This post is advanced as a preliminary argument on the larger question of who won the American Civil War. As such, it emanates from quite specific concerns about the relationship between the armed conflict that took place, largely in the U.S. South, between 1861 and 1865 and the underlying political issues that instigated the conflict. On the other hand, it invariably advances arguments relevant to a generalized discussion of the relationship between politics and armed struggle. Emphatically, it is an effort to posit that armed force, resulting in the total disarmament of one party to an armed conflict, need not necessarily result in achievement of the objectives of the victorious party. If warfare is a struggle of wills between two parties to armed conflict, then armed violence against persons and property, as the means by which one party seeks to compel the other to submit to its will, is only imperfectly suited to achieving such ends.
What will follow in this post should not be construed as a general theory of warfare or even a component within a general theory of warfare insofar as such a general theory is itself impossible. Nor will I attempt to rehash axioms on warfare by Clausewitz, Jomini, or Sun Tzu, all of which have their place as contributions to our knowledge of armed conflict but need to be situated in relation to their time and the particular problems to which each contribution was offered as an effort to address. Rather, this post is an effort to argue that we need to disaggregate the military conflict that constituted, in part, the American Civil War from the political struggles from which it was likewise constituted. The latter struggles continue to this day in diverse forms within the broader frameworks of race relations, Constitutional law/federalism, electoral politics/voting rights, and interpretations/recitations of American history. Without such a disaggregation, we are apt to forge an arbitrary rupture in U.S. history and, in particular, the history of the U.S. South, between Antebellum and Postbellum times, a bifurcation that I would regard, at least in part, as erroneous. A longer history of geopolitical divergence within the American polity needs to be analyzed as a totality, from the ratifications of the U.S. Constitution of 1787 to the present day, through which the Civil War appears as a brief if not inconsequential aberration. Such a perspective would, in turn, inevitably reframe the terms through which we interpret the Civil War itself, marginalizing certain rationale for the conflict while accentuating others. More pointedly, for the purposes of this post, disaggregating the military aspects of the Civil War from its underlying political instigations enables us to realize one particularly relevant conclusion: notwithstanding the overwhelming victory of U.S. federal military forces against the Confederate States, the victors were incapable of imposing their will in order to fundamentally transform social structures, race relations, and the balance of power between federal and state governments within the Southern states.
Proceeding from the limited objectives of this account, I intend to argue, first, that the military victory of federal forces in the period from 1861 to 1865 was less than total, but, on the other hand, it was sufficient to fatally incapacitate the armed forces of the Confederate States to such a degree that further major organized conflict would have been futile. Second, I will argue that, in certain respects, the conclusion of major organized armed conflict in 1865 constitutes an arbitrary boundary in defining the time span of the Civil War. Rather, we need to include the span of federal military occupation of the Southern states through Reconstruction as a concluding stage of the military conflict, both to assess the effectiveness of federal military forces in compelling the submission of the Southern states to the will of the federal government and to place the Civil War in a comparative framework through which we can draw analogies to other, more recent American military conflicts. Third, I will posit the existence of a vacuum between the military policies of Reconstruction and the diverse political agendas of Reconstruction-era Southern governments, Congressional and administrative policy makers, and Antebellum (aristocratic, ex-Confederate) Southern political elites. I will argue that the existence of such a vacuum constituted a space for practical reinterpretation of the consequences of the federal victory, ultimately enabling un-Reconstructed Southern political elites to truncate the transformative capacity of the federal government on Southern social formations. Concluding, I will argue that, on the one hand, the loss in major organized conflict by Confederate military forces demonstrates the capacity of militaries to lose wars, in the sense that the Confederate States could not retrieve the broader objectives that compelled their secession and formation of a political bloc (i.e. retention of slave class structures as a major organization of surplus labor production; supremacy of individual state political prerogatives against federal Constitutional authority including, in the last instance, the capacity to vacate participation in the U.S. Constitutional structure). On the other hand, I will argue that the failure of certain federal constituencies to impose their will in transforming Southern social formations through military occupation demonstrates the incapacity of militaries to actually win wars - enduring political, economic, and cultural change cannot be foisted onto a social formation at the end of a bayonet.
The Defeat of Confederate Military Forces in Major Organized Conflict (1861-1865)
The point in this section is not to provide an exhaustive account of the evolution of the larger military conflict between 1861 and 1865. Rather, the account that I will advance seeks to convey a sense of the complexities involved in geographically dispersed military conflict over a space as large as the U.S. South. It will emphasize unevenness in the measure federal military control and Confederate resistance across the space of the U.S. South. The defeat of Confederate forces will reflect a methodical if uncertain piecing together of various components over time, rendering Confederate forces relatively incapacitated, rather than a punctuated, conclusive defeat of particular armies on particular battlefields.
The generations that prosecuted major armed conflict in the American Civil War were infected by an intellectual bias favoring conclusive confrontations between large, organized military forces as the primary signature of victory in military conflict. It was a bias constituted through the strategic, logistical, and organizational development of large conscripted armies, from the beginnings of the levée en masse in the French revolutionary period through the heights of Napoleonic warfare. In certain respects, professional military specialists and at least some military historians remain infected by a similar bias today, notwithstanding a long history of low intensity conflict, guerrilla warfare, and lingering political insurgencies, waged by non-professional military contingents. Even the Napoleonic period had its paradigmatic development of guerrilla warfare on the Iberian peninsula and partisan tactics waged by defiant Russian forces against French invasion, but, for noteworthy reasons, history remembers Austerlitz, Leipzig, and Waterloo, conclusive engagements that yielded conclusive subsequent political effects.
