The interior life of the North was far less affected by the war than that of the South. The war brought increased prosperity to the North and much less intrusion into everyday life. Paradoxically, while the South championed the cause of small government, exigency obliged the government in Richmond to interfere at many levels in the social and particularly the economic life of the Southern people. The South really got the worst of two worlds: an attempt to run a command economy of price-fixing, requisition, and direction of labour which was at the same time inefficient. In the North, by contrast, the economy, left to itself by the Federal government, flourished, producing full employment and high wages, while delivering in abundance both the necessities of everyday life and the requirements of a war-fighting state. It did so, moreover, without succ.u.mbing to many of the normal faults of war finance, such as inflation, exorbitant taxation, or disabling public debt. The outbreak of war succeeded several years of economic downturn which the crisis threatened to exacerbate. Of particular concern was the cotton famine, which closed many New England textile mills or thrust them into working short time. The crisis was averted in an unexpected way. Poor harvests in Europe created a surge in demand for American grain, which thanks to contemporary improvements in agricultural practice the North was readily able to meet. The European trade also brought large payments in gold into American banks. At the same time, the demand for woollen uniforms to clothe Federal armies created a boom in sheep farming and also took up a lot of slack in the spinning, weaving, and garment-making industries. What had looked in 1861 to be a difficult period in Northern economic life turned by 1862 into a highly prosperous pa.s.sage.
Building a wartime economy required, of course, the making of financial arrangements to pay for military expenditures. Before the war the government had spent very little. Civil servants were few and there were no large spending programmes. The army was tiny, most of the navy"s ships antiquated to the point of obsolescence. Coastal fortification was costly but by 1861 most of the systems were complete. As a result the federal government of antebellum years found itself in the happy and unusual position of having a larger income than it needed. Most of its money came from customs duties. There were very few federal taxes and the government scarcely borrowed. Precisely because it had needed so little money before 1861, the government lacked the machinery and procedures necessary to rapidly enlarge its income when war came. How to do so caused much puzzlement and debate. Salmon P. Chase, the secretary of the Treasury, was a man of energy and ability, but not an experienced financier. He adhered, moreover, to shibboleths of American public finance, disliking debt and holding the banks in suspicion. He set out, therefore, to finance the war at first by taxation, but even when modest increases and new forms of tax were imposed, it was sufficient only to pay for normal expenditure, not for the exceptional costs of paying the soldiers and purchasing war supplies.
By the end of 1861 the Union"s financial situation was becoming unsustainable. Chase believed sternly in the circulation of gold to pay for everything. There was, however, only $250 million in bullion in the Northern states, and as Chase postponed settlement of government debts to tide over the developing crisis, gold started to disappear, as it was h.o.a.rded by citizens and inst.i.tutions alike. The immediate solution was to float a public loan, by issuing interest-bearing bonds, sold at below face value so as to offer an attractive rate of interest. The bond issue was an eventual success, but at the outset it did not solve the pressing problem of liquidity. With gold drying up there simply was not sufficient currency in circulation for either private citizens or inst.i.tutions to meet their obligations. In February 1862, therefore, though only after heated debate, Congress authorised the issue of paper money, which came to be called greenbacks because of its colour. Paper money was regarded with deep suspicion in nineteenth-century America but necessity dictated terms and the first issue was for $150 million in notes, which were to be legal tender. Greenbacks caught on and there were two more issues in 1862-63. By the end of the war the total value in circulation was $431 million.
Against all prediction, paper money had not corrupted the financial system. It had, of course, caused inflation, but on nothing like the scale in the South. Taking the index in 1861 as 100, price increases at the height of inflation in the North in 1864 reached 182. Most working Northerners felt better off. There was a lot of money in circulation, a lot to spend and a reasonably ample supply of goods to purchase. It was, as always in inflationary times, those on fixed incomes who felt the pinch. The average spender managed and prospered. Evidence for the reality of the paper currency boom is supplied by expansion of settlement on new farming land released onto the market from government holdings, and by the continuing tide of immigration from Europe. The Homestead Act of 1862 gave t.i.tle to farmers who worked a claim of 160 acres for five years. By 1865, 20,000 new farms had come into being. Few of the homesteaders were immigrants, since these lacked the capital to take and cultivate even free land. Immigration rose all the same, despite the danger of being conscripted into the army that immigrants faced on arrival. After a slump at the beginning of the war immigration rose during the conflict, exceeding 100,000 in both 1863 and 1864 and reaching a quarter of a million in 1865.
It was a Confederate allegation that the Federal government succeeded in filling the ranks of the Union army by impressing immigrants. That was certainly not the case. Almost half of the Union"s soldiers were farm boys from New England and the Middle West. Moreover, the big cities in which immigrants congregated were hotbeds of hostility to the draft. Hostility did not take the form of rebellion, as it did in the South, where by 1864 large numbers of deserters had taken to the backwoods and organised themselves into armed bands which fought state militias sent to disperse and recapture them. Many Northerners did, however, forcibly oppose the imposition of the draft. In mid-July 1863 there was a four-day riot in New York City, which caused 105 deaths, largely at the hands of Union soldiers sent to suppress the disorders, and there was widespread looting and burning.
Yet, remarkably, and despite resistance to or evasion of the draft, the most striking aspect of life on the home front in both North and South was how steadfast the populations remained in their support for the war. The anti-war movement in the North, though it grew in strength during the bad times of 1862 and after the onset of war weariness in 1864, never threatened to undermine Lincoln"s authority. The normal processes of politics were maintained throughout the war years, with congressional and local elections held in 1862 and a presidential election in 1864. Though anti-war candidates and parties stood in all of them, and in 1862 made important gains, a serious anti-war movement never gained commanding influence in the North. That was due in large measure to Lincoln"s extraordinary political talents, which allowed him to maintain personal control over individuals and factions in Congress, and to appeal directly and persuasively to popular opinion in the country. He took risks, particularly in insisting on the Emanc.i.p.ation Proclamation, but always avoided creating an effective internal opposition to his presidency and war policy.
