each side, beginning with chapter 3, the first chapter that directly compares the Confederacy and the Union. Because the Confederate military was divided into fewer major armies than that of the Unionthree armies versus eightI have separately calculated the average number of stars for each sides armies. The Confederate average rating for its three major armies is 2.8. The Union average rating for its eight major armies is 2.6. This puts both somewhere between marginal and mission-capable, with the average of the three Confederate armies closer to mission-capable than the average of the eight Union armies.

When we add up and average all of the parameters rated in chapters 3 to 26, the bottom-line result is 2 (marginal) for the Confederate military versus 2.5 (between marginal and mission-capable) for the Union.

How do we interpret this result?

Lets begin by making what I readily admit is a very bold assumptionnamely, that the result has real significance. If this is the case, what we discover is that the difference between victory and defeat in the Civil War was extremely narrow. That the success of the North was due mainly to its economic advantages over the South comes as no surprise. But who could have expected that these enormous economic advantages failed to make a bigger difference in the magnitude of the wars outcome? As confirmed by our bottom-line figures, in strictly military terms, the two sides were quite closely matched. Perhaps, therefore, it is best to say of the Unions victory in the Civil War what the Duke of Wellington famously said of his own victory over Napoleon at Waterloothat it was the nearest run thing you ever saw in your life.

Most schoolbook histories say no such thing. Instead, they paint a picture of victory for the Union that is both total and inevitable. Those of us fascinated by the Civil War have always known better than this. That the most consequential and costly military enterprise in American history was in fact such a near-run thing shocked both the South and the North during and immediately after the war. Today, this fact continues to drive the seemingly inexhaustible sensation of high drama and nearly unbearable suspense that clings to events whose outcome has been known for more than a century and a half.

Also by Alan Axelrod:

Pattons Drive: The Making of Americas Greatest General

Miracle at Belleau Wood: The Birth of the Modern U.S. Marine Corps

Generals South, Generals North

Before there was a Union army and a Confederate army, there was a United States Army. On the eve of the nations dissolution, at the very end of 1860, that army consisted of 16,000 officers and men. The product of a country whose people never liked the idea of maintaining a standing army in their midstthe obnoxious presence of redcoats among them was instrumental in driving the American colonists to war against their king in 1775it was a military formation intended, really, to be little more than a police force to manage, if not to curb, the depredations of hostile Indians on the frontier. This was the case even as late as 1860.

The core of the officer corps commanding the opposing troops of the North and the South had fought as comrades in arms during the US-Mexican War of 184648. Robert E. Lee and Ulysses S. Grant, Thomas Stonewall Jackson and William Tecumseh Sherman, James Longstreet and George B. McClellan, P. G. T. Beauregard and Ambrose Burnside, Braxton Bragg and George Meade were all among the Civil War general officers who got their start fighting Mexico together. Jefferson Davis, the president of the Confederacy, was a hero of the Battle of Buena Vista in the US-Mexican War, but perhaps even more remarkable was the Union armys first general-in-chief, Winfield Scott, Old Fuss and Feathers, whose fifty-three-year military career began in 1808 and whose first war was the War of 1812 (181215). They were a band of brothers about to embark on a war tagged famously as the struggle of brother against brother. Many of them never lost that fraternal feeling, even in the thick of bitterest battle.

In his 1885 Personal Memoirs, Grant recalled April 9, 1865, when Robert E. Lee came to him at the house of Wilmer McLean in Appomattox Courthouse, Virginia, to surrender his defeated Army of Northern Virginia. What General Lees feelings were I do not know. As he was a man of much dignity, with an impassable face, it was impossible to say whether he felt inwardly glad that the end had finally come, or felt sad over the result, and was too manly to show it.... my own feelings... were sad and depressed. I felt like anything rather than rejoicing at the downfall of a foe who had fought so long and valiantly, and had suffered so much for a cause, though that cause was, I believe, one of the worst for which a people ever fought. Grant found himself painfully self-conscious in Lees presence, dressed, as the Confederate commander was, in a full uniform which was entirely new, and... wearing a sword of considerable value, very likely the sword which had been presented by the State of Virginia.... In my rough traveling suit, the uniform of a private with the straps of a lieutenant-general, I must have contrasted very strangely with a man so handsomely dressed, six feet high and of faultless form. But soon the embarrassment melted as the two fell into a conversation about old army times. The conversation grew so pleasant that I almost forgot the object of our meeting. It was Lee who called my attention to the object of our meeting, and said that he had asked for this interview for the purpose of getting from me the terms I proposed to give his army.

THE UNITED STATES ARMY IS BORN

ARMY AT THE START OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION, 1775:

ARMY AT THE BATTLE OF YORKTOWN, 1781:

In the beginning was the militia. Following the Boston Tea Party of December 16, 1773, in which a band of political demonstrators destroyed a shipment of East India Company tea to protest British taxation without representation, Parliament passed a series of Coercive Acts against Britains American colonies, including the much-hated Quartering Act, authorizing the involuntary permanent quartering of British troops in Boston. British general Thomas Gage was named both commander in chief of British forces in America and royal governor of Massachusetts in April 1774. In response to the Boston crisis, fifty-six delegates from twelve colonies (Georgia abstained) heeded the call of the Massachusetts Assembly (banned by Gage) for a Continental Congress, which convened at Carpenters Hall, Philadelphia, on September 5, 1774. The congress condemned the Coercive Acts, urged Massachusetts to form an independent government, and advised colonists to arm themselves for protection while withholding taxes from the Crown until the acts were repealed.