A Crucial Six Months: January to July, 1863

Today we will look at a series of campaigns that constitute a major directional shift in the course of the war. As 1863 began, the Union's efforts seemed to be bogging down. Although the Army of the Potomac had successfully turned back Lee's planned invasion of Maryland at the battle of Antietam, the year ended dismally with the failure at Fredericksburg. In the West, where the Union had achieved far greater success with Grant, progress seemed to bog down as the campaign against Vicksburg momentarily stalled. The objective today will be to explore the events that led from this bleak winter for the Union to the euphoric victories of July 4, 1863.

The battles that we'll look at today are:

Stones River (Dec. 28-31, 1862) near the town of Murfreesboro, TN
The Vicksburg Campaign
Chancellorsville  A good series for May 1 - May 4
Gettysburg (here is a good map of the campaign northward) Gettysburg Day 2 (Peach Orchard)Pickett's Charge

The Early War

We will follow up Monday's lecture on the early months of the war by getting into the main battles of early 1862. With any luck, we'll get to Fredericksburg in December, 1862.

One of the first things we need to consider before going forward, however, is a bit of military technology that changed the way we fight wars, but not before a lot of men died in the Civil War in the process of making that discovery.

This video does a very good job of showing some key elements of the difference:




But what did this difference mean to the battlefield? In short, it meant a lot! And it isn't even all entirely evident in this video. We will discuss this in class today.

The difference was even more dramatic when rifling came to artillery.

Yet technology isn't everything - and it probably wasn't even a factor in the outcome in the war per se. But it did matter more broadly in the way societies planned for and executed their war plans, and it is worth noting that the North had a vast advantage in innovation and bringing new ideas into material existence.

The first 18 months of war

Old-fashioned military history has made a small comeback in the profession in recent years. No doubt this is in some measure due to our current military entanglements. But it is not nearly as prominent as it once was, particularly in the context of a collegiate-level Civil War class. Today, we ask a much wider range of interpretive questions about the Civil War Era than we did 50 years ago, when interest picked up during the war centennial in the 1960s. The design of this course reflects many, yet certainly not all, of this interpretive myriad. All the same, military history - the who, where, what, when - and more importantly - "why" of the battles remains important to any true understanding of the conflict. What happened on the battlefield had a symbiotic relationship with the broader changes taking place in America, having a direct impact upon their course.

Today (and likely into Wednesday and possibly next week) we will look at the first 18 months of the war. It is important to pay attention to chronology more than specific dates of battles. Yet dates also remain important. The sequence of events is key in war, because precise moments dictate subsequent outcomes. Therefore, I hope that you pay particular attention to the sequence of events and their significance during the lecture. 

Explanations of battles will not get into the deeply detailed terrain of inside-baseball military history. But I will explain to you in broad strokes the key moments so you have a better understanding of how the observers and participants judged the results of the conflict. 

To lend some structure to what for some will be an endless array of place and proper names and dates, I supply an overview of what we will cover:

• The clashes of 1861: May to December: Virginia, Western Kentucky, and Missouri
• The West in early '62: January to June: From Donelson to the fall of New Orleans and Memphis by way of Shiloh and the fall of Beauregard and the rise of Grant and Halleck
• The East in early '62: April through July: The Peninsular Campaign and the Seven Days' Battles / The Valley Campaign. The rise of Lee and Jackson, the first fall of McClellan
•  The East in mid '62: August - Second Bull Run and the fall of Pope and recall of McClellan
• The Confederate Offensive of '62: Late August through early October: Bragg and Kirby Smith in Kentucky, Lee in Maryland.
• The West in late '62: June through December: Continued Confederate Failures: Baton Rouge, Iuka, Corinth. The fall of Van Dorn and Price and the rise of Sherman.
• The Mess in the East, late '62: October through December: the last fall of McClellan, Rise and fall of Hooker and Fredericksburg.

Note the useful LINK to the MAP on the right hand margin of this blog!

The sunken road at Antietam as it appeared in 2007. 

Antietam Creek.

The South on a War Footing

I will want to spend a fair amount of time today discussing chapters 2 and 3 from the Escott book, but we will also spend some time considering the transformation of the South set into motion by the war.

One thing that I want us to consider today in our discussion is the role of contingency - in history in general, and in determining the root causes and objectives of the Civil War in particular. To wit, that while one thing may be absolutely true in January, it might not be in April. The mutability of the Civil War's main themes are one of the key sources of subsequent disagreement. Mutability is hard to chart. Everybody can be right if they are selective enough in their analysis. But we must chart mutability if we are to understand the war.

The roots of New South industrialization can be found in the policies of Jefferson Davis:

As I mentioned earlier, it was not as though the South was without industry before the Civil War, although the scale of it dramatically increased. The Roswell Mill in Roswell, Georgia is a good example of a factory that became much more important with the onset of war.  (It was also a forerunner of the New South textile mill.)

The Roswell Mill located at rolling falls on the Chattahoochee River.

Likewise, the modest Tannehill Iron Works (just south of Birmingham, Alabama) of antebellum times underwent a massive transformation during the war. Birmingham, which did not exist at the time of the Civil War, would be founded on the iron industry that blossomed for the sake of the Confederate effort.

Similarly, North Georgia also had a nascent iron industry in Bartow and Cherokee Counties. The Cooper Furnace is representative of this period of time. The area did not develop into a major iron and steel producer, however, because the local ore deposits were not nearly as rich of those found in Alabama.