In the South, though war weariness and loss of hope became almost tangible from 1864 onwards, it never coalesced into a defeatist movement. Jefferson Davis"s worst difficulties were with uncooperative state governors, many of whom championed states" rights even as the experience of war demonstrated the growing necessity for centralisation of power. The belief in the fragility of Southern support for secession, which was so widely held in the North in 1861-62, was never substantiated.
* Confederate bonds were issued and sold successfully in Europe, particularly England, but were backed by cotton. When the Union blaockade stopped cotton deliveries, the market in bonds collapsed, totally after 1864. Confederate bonds were issued and sold successfully in Europe, particularly England, but were backed by cotton. When the Union blaockade stopped cotton deliveries, the market in bonds collapsed, totally after 1864.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Walt Whitman and Wounds
THE LIKELIHOOD OF death or disfigurement on the battlefield was remote from the minds of the men of 1861 as they marched away. It became an all too urgent reality once the first shots were exchanged. The first battle of Bull Run left a thousand wounded on the field. By 1862 Union regiments were becoming accustomed to casualties of 30 percent in any engagement, of which the majority would survive to enter hospital. As quickly as Civil War soldiers learnt of the probabilities of death and wounding in action, however, they learnt to avoid, as far as possible, treatment by the regimental doctors, who acquired a reputation early on for incompetence and laziness. It was not understated; the staff of the pre-war medical department was ill-trained, rule-bound, and rarely abreast of modern methods. They were also poorly supplied with drugs or equipment. The first hospitals were improvised, often simply a few tents pitched on the outskirts of camp, attended by untrained men who acquired the reputation of shirkers. death or disfigurement on the battlefield was remote from the minds of the men of 1861 as they marched away. It became an all too urgent reality once the first shots were exchanged. The first battle of Bull Run left a thousand wounded on the field. By 1862 Union regiments were becoming accustomed to casualties of 30 percent in any engagement, of which the majority would survive to enter hospital. As quickly as Civil War soldiers learnt of the probabilities of death and wounding in action, however, they learnt to avoid, as far as possible, treatment by the regimental doctors, who acquired a reputation early on for incompetence and laziness. It was not understated; the staff of the pre-war medical department was ill-trained, rule-bound, and rarely abreast of modern methods. They were also poorly supplied with drugs or equipment. The first hospitals were improvised, often simply a few tents pitched on the outskirts of camp, attended by untrained men who acquired the reputation of shirkers.
Descriptions of the interiors of hospitals are among the most common pieces of reportage in Civil War writing, as are expressions of disgust at what was seen. The Union army had entered the war with entirely inadequate medical resources. The senior medical officer was eighty years old and his knowledge of medical practice of equal antiquity. The U.S. Medical Service possessed only twenty thermometers and lacked almost all other medical equipment. Surgeons were posted to regiments on a scale of one per unit, with an a.s.sistant surgeon as the only other trained man. In the field they took charge of the regimental musicians, who acted as litter-bearers. They were quite without medical training and earned a reputation as rough, incompetent, and often uncaring. There were at first no specialised ambulances to transport the wounded, who were jolted over rough ground to hospital on military wagons or requisitioned farm carts. The delay in evacuating the wounded was often extreme. After the second battle of Bull Run, 3,000 wounded still lay where they had fallen three days after the fighting ceased; 600 were found still alive five days after the battle. It was a week before the last survivors were got to hospital in Washington. It was often preferable to remain in a barn or private house, as many did, than to be taken to hospital, which were frequently sinks of infection, dirty, untidy, and overrun with parasites. Most soldiers were infected with lice but, while fit, were able to make some effort to rid themselves of the creepy-crawlies. In hospital they were dependent on others to delouse them, a duty not often undertaken. Many soldiers were brought in with their wounds crawling with maggots, stinking, and all too often gangrenous. Because of the prevalence of gangrene, amputation was the preferred surgical procedure. Many eyewitnesses recorded the sight of piles of severed arms and legs outside, and sometimes inside, hospitals. The frequency of amputation led soldiers to dread being taken to hospital, even though, surprisingly, anaesthesia, with chloroform or ether, was commonly available in Union hospitals. As the war progressed, its use grew rarer in the South, where the blockade cut off the supply of many essential medical stores.
