A Navalist's Perverse Civil War History, Part 0-addendum: Five Assertions about the War

There's no good way to put this, but here are five major propositions that I think are simultaneously (1) true, (2) counterintuitive on at least one level, and (3) critical to understanding the Civil War.

1. Nobody planned for this war, and nobody had any idea how to fight it.

This seems strange to us in 2009, in which I'm sure the US Army has a plan for invading France. However, not only did nobody know prior to April 1861 even which states would be on which side, nobody seemed to have given any thought at all about how the war would be waged. The USA had a tiny army which had not fought a technological peer since the war of 1812, and those veterans were all dead. There was no general staff. The army was designed to fight Indians and Mexicans, and was scattered in western forts. The USA didn't have a navy at all; it had a Coast Guard with gold braid and holystones. The CSA has even less. No army, no navy, and no guns or ships save what they could grab from federal armies and shipyards. But more than that, nobody had any real strategy. The generals made up this war as they went along.

2. It's all about the rivers and the railroads.

Everyone knows this in their head, but until you learn to think in terms of rail and river lines, your eyes will play tricks on you. When looking at maps to understand the war, you need a map that doesn't have a lot of extraneous crap, and has the rivers and railroads clearly marked. Remember the maxim, "Amateurs study tactics, professionals study logistics."

3. In this era, ironclad gunboats are floating fortresses.

In the Napoleonic Wars (1793-1815), Admiral Nelson could rightly say, "A man's a fool who fights a fort [with a fleet of warships]," but by 1861, this had changed. The great "Industrial Revolution" at sea (and, in the Civil War, on the rivers) had three parts: steam, shell, and iron, which replaced sail, shot, and oak. Steam gave ships the maneuverability in fighting forts such that they were harder to hit, shells (which explode as opposed to shot, which is just an iron ball) do more damage to fortification, and iron hulls made them much less fragile. This didn't mean that ironclads could easily take on forts without help and win in the Civil War (as far as I know, this only happened at Fort Henry in Tennessee)-a gunboat-only-victory in the 1860s is like an air-only-victory in 2000, but gunboats could *massively* soften up fortified positions in the way that air power does today in 1860. This wasn't true in 1812. One more thing-if gunboats could sail up a river, all railroads crossing that river could be cut. This will become important at a couple of points during the war, where controlling a river will give the Union the ability to cut Confederate lines well to the rear of the front.

4. When you don't have naval supremacy, a river is a wall. When you do have naval supremacy, a river is a super-railroad. Corollary: because the South had almost no iron-making capacity, their strategic imperative in the West was to keep the rivers as walls by denying naval supremacy to the Union.

Kind of a variation above, but it's so important on its own, I made it its own point. The South had only two ironworks to speak of, a large one in its capitol at Richmond, VA (Tregedar), and a smaller one at Nashville, TN which was lost in the first year of war. It was all the South could do to produce rifles, cannon, and ammunition in the amounts they did-shipbuilding was very much a last priority for a South that could neither make iron nor buy it. The South's defense in the West really had to be the Ohio and Mississippi. Unfortunately for the CSA, they lacked the manpower to defend the whole line, and Kentucky's neutrality meant they never even really had an intact line to begin with. The story of the Western war is largely one of (1) the North gaining naval supremacy in a stretch of the rivers and either (2a) using this control to concentrate troops and firepower to defeat the Confederates at a weak point, or (2b) using this control to make huge swaths of the Confederacy impossible to defend.

5. The Mississippi is the hinge of the West.

As long as the South held the Mississippi, the Old Southwest was a vital part of their war effort. The agricultural output of Texas, Arkansas, Mississippi, and Louisiana were essential to keeping the blockaded South fed, and their populations were sources of troops. Without it, the South would be reduced to eating grass and acorns by war's end.

The flip side is that as long as the South held the Mississippi, the Old Northwest couldn't bring its full weight to bear on the war effort. All of the states from Ohio on west had tremendous economic output which was stifled by Confederate blockage of the Mississippi. This region was also home to most of the Democratic "Copperhead" anti-war sentiment that undermined Lincoln, and threatened to vote him out of office in 1864. When control of the Mississippi fell to the Union on July 4, 1863, most people concentrated on what the South lost, but equally important is what the North gained-the Old Northwest could become a full partner in the war effort, and anti-war sentiment was weakened by increased western prosperity.