Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction by Allen Guelzo (self help books to read TXT) 📕

in the world, and a 105-page summary of Jomini’s Treatise on Grand Military Operations was mandatory reading at West Point until 1832. Jomini believed in the virtue of the military offensive: the general who wanted a truly decisive victory (like those of Napoleon) must take the war to the enemy as Napoleon did, by cutting the enemy’s communications, turning the flanks of his armies, or, if all else failed, making a concentrated frontal assault on the enemy’s defenses. Jomini acknowledged that the offensive was more costly in lives in the short run. Since it was more likely to achieve a decisive result more quickly, more lives would be saved in the long run.16

In Europe, almost all the tactical experience of the major national armies seemed to bear Jomini out. The allied British and French attack at the Alma River in 1854 during the Crimean War and the headlong French attacks upon the Austrians at Solferino in 1859 all seemed to testify that it was the army of the offense that won European battles, and at lightning speed. This was enough to convince many prewar American officers. The reigning American tactics handbooks—such as Winfield Scott’s Infantry Tactics (1835) and William J. Hardee’s Rifle and Light Infantry Tactics (1855)—borrowed heavily from Napoleonic sources and stressed the virtue of quick, aggressive offensive movements on the battlefield. Scott himself had put the offensive to the practical test in the Mexican War by driving an outnumbered American army straight through the gates of Mexico City on the momentum of a Napoleonicstyle campaign.17

Beside the example of Scott’s campaign operations in Mexico was the practical example of Zachary Taylor’s field tactics at Buena Vista, where Taylor stood his army on the defensive and allowed Santa Anna to bleed his Mexican army to death in repeated assaults on Taylor’s position. In fact, most of the great victories in American military history had been defensive ones, with Andrew Jackson’s crushing defeat of the British at New Orleans in 1815 being the most famous and most politically potent example. The prolonged defiance of the Russian naval base of Sevastopol during the Crimean War was an updated notice that once a defending force had been allowed to fortify itself, head-on assaults were unlikely to budge it.

The politics of the defensive, whether on the level of grand strategy or of battlefield tactics, may have been more important to Americans than the real military value of the defensive, since the American republic retained a horror of supporting a large professional army (not only did a professional army remind Americans of British occupation during the Revolution, but a standing army represented the principle of power, the eternal enemy of republican liberty, and required heavy taxation to maintain). “The [American] government was conceived in the spirit of peace,” wrote one British observer, “and framed more with a view to aid and encourage the development of the peaceful arts, than to promote a martial spirit in the people, or to throw the destinies of the country into a military channel.”18 So long as American armies were more likely to be made up of civilian volunteers and state militia, it was easier and safer to put nonprofessional soldiers of that sort on the defensive, rather than risking them on the offensive, where discipline, coordination, and mobility had to be of the highest order.

This preference for a strategic defensive posture in American wars was reinforced by the fact that West Point, the American military academy, was organized and run by the Army Corps of Engineers, so the education given to officers there was naturally inclined toward such defensive studies as fortification and military engineering. Then in 1832 a young meteor named Dennis Hart Mahan was promoted to the professorship of civil and military engineering at West Point, and through his classroom teaching and his publications he soon persuaded the new officers of the U.S. Army that the Napoleonic lust for the offensive had to be qualified by a realistic appreciation for the risks the offensive might run. Like Jomini, Mahan encouraged future generals to maneuver—but not, like Jomini, in order to gain advantage for an attack. Instead, fully aware that American armies were bound to the use of militia and volunteers, the principal object in Mahan’s teaching was to seize and occupy enemy territory, and eventually force the enemy to launch an attack on one’s own defensive fortifications. That required intensive training in the construction of major fortifications and instruction in the creation of temporary fieldworks on the battlefield, and that was what Mahan and West Point offered. The result was, as Jacob Dolson Cox remembered, that “the intellectual education at the Military Academy was essentially the same… as that of any polytechnic school, the peculiarly military part of it being in the line of engineering.”19

Mahan took an academy that had been designed mostly for the defensive protection of American territory through the construction and garrison of fortification, combined it with a military tradition shaped by political mandates from Congress to favor a defensive mission, and raised the art of defense to an American science. “It has not been the policy of the country to be aggressive towards others,” wrote navy secretary Gideon Welles, “therefore defensive tactics, rather than offensive have been taught, and the effect upon our educated commanders in this civil war is perceptible.”20 The American regular army officer in 1861 was thus presented with a series of contradictions: tactics books that encouraged officers to take the offensive and make the enemy’s army their objective, and a professional military culture that looked to occupy enemy territory and fight a defensive war from behind fortifications.

In addition to these theoretical concepts, the officer of the Civil War era also would have had to come to terms with three new considerations. The first of these was supplies. From the Napoleonic Wars at the turn of the century up till the Crimean War, the size of modern armies had mushroomed from the 5,000–6,000-man forces that served under George Washington to