As is commonly said, the Civil War occurred at a point of transition in scientific development, so that the armies had the use of some weapons of the future, such as breech-loading rifles, but, not others, such as machine guns. Military medicine was also very much at a point of transition. Doctors could administer anaesthetics, but they did not yet understand the germ theory of infection and so did not practice antisepsis. Surgeons commonly operated in old clothes stiff with blood or pus, dressing wounds with torn-up rags when bandages were not available, and they did not clean, let alone sterilise, their instruments and did not keep wards or operating theatres free of disease-carrying insects. Blood transfusion was unknown, as was blood-typing, and they would remain so until the end of the First World War. In the circ.u.mstances it was remarkable that as many wounded survived as did, given the nature of wounds suffered. The minie ball, fired from the Springfield and Enfield rifles-the main cause of wounds-was a conical lump of lead the size of a man"s upper thumb joint and weighing two ounces. It penetrated the human body with ease, producing a comparatively benign injury unless it hit a blood vessel, but it frequently hit bone, which it tended to shatter, often a cause of amputation. Even worse was the wound caused by a fragment of artillery sh.e.l.l, which could remove a foot or hand or smash the ribcage. Worst of all was round shot, which could decapitate. A direct hit from a cannonball almost always meant death. Seneca Thrall, the surgeon of the 13th Iowa Infantry, wrote to his wife, "I have been hard at work today dressing wounds. The unutterable horrors of war most manifest in a hospital, two weeks two weeks after a battle, is terrible. It required all my will to enable me to properly dress some of the foul, suppurating, erysipelatous fractured limbs." Another letter to a wife, by the surgeon of a Kentucky regiment after the battle of Kennesaw Mountain in 1864, described how the wounded who had been out all day in the hot sun were covered with maggots by the time they were brought in. "You may well suppose that their suffering was immense, such as arms shot off-legs shot off. Eyes shot out-brains shot out. Lungs shot through and in a word after a battle, is terrible. It required all my will to enable me to properly dress some of the foul, suppurating, erysipelatous fractured limbs." Another letter to a wife, by the surgeon of a Kentucky regiment after the battle of Kennesaw Mountain in 1864, described how the wounded who had been out all day in the hot sun were covered with maggots by the time they were brought in. "You may well suppose that their suffering was immense, such as arms shot off-legs shot off. Eyes shot out-brains shot out. Lungs shot through and in a word everything everything shot to pieces and totally ruined for all after life. The horrors of this war can never be half told. Citizens at home can never know one fourth part of the misery brought about by this terrible rebellion." shot to pieces and totally ruined for all after life. The horrors of this war can never be half told. Citizens at home can never know one fourth part of the misery brought about by this terrible rebellion."1 During 1862 the North urgently put in hand an effort to improve the quality of medical care offered to the wounded. As with other Civil War developments, the battle of Antietam, with its huge casualty list, was the spur. The decisive step had been the appointment in April 1862 of a new director of medical services, William Hammond. Young, energetic, and well educated, Hammond was supported by a voluntary organisation, the United States Sanitary Commission, which became a power in the land. Under the executive secretaryship of the formidable Frederick Law Olmsted, it coordinated the activities of thousands of civilian volunteers, collected medical supplies of all sorts, recruited several thousand nurses, and provided welfare facilities for soldiers, both sick and healthy, all over the Northern states. The Sanitary, as it was known, also acted as a pressure group, prodding Congress and the Union army into the provision of better care for the sick and wounded. There was similar voluntary effort in the South, where a Richmond lady, Sally Tompkins, set up a hospital on her own account and was commissioned a Confederate captain, so valued were her services by President Davis.
William Hammond was responsible for widespread reform and for choosing able men to fill surgical and medical appointments throughout the Union army, among whom was a contemporary, Dr. Jonathan Letterman, appointed chief of medical services in the Army of the Potomac. Letterman expanded and reorganised the ambulance corps. The first results were seen after Antietam, when the wounded were moved from the battlefields according to a rational and disciplined schedule. Letterman also introduced carefully designed and prefabricated hospitals, the Letterman hospital, which was to remain in use up to the First World War. Modelled on the wooden "balloon" house then springing up in all American industrial cities, it grouped single-storey wards around a central complex of operating theatres and dressing stations, and was properly ventilated and heated. He also insisted on strict standards of hygiene. An important aide in Letterman"s drive to impose correct standards of hygiene and order was Dorothea Dix of the United States Sanitary Commission, who took up work as early as April 1861. The commission was modelled on that of Florence Nightingale, during the Crimean War. Dix had visited the British commission and seen Nightingale"s hospitals. Soon she was active in the dozens of hospitals which began to be opened all over Washington, which was close to most of the major battlefields. Some were improvised in the capital"s public buildings, such as the Patent Office. Others were accommodated in schools and colleges, including Georgetown University. Wooden hospitals were built wherever s.p.a.ce was available, until more than fifty were in operation in the capital. One stood on what is now the site of the Smithsonian Air and s.p.a.ce Museum, another on the south lawn of the White House.
The original hospitals, since Washington had almost none of its own, were groups of tents, as used by regimental medical teams in the field. They were only slowly replaced by more solid constructions. Either too cold or too hot, depending on the season, they were open to the public, which wandered in and out at whim.
An early visitor was the poet Walt Whitman, who came to Washington following the evacuation of his brother George Washington Whitman from the field of Fredericksburg. Whitman was a New Yorker who was trying to set up as a professional writer. He did not serve in the army, though another brother did; he was never present at a battle and visited the armies only twice. Nevertheless, the war was to possess Whitman. After finding his brother, he decided to devote himself to the welfare of the wounded; he took a clerical job in the army paymaster"s office and spent the small salary he earned on tobacco and other comforts for the patients, to whom he devoted his time. He wrote copiously during his four years as a self-appointed hospital visitor. By his own reckoning, he attended at the bedsides of 80,000 casualties. He believed that his visits were beneficial and recorded that "the doctors tell me I supply the patients with a medicine which all their drugs and bottles and powders are helpless to yield." That medicine was kindness and cheerful attention, particularly in writing and sending letters to the soldiers" families.
Whitman, who was to become America"s leading poet of the nineteenth century, was of humble origins and simple nature. He was temperamentally egalitarian and might, had his bent taken him that way, have become a leader in the socialist movement. He was also deeply humanitarian with a heartfelt belief in the greatness of his country and its people. Besides his openhearted goodness, he also had a deep love for the beauties of the American landscape and skies, about which he wrote memorably in his first and best-known collection of verse, Leaves of Gra.s.s Leaves of Gra.s.s. The war moved him greatly, at first by its drama and display, then by its tragedy, which he was to express in deeply moving lyrical terms. One of his war poems, published in the collection Drum-Taps Drum-Taps, is undoubtedly one of the greatest works of literature the war was to inspire and one of the finest war poems ever written. It came from his experiences as an army hospital visitor.
COME U UP FROM THE F FIELDS, FATHER Come up from the fields, father, here"s a letter from our Pete;And come to the front door, mother-here"s a letter from thy dear son.Lo, "tis autumn;Lo, where the trees, deeper green, yellower and redder,Cool and sweeten Ohio"s villages, with leaves fluttering in the moderate wind;Where apples ripe in the orchards hang, and grapes on the trellis"d vines;(Smell you the smell of the grapes on the vines?Smell you the buckwheat, where the bees were lately buzzing?)Above all, lo, the sky, so calm, so transparent after the rain, and with wondrous clouds;Below, too, all calm, all vital and beautiful-and the farm prospers well.Down in the fields all prospers well;But now from the fields come, father-come at the daughter"s call; And come to the entry, mother-to the front door come, right away.Fast as she can she hurries-something ominous-her steps trembling;She does not tarry to smoothe her hair, nor adjust her cap.Open the envelope quickly,O this is not our son"s writing, yet his name is sign"d;O a strange hand writes for our dear son-O stricken mother"s soul!All swims before her eyes-flashes with black-she catches the main words only;Sentences broken-gun-shot wound in the breast, cavalry skirmish, taken to hospital,At present low, but will soon be better.Ah, now, the single figure to me,Amid all teeming and wealthy Ohio, with all its cities and farms,Sickly white in the face, and dull in the head, very faint,By the jamb of a door leans.Grieve not so, dear mother, (the just-grown daughter speaks through her sobs; (the just-grown daughter speaks through her sobs;The little sisters huddle around, speechless and dismay"d;)See, dearest mother, the letter says Pete will soon be better.Alas, poor boy, he will never be better, (nor may-be needs to be better, that brave and simple soul;)While they stand at home at the door, he is dead already; The only son is dead.But the mother needs to be better;She, with thin form, presently drest in black;By day her meals untouch"d-then at night fitfully sleeping, often waking,In the midnight waking, weeping, longing with one deep longing,O that she might withdraw unnoticed-silent from life, escape and withdraw,To follow, to seek, to be with her dear dead son.
What makes this poem of Whitman"s so heartrending is that everything in it is entirely genuine. Whitman knew what happened to boys shot in the chest; he knew how such news affected families, since he often met them on their visits to the hospitals; he knew what terrible truths the consoling letters sent to families concealed, since he had often written such letters himself. Even though he was not a witness of battle, he knew what results battles caused, since he saw them on the hospital wards. Whitman was a great poet of the Civil War, because he understood the purpose and nature of the war, which was to inflict suffering on the American imagination. The suffering was equally distributed between the two sides, and was felt particularly by those not present. The whole point of the war was to hold mothers, fathers, sisters, and wives in a state of tortured apprehension, waiting for the terrible letter from hospital that spoke of wounds and which all too often presaged the death of a dear son, husband, or father. It was a particular cruelty of the Civil War that because neither side had targets of strategic value to be attacked-not, at least, targets that could be reached by the armies in the field (until Sherman took the war to the Southern people by marching into their homeland)-its effect had to be directed princ.i.p.ally, indeed for years exclusively, at the man in the field and at the emotions of those who waited at home. Torturing the apprehensions of the non-combatants was a new development in warfare, produced by the rise of an efficient postal service. Before the days of rapid and reasonably certain postal communication, soldiers could be banished to the mind"s recesses after they marched away, because the nearest and dearest knew that they would receive no news of their fate until the war was over, if indeed then. The only certain news of a soldier on campaign came by default, when he did not return. Whitman caught at the truth in an entry in one of his notebooks. "The expression of American personality through this war is not to be looked for in the great campaign and the battle-fights. It is to be looked for ... in the hospitals, among the wounded."
Whitman"s words would have carried an even stronger ring of truth had he written, "The expression of American national emotion." Whitman"s keen sense of the national character might have encouraged him to emphasise explicitly the strength and importance of family feeling in nineteenth-century America and the degree to which the brutalities of the Civil War played upon those feelings. He touched on those truths in his great elegy for President Lincoln, which is also an epitaph for the war itself, "When Lilacs Last in the Door-yard Bloom"d": I saw the debris and debris of all the dead soldiers of the war;But I saw they were not as was thought;They themselves were fully at rest-they suffer"d not;The living remain"d and suffer"d-the mother suffer"d,And the wife and the child, and the musing comrade suffer"d,And the armies that remain"d suffer"d.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Civil War Generalship
AMERICA WAS AWASH with generals in 1865, or at least with men who held that t.i.tle. It could not have been otherwise, since the armies of both North and South had swollen to comprise dozens of corps, scores of divisions, and hundreds of brigades, command of any of which carried the t.i.tle. In 1861, however, there had been almost no generals on either side. The only men holding rank as generals were a few ancients who had risen to their rank during the Mexican War or survived from even earlier conflicts. The most important in the hierarchy was Winfield Scott, general in chief of the republic and holding the rank of lieutenant general, previously only held by George Washington. He was an experienced operational commander. By 1861, however, he was eighty-five years old and too stout and feeble to mount a horse. Though his brain was keen and active, he was unable to take the field or indeed to stray far from the invalid chair in his Washington office. As the victor of the war against Mexico in 1846-48, Scott was an experienced military campaigner who also possessed, for a soldier, a high degree of political understanding, having run as the Whig candidate for the presidency in 1852. His main contributions to the conduct of the war were to counsel and encourage Lincoln, which he did with great sympathy and beneficent effect in the opening months and to frame what would become the North"s fundamental strategy, later called the Anaconda Plan. Designed to profit from the geographical advantage the North enjoyed, it envisaged cutting the Confederacy off from contact with the outside world by naval blockade, and bisecting the Confederacy by seizing control of the Mississippi River. Excellent in conception, it suffered from the defect-which was also a defect of Scott"s mind-that it fell short of promising to deliver victory. A blockaded and bisected South would be a poor South but not necessarily one deprived of the power of resistance. Scott could not accept that this const.i.tuted a fundamental weakness of his planning, since, like many Northerners, he shrank from the idea of shedding the blood of fellow Americans, nor did he want to inflict disabling damage on the economy or society of the southern states. with generals in 1865, or at least with men who held that t.i.tle. It could not have been otherwise, since the armies of both North and South had swollen to comprise dozens of corps, scores of divisions, and hundreds of brigades, command of any of which carried the t.i.tle. In 1861, however, there had been almost no generals on either side. The only men holding rank as generals were a few ancients who had risen to their rank during the Mexican War or survived from even earlier conflicts. The most important in the hierarchy was Winfield Scott, general in chief of the republic and holding the rank of lieutenant general, previously only held by George Washington. He was an experienced operational commander. By 1861, however, he was eighty-five years old and too stout and feeble to mount a horse. Though his brain was keen and active, he was unable to take the field or indeed to stray far from the invalid chair in his Washington office. As the victor of the war against Mexico in 1846-48, Scott was an experienced military campaigner who also possessed, for a soldier, a high degree of political understanding, having run as the Whig candidate for the presidency in 1852. His main contributions to the conduct of the war were to counsel and encourage Lincoln, which he did with great sympathy and beneficent effect in the opening months and to frame what would become the North"s fundamental strategy, later called the Anaconda Plan. Designed to profit from the geographical advantage the North enjoyed, it envisaged cutting the Confederacy off from contact with the outside world by naval blockade, and bisecting the Confederacy by seizing control of the Mississippi River. Excellent in conception, it suffered from the defect-which was also a defect of Scott"s mind-that it fell short of promising to deliver victory. A blockaded and bisected South would be a poor South but not necessarily one deprived of the power of resistance. Scott could not accept that this const.i.tuted a fundamental weakness of his planning, since, like many Northerners, he shrank from the idea of shedding the blood of fellow Americans, nor did he want to inflict disabling damage on the economy or society of the southern states.
At the outset Lincoln shared many of Scott"s views, and himself lacked any conception of how to transform his desire to crush rebellion into military reality. His first attempt to frame a scheme of decision was far too moderate to have produced a result. It envisaged holding Fortress Monroe, the great fortified place at the tip of the Virginia Peninsula, organising blockade, and then mounting a seaborne expedition to attack Charleston, South Carolina. What he needed and begged for from Scott were suggestions as to how to proceed. What he wanted were generals who would give him sound advice and then put plans successfully into action. At the outset, however, he had the greatest difficulty in finding any generals who displayed the least competence or resolution. He promoted dozens of men in 1861, though without confidence that any of them were good leaders, and often because their promotion would strengthen his political position. As a result, many of the first to put stars on their uniforms were local political bigwigs, representatives of European immigrant groups, or state officials, including governors. As he shortly discovered, however, none could offer worthwhile advice and some could not be trusted to command the formations to which they had been appointed.
The procedure for appointing generals was strangely unsystematic. Because promotion to general"s rank lay in the hands of Congress, those chosen were normally made brigadier or major generals of U.S. volunteers, which were organisations of the states, rather than in the regular army, which was a federal inst.i.tution. As they took the field and if they proved their worth, they might be given regular rank, which was greatly esteemed. Grant, for example, began his general"s career as a brigadier of Illinois volunteers but was then given a commission as major general in the regular army until, in March 1864, he a.s.sumed the appointment of general in chief and the rank of lieutenant general.
As the war drew out, it became easier for Lincoln to identify which of his appointments were good ones and which merited further promotion. What Lincoln looked for in his generals was the ability to achieve results without constantly requiring guidance from Washington or reinforcement by additional troops. The war produced far too few such men. Lincoln"s first choice, Irvin McDowell, had excellent paper qualifications. He had been to a French military college, had served a year with the French army, until 1870 thought the best in the world, and had served as a staff officer under Scott in Mexico. McDowell, had he been given a properly trained army, might have proved a competent officer. In 1861, however, there were almost no properly trained soldiers or units anywhere in America and those McDowell led to drive the Confederates out of Mana.s.sas and away from Washington in July were particularly ill trained. There was nothing wrong with McDowell"s plan of action or with his execution of the opening stages of the battle. What went wrong for the Union is that its untrained soldiers panicked, after failing to carry the position held by more determined if not better trained Virginia troops, then initiated a stampede to the rear and abandoned the field to the Confederates.
McDowell, for all his credentials, could not survive such a disgrace and was swiftly removed, to be replaced by George McClellan, who had recently won a few very small battles in the western Virginia mountains. McClellan shared some of McDowell"s experience. He had been to Europe to observe the Crimean War and had also served with distinction in the Mexican War. He had more ability than McDowell, particularly in the training of troops, at which he excelled. The Yankee soldiers" first favourite, though he never served in the West, the "Young Napoleon" was an excellent organiser and a master of the details of logistics. His armies were always well-fed and supplied and his soldiers held him in high esteem despite his insistence on strict discipline. McClellan was always popular with the troops. That was partly due to his defects as a commander. Because he did not believe in inflicting heavy costs on the enemy, his soldiers were often not pressed in battle to the point of suffering heavy losses. He also, at first, got on well with Lincoln, who admired his intellect. The era of good feeling did not last. Civilian though he was, Lincoln knew what he wanted from a princ.i.p.al military adviser and McClellan quickly revealed that he was not the man to supply it. Appointed to command the Union troops defending Washington in July 1861, and then promoted general in chief in November, he dissipated his and his subordinates" energies in discussion of projects and in reorganisation during his first nine months of authority. When, in April 1862, he eventually embarked on action, he at once began to exhibit symptoms of caution and defeatism, which proved to be fundamental qualities of his character and which unfitted him for high command of any sort, let alone supreme command. The first stage of his grand strategic idea, the transshipment of the Army of the Potomac by sea and river to the Virginia Peninsula, was inspired and ought to have led on to great results. As soon as his army landed in enemy territory, however, McClellan began to torment himself with fears of being outnumbered. He also failed to do what he could easily have done had he begun forcefully and at once. Confounded by enemy entrenchments across the peninsula, he declined to storm the defences, which were weak and lightly garrisoned. Instead he began to await reinforcements from Washington. When at last the enemy abandoned his positions and began to retreat towards Richmond, McClellan followed lethargically. Though managing to achieve a small victory at Williamsburg, he eventually arrived outside the defences of Richmond in July having scarcely damaged the enemy at all. What followed was even worse than his failure to press his advance up the peninsula. He began to fight, in what would become known as the Seven Days" Battles, but halfheartedly, so that what should have been victories ended as indecisive defeats, disabling to neither side but fatal to McClellan"s plan of defeating the Confederacy by capturing its capital. Throughout the Seven Days, he pestered Washington with requests for reinforcements, predicting disaster unless he was given more troops. Eventually, he was ordered by Halleck, his successor as general in chief, to withdraw the army by ship from the peninsula and bring it back to Washington. Once arrived he persisted in his distaste for decision by failing to come to the support of General John Pope, who was thereby exposed to defeat at the second battle of Mana.s.sas. In its aftermath Lee resumed his advance northwards until brought to battle at Sharpsburg, or Antietam Creek. Antietam was a battle McClellan should have won, since he outnumbered Lee several times. He frittered away the advantage, however, in piecemeal attacks, and although the result was a sort of Union victory, McClellan"s refusal to pursue the badly shaken Confederates resulted in their escape. Antietam was the end of McClellan"s military career. In November 1862 he was removed from command.
McClellan"s failure in generalship cannot be ascribed to the actions of the enemy but to his own defects of character. His was a curious mixture of high self-regard and disabling anxiety. However many troops he was given he always chose to believe that the enemy had more and was receiving reinforcements which exceeded in number any he was offered. This was a form of moral cowardice. But it was also an effect of his professionalism. His armies were so well organised that he shrank from exposing them to anything that would disorganise their perfect order, as battle was bound to do. Convinced of his personal superiority over all others on the Union side, including the president, he took his failures as proof of their failure to support him. McClellan, a brilliant organiser who retained to a surprising degree the confidence and affection of his men, may be thought the worst general of the war and his reputation has suffered greatly in the war"s aftermath, yet his is one of the most interesting psychological cases in military history: a first-cla.s.s military mind capable of achieving great results at leisure but utterly incapable of overcoming difficulty, even, perhaps particularly, imagined difficulty. Without being wholly incompetent, he threw away any chance he was given, wasted time when circ.u.mstances were in his favour, and shrank from delivering decisive blows in battle even when events were running his way. It is fortunate that he was never asked to exercise authority in the West, since he was const.i.tutionally incapable of achieving such victories as those at Forts Henry and Donelson, let alone of recovering from a setback such as the first day at Shiloh.
He is most obviously contrasted with Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson, who possessed the qualities he lacked and though indeed often outnumbered had the gift of compensating for numerical weakness by striking savage and unexpected blows. Jackson"s virtues are easy to enumerate. He had an acute topographical sense, enabling him in the complex geography of the Shenandoah Valley to read the lay of the land as if by instinct. He also had an empathetic understanding of how his enemy would react and how his movements would conform to the geographical accidents of the campaign theatre. His philosophy of war was to establish psychological superiority by surprising, mystifying, and misleading his opponent, which he succeeded in doing on occasion after occasion. He succeeded because he was utterly without fear or self-doubt. He was not, however, without faults, notably those of aloofness and secretiveness. He did not explain himself to his subordinates or take them into his confidence, with the result that, when he was not present in person, his plans could miscarry. Generally reckoned the war"s supreme pract.i.tioner of battlefield command and an undoubted master of manoeuvre in small theatres of action, he was not really a general of the highest gifts. His talents were for operations outside the centre of events. Moreover, he was a bad subordinate, sometimes, as at the opening of the Seven Days" Battles, declining to obey orders or to coordinate his movements with those of his superior. He also preferred improvised arrangements to conformity to a system. Thus, before Chancellorsville, he used a clergyman as his chief of staff, without broadcasting the appointment to his subordinates, an obvious recipe for confusion and misunderstanding. A deeply devout Christian and member of the Presbyterian Church, he was Calvinist in his outlook, both as an individual and as a military commander, since preordination influenced all his judgements. When slightly but painfully wounded at First Mana.s.sas, he revealed to a subordinate who was sympathising with him about his injury but also questioning him about the wellsprings of his evident courage that he refused to fuss about the risks he ran in the presence of the enemy because he said the time of his death was fixed by G.o.d and that there was therefore no point in feeling fear. He said he felt no more fear on the battlefield than he did settling to sleep in his own bed, and that all men should feel the same, in which case all would be equally courageous. Jackson"s supreme lack of anxiety, both under fire and in decision-making, a.s.sured him a unique place among Civil War generals, indeed among generals of any army or nationality. He was certainly a very great general, if of a somewhat limited sort.
Of the South"s other generals, few deserve great reputation. Beauregard was a reliable commander of the middle rank. Braxton Bragg, despite his notorious bad temper and general unlovability, was at about the same level. Joseph Johnston was the superior of both in intellect but, though he proposed a grand strategy for the South which was conceded by Grant to have offered the chance of prolonging the successful defence of the Confederacy"s land area, did not bring and could not have brought the South victory. Johnston advocated fighting defensive battles and surrendering territory if attacked in such force as to threaten heavy casualties. When in command in Georgia in 1864 he practised what he preached. The defect in Johnston"s otherwise sensible scheme was that the South had a finite amount of territory to surrender and that, if adopted, the plan would eventually have transferred the territory of the Confederacy to the Union armies without cost. Though not the author of any strategic plan, Bragg must be recognised as a considerable military intellect. Had he possessed a more cooperative character, instead of always getting onto bad terms with subordinates, equals, and superiors, he might have achieved much for the South.
The North never produced an equivalent to Jackson, which was one reason for the psychological dominance he consistently exercised over his opponents. No Union general ever matched him in his ability to inspire his soldiers or win their affection, which allowed him to extract from them feats of endurance unequalled by any other units or formations, North or South. Jackson had little or no strategic vision and poor powers of a.n.a.lysis, but in a small theatre whose geography he understood he was almost invincible. Unlike Sherman, however, he bequeathed no legacy of generalship. His talents were too personal and too momentary in effect to be formalised into an operational system and though he was to be imitated and admired for generations to come, his achievements could not be turned into lessons or methods for would-be imitators.
Jackson was the complement to Robert E. Lee, whom he served with great loyalty, perhaps because he was impressed, as a deeply devout Christian, by Lee"s purity of character. Even as war broke out, Lee was regarded in both North and South as the most eminent soldier in the country. This was due in large measure to his character and personality, as a great southern gentleman, as head of one of the First Families of Virginia. Lee was offered command of the Union army but chose instead to lead Virginia"s troops. He had been an outstanding cadet at West Point and a successful engineer officer and had served with distinction in Mexico. Curiously, he did not enjoy a successful start in the Civil War. He was nevertheless chosen to replace Joseph E. Johnston, wounded in the Seven Days" Battles as President Jefferson Davis"s princ.i.p.al military adviser, and given command of the Army of Northern Virginia, which he held to the war"s end, then with the additional t.i.tle of commander in chief. Lee"s great talents were as a tactician rather than as a strategist. His strategic views were rather narrow. He really had only one stroke of strategic inspiration throughout the war, which was to carry the war onto Northern soil in 1863, with the objects of relieving Virginia of the burden of being fought over, profiting from the supplies which were to be captured, and raising Southern spirits and depressing those of the North. Lee"s generalship, like Jackson"s, was too personal to be formalised as an operational method. Moreover, it was derivative, based on Napoleon"s achievements; Lee believed that the pursuit of victory was the true strategy and that victory was best attained by inflicting crushing defeats on the enemy in the style of Austerlitz or Jena, Napoleon"s great victories over the Austrians and the Prussians. Those were the victories taught and studied at West Point, and Lee was responsible for achieving at least two in that pattern, Chancellorsville and Second Mana.s.sas. Though Lee was a "creative" imitator of Napoleon, he cannot really be credited with any originality. On a battlefield, by contrast, Lee fizzed with ideas which he conceived at high speed and carried out with extreme despatch. That was particularly evident at Chancellorsville, his military masterpiece, where he deliberately broke several fundamental rules of generalship and yet achieved a striking victory.
Lee"s greatest gifts of generalship were quick and correct decision-making in the face of the enemy, exploitation of his enemy"s mistakes, and economic handling of the force available to him. His defects were excessive sensitivity to the feelings of his subordinates and a failure to insist upon his own judgement, both of which emanated from his breeding as a Virginia gentleman. His defeat at Gettysburg stemmed largely from his failure to give direct orders to Longstreet and to insist on their being carried out. Lee was undoubtedly a very great soldier and a formidable opponent. He was also, however, a great gentleman and an indulgent colleague, qualities which could detract from his powers of will and decision.
Lee"s generalship was enhanced by the inferiority of his opponents during the first two years of war. McClellan simply was not his match in mental firmness or power of decision. In Meade, who commanded the Union forces at Gettysburg, he met a man who equalled him in efficiency, if not in imagination or daring, but it was not until Grant came east in 1864 that he was challenged by someone of equal, indeed superior, quality. Grant was the greatest general of the war, one who would have excelled at any time in any army. He understood the war in its entirety and quickly grasped how modern methods of communication, particularly the telegraph and the railroads, had endowed the commander with the power to collect information more quickly and the means to disseminate appropriate orders in response. Once his qualities became apparent, as they had by 1862, he rose very quickly, to the surprise of his West Point contemporaries. Nothing in his earlier life had marked him out as exceptional; indeed the contrary was the case. The son of a moderately prosperous Illinois family, he was nominated to West Point against his will, and while a cadet he followed with hope and interest a congressional debate on closing the academy down. He excelled at his studies, particularly in mathematics, and hoped on graduation to find employment as a professor, but academy routine carried him into the army, in which he served successfully in the war against Mexico, of which he strongly disapproved, believing it to be an aggressive and immoral conflict. After the war he was posted to California, where, separated from his beloved wife, Julia Dent, he took to drink and disputation with his seniors, which led to his resignation from the army. He was unsuccessful in civilian life, failing as a farmer and in commerce and being reduced eventually to working as a clerk in his father"s tannery.