More sophisticated manufacturing took place in cities like New Orleans, where the Leeds Foundry (today owned by the Preservation Resource Center) fabricated everything from cannon to ironclad ships. The city's early loss to the Union Navy was a blunder of epic proportions from many standpoints, not the least of which was the supply of war materials.

Like other Southern industrial enterprises begun in the 1830s, the Tredegar Iron Works in Richmond, Virginia grew tremendously during the war. But few other factories were nearly as important. 

Southern manufacturers had to be resourceful. Often times the weapons they produced contained material substitutions when possible - i.e., iron instead of steel, brass instead of iron.  A good example of this can be found when comparing the Spiller and Burr revolver to the Starr Revolver picture below:

The Confederacy's need to manufacture the goods of war led it to engage in ambitious plans, including that of the national armory in Macon, Georgia. Considering the "non-industrial nature" of the South, it's construction, which began in 1863, was remarkable. It never fully realized its potential by the time of the war's end. 

A photograph of the recently captured Macon Arsenal taken in June, 1865.

Yet in the end, southern manufacturing was a shabby replica of efforts in the North, where a major industrial complex began to flourish during the war.

Community and Battle of Antietam

Here is a blog entry written for Not Even Past by my former Virginia Tech student Nick Roland. He is currently pursuing a PhD in history at the University of Texas. Much like I ask you to do in your "Community at War" assignment, he links the fate of Texans with affairs on the battlefield at Antietam.

The Civil War at 150... All around us!

Last weekend, Civil War reenactors descended upon Maryland to play out the one-hundred fiftieth anniversary of the Battle of Antietam. We'll be looking at this battle a little later in the semester. If you were unaware of the reenacting subculture, however, this would be a good time to begin paying attention.

Also, PBS will premiere on Tuesday, September 18 what promises to be a somewhat morbid documentary titled "Death and the Civil War." It is, however, being produced by the people who bring us the American Experience films, so it might well be worth our while to watch it. Perhaps we might even take a little time to discuss it in class on Wednesday.

Creating an Army from Scratch

The following pictures should give you an idea of the war's ability to "make" and "unmake" people as well as institutions. The war represented a tremendous problem, but with this trouble came incredible opportunity. Many of the fundamental questions in American history for the rest of the 19th Century were in some way settled by the way fate intervened in lives of the Civil War generation in 1861-62.

Leading an army: A portrait of youth.

George Brinton McClellan - made General in Chief of the United States Army. Prior military training: extensive.
Age in 1861: 35

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. - (future legendary Associate Justice of the Supreme Court) as a young lieutenant in the Union Army. Prior military training: none.
Age in 1861: 20 (just barely)

Ulysses S. Grant - Future commander of the Union Army and President. Prior military training: substantial.
Age in 1861: 39

John B. Gordon - Major General in the Confederate Army. Enlisted as Captain, promoted by 1862. Prior military training: none
Age in 1861: 29

Not everybody was young, including political generals (the early) bane of both armies:

Leonidas Polk, the "Fighting Bishop." Kin of James K. Polk, Friend of Jeff Davis, appointed to high command despite no military experience - Was a graduate of USMA 1827. Killed outside Kennesaw Mountain, Georgia in 1864 at age 58

It is not hard to believe that Nathaniel P. Banks might one day have been President had he been at least a competent and effective general, but he was not. This former Speaker of the House became a political general at age 45, at the beginning of the war:

Both North and South had to construct armies essentially from scratch.

What were some of the considerations that the leadership had to take into consideration?
There were certainly tangible issues such as how one might pay for the war. Then there is the question of just how long the war was going to be and to what degree you were ready to disrupt your society. How many men, for instance, should stay home to keep a nation's economy operating.


We read about how McClellan ordered Hardee's Tactics printed for his inexperienced officers, but there were a lot of factors to consider that weren't going to be solved with readily available (if out of date) books.

Not only did few men have military experience of any kind, though frontiersmen North and South and slave patrol personnel in the South had some useful skills in human combat. But what of supplying an army that was larger than anything anyone had ever seen before? Who knew how to feed 15,000 ... 20,000... 100,000 men in the field, keep them moving, etc.? This required a great deal of managerial skill, and this tended to favor the captains of business in the North - if only they occupied those positions.

Some approximate figures:

Size of the Armies: Union
Jan. 1, 1861 - present for duty:  14,663
Jan. 1, 1862 - present for duty: 527,204 


Confederate Forces:

Jan. 1, 1862 - present for duty: approx. 260,000

Moreover, think about something like medicine. How many doctors will a nation need? The answer was going to become clear: far more than either nation possessed. And these doctors had limited notion of the causes of infection. No wonder so many soldiers died of causes such as "camp fever."

How many engineers and manufacturers would need to be dedicated to the war effort? And again, you see that the North has a comparably large advantage. Consider again the "mechanic's' republic" as demonstrated by the daguerreotypes in the first lecture. 

In Escott, you will read about Jefferson Davis's plans to supply his nation's war effort, and how radical they were, particularly in light of the South's supposed "states' rights" ideology. In light of the North's war making ability, was there any other viable choice?

Yet all of this discussion of the tangible does not tell the whole story. The United States, the world's most technologically advanced nation in the 1960s, ultimately foundered and withdrew from its involvement in Vietnam.

How important (and how strong) was the Northern commitment to Union? Did this exist in separation from the issue of slavery? Was the North truly united and could it stay united. Moreover, what did the North have to accomplish in order to declare true victory?