The American Civil War had numerous significant military confrontations (e.g. Gettysburg, Antietam, Chancellorsville, etc.), but no single major confrontation was adequate to permanently incapacitate one or the other party. If the series of confrontations resulting in the federal seizure of Petersburg, Virginia and subsequent seizure of the Confederate capital at Richmond in the spring of 1865 might be regarded as conclusive, then they further need to be definitively situated against the background of a nine-month siege, the progressive assemblage of diverse components in federal military efforts to break down or seize control over logistical infrastructure systems across the Confederate States including seaboard transportation avenues (i.e. the federal coastal blockade and seizure of control of navigation on the Mississippi River and its major Southern tributaries), and the reaching of critical thresholds in a war of attrition between the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia and diverse components of federal forces besieging Petersburg, controlling the Shenandoah Valley, and traversing northward through the Carolinas against a steadily battered and dwindling Confederate Army of the West. In other words, the larger story of armed conflict in the American Civil War, as in every war, is a story of networks/assemblages in which no individual confrontational piece in the broader process of military conflict can be arbitrarily abstracted from the totality of the conflict to achieve explanatory priority.
Dispensing with the notion that we need to look for conclusive confrontations, we can characterize the evolving strategies of the federal military as efforts to articulate multifarious components in countervailing geographically and temporally dispersed networks. Federal military forces initially conceive of their strategy as oriented toward the limited goal of seizing and holding key contested ground - Richmond (the Confederate capital), Norfolk, Charleston, New Orleans, etc. Such a strategy operates, minimally, under the conception that by seizing and occupying key land spaces the federal government can disrupt the political will of the Confederate states and compel their re-entry into the union. Such a calculus, in turn, relies on the idea that the Confederacy is constituted, organizationally, as a fragile and electorally shallow conspiracy among elites in the legislatures of the Confederate states, capable of being fatally undermined by a well-organized effort by federal military forces to disrupt the capacity of diverse state governments to hold key geographic locations. That is to say, federal policy makers in the Lincoln administration, Congress, and the federal military establishment (e.g. Generals Scott and Hallock) misconstrue the democratization of anti-federal ideologies in the Confederate states beyond the ranks of Southern elites. As the scale of popular support for the Confederacy across the broader electorate of the Southern states becomes apparent by virtue of the threshold of military mobilization within the White Southern population, the federal strategy of holding key landspaces gives way to a range of divergent ideas that might be crudely consolidated into two separate but integrally linked goals: the need to control or otherwise disrupt logistical infrastructures facilitating free flow of materiale and military forces across the space of the Southern states, and the need to inflict persistent losses against spatially dispersed and logistically isolated field armies of the Confederate states.
By the end of major organized conflict, federal forces had largely realized both goals. The defeat of Confederate military forces, in this respect, reveals a dichotomy. The Confederate military proved incapable of defending dispersed networks of logistical infrastructures and strategically critical spaces. Rail lines were cut, riverine navigation impeded, and, especially following the federal Army of the Tennessee's campaigns in Georgia and the Carolinas (1864-1865), entire swaths of land rendered barren of logistically usable resources. As its control over logistical assets and networks dwindled, Confederate field armies became increasingly disconnected from each other and dis-articulated relative to governmental control and their domestic base of support. That is to say, the Lincoln administration never loses operational control over federal military forces in a way that might have impeded logistical operations or undermined overall government supervision of strategic goals. Lincoln may not have stood continuously over the shoulders of George McClellan on the York-James peninsula or that of Ulysses Grant at Vicksburg, but he absolutely maintained some degree of direction and discretion over the general formulation of operational planning at the level of designated armies/campaigns. The same could not be said regarding the Confederate Davis administration, especially in the latter stages of major organized conflict. Davis may have enjoyed some discretion regarding Robert E. Lee's decision to invade Pennsylvania in 1863, but he certainly lacked any meaningful control over the logistical details or the staffing levels for field units engaging in the operation, if only because the constitution of the Confederate states did not grant him adequate authority to exercise such close control of the military, which was, above all, a consolidation of separate state level militia forces consolidated under loose authority by a weak central administration. Finally, to the extent that the Confederate military continued to enjoy a strong degree of popular support in local jurisdictions of the South, the Confederate government lacked any capacity to leverage such support across space to bolster the logistical status of the military. By early 1865, the staffing and supply status of the Army of Northern Virginia was lost on populations in areas still under Confederate control in Alabama or Louisiana or Tennessee, and the Davis administration was incapable of procuring material assistance from such areas because it lacked any control over logistical networks capable of doing so.
Conversely, federal successes at disrupting logistical networks and winning a war of attrition against Confederate field armies did not simultaneously manifest success at undermining popular support for the political project of the Confederacy, even in areas where the federal government quickly regained military control (e.g. New Orleans, seized in early 1862). Rather, unevenly distributed patterns emerge in areas under direct federal military administration, areas loosely under Confederate control, and areas at the margins, where federal forces contended, in certain circumstances, with resistance from regular Confederate military units and civilian organized partisan or guerrilla units (see Samuel C. Hyde, Jr., "Bushwhacking and Barn Burning: Civil War Operations and the Florida Parishes' Tradition of Violence," in Louisiana History: The Journal of the Louisiana Historical Association (Spring 1995), 171-186, downloaded from JSTOR (21 Nov. 2015) at: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4233176).
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