Redemption came with the outbreak of the Civil War. Grant"s military training and experience proved to be in demand, and enlisted by the governor of Illinois to help organise the state"s volunteers, he got command of a regiment, which he commanded successfully in local action. Grant proved an efficient organiser of men, then in an early action a decisive and successful commander with remarkable intellectual powers, including the gift of dictating clear orders without hesitation in a steady stream. He was quickly advanced from colonel"s to brigadier"s rank and given larger powers in the campaign on the lower Mississippi. His victories at Forts Henry and Donelson brought him to the attention of Lincoln and ensured the acceleration of his career. By 1864, when he had overseen a string of western victories, including Shiloh and the capture of Vicksburg, he was widely recognised as the best Union general, brought to Washington, and appointed general in chief, thus embarking on a new pa.s.sage, against Lee and the Army of Northern Virginia. Lincoln had decided he was indispensable. To a critic, the president riposted, "I need this man; he fights."
In the West, Grant won success by risk-taking and unceasing aggressiveness, but his soldiers paid the price. Most of Grant"s battles were costly in casualties. He retained nevertheless his men"s confidence and devotion, and eventually he came to be almost venerated by his soldiers, who would gather in silent groups to watch him walk past. Grant seemed at home in the West. He applied his keen sense of topography to its sinuous rivers and jumbled hills and mountains and never seems to have been confused by their complexity. He certainly did not allow difficulties of terrain to interfere with the supply of his troops, which was never interrupted even during the most difficult pa.s.sages of his campaigns. In the struggle to capture Chattanooga, the key railroad junction that was vital to the South to maintain communication between the southwestern and northeastern regions of the Confederacy, when for a time the Union army was constricted in its line of supply, Grant succeeded in rapidly opening the "Cracker Line" to furnish his troops with basic necessities and then in restoring supply in amplitude. Grant had a philosophy of war, which was to keep the enemy under relentless pressure at all points and to fight whenever opportunity offered. This style of generalship tried his men very hard. Indeed, without the a.s.surance of frequent reinforcement, Grant would have had to desist from his desire to destroy the Army of Northern Virginia before its destruction was achieved. Grant"s reputation was made late.
It was greatly to Grant"s advantage that he was served by subordinates of talent, with whom he established cordial personal relations. That was particularly so with Sherman and Sheridan. Sherman was a sort of alter alter Grant, having the same aggressiveness and relentlessness, though he went even further than Grant in his belief in the moral effect of offensive force on the enemy"s will to resist. Sherman resembled Grant in his originality; his determination to attack the spirit of the Southern people was an entirely novel approach to war-making and antic.i.p.ated the technique of psychological warfare as employed by twentieth-century European commanders fighting against national liberation movements in post-1945 colonial campaigns. Sherman came to believe that the South could only be beaten if its people were made to suffer both in body and spirit. By destroying their source of wealth and ruining their means of livelihood, he convinced himself, and eventually his superiors and his own soldiers that the rebels would repent and relapse into inactivity. Sherman applied his philosophy of destruction and spoliation first in Georgia, then in the Carolinas, and it worked as he believed it would. It is not surprising that he has been made the object of study by modern strategic a.n.a.lysts in America and abroad. He also showed something of Grant"s gifts of communication, quickness of decision, and ruthless a.n.a.lysis of the military situation. Though not as gifted a writer as Grant, Sherman composed several aphorisms about war which have pa.s.sed into the anthologies. His most considered statement of his beliefs was "we are not only fighting hostile armies but a hostile people, and must make old and young, rich and poor, feel the hard hand of war, as well as the organised armies." Grant, having the same aggressiveness and relentlessness, though he went even further than Grant in his belief in the moral effect of offensive force on the enemy"s will to resist. Sherman resembled Grant in his originality; his determination to attack the spirit of the Southern people was an entirely novel approach to war-making and antic.i.p.ated the technique of psychological warfare as employed by twentieth-century European commanders fighting against national liberation movements in post-1945 colonial campaigns. Sherman came to believe that the South could only be beaten if its people were made to suffer both in body and spirit. By destroying their source of wealth and ruining their means of livelihood, he convinced himself, and eventually his superiors and his own soldiers that the rebels would repent and relapse into inactivity. Sherman applied his philosophy of destruction and spoliation first in Georgia, then in the Carolinas, and it worked as he believed it would. It is not surprising that he has been made the object of study by modern strategic a.n.a.lysts in America and abroad. He also showed something of Grant"s gifts of communication, quickness of decision, and ruthless a.n.a.lysis of the military situation. Though not as gifted a writer as Grant, Sherman composed several aphorisms about war which have pa.s.sed into the anthologies. His most considered statement of his beliefs was "we are not only fighting hostile armies but a hostile people, and must make old and young, rich and poor, feel the hard hand of war, as well as the organised armies."
Sherman and Grant were the two outstanding generals of the war. Sherman"s legacy was the more lasting since his style of war-making, brutal and decisive, was highly imitable. As a battlefield commander, however, Grant was the more able, with higher achievements and more decisive victories to his credit.
Sheridan, Grant"s cavalry commander in the East during the last year of the war, owed much to Grant"s sponsorship and, like him, had an unpromising start. His first appointment was as a quartermaster officer, but he excelled at the unglamorous duties of supply in a war where supply was of paramount importance. He also later demonstrated unequalled powers of leadership, by personal example and vivid inspiration, as during the campaign against Early in the Shenandoah Valley in 1864.
Grant even succeeded in keeping on terms with General Meade, a notoriously cantankerous man with reason for dissatisfaction, after Grant ranked him as general in chief and then established his headquarters with Meade"s personal command, the Army of the Potomac. Thereafter Grant was consistently credited with successes that rightly belonged to Meade, causing disgruntlement that the latter regularly communicated to his wife. Meade could not, however, be deprived of the credit for having won Gettysburg, a distinction which perhaps supplied the basis on which they maintained their equable relationship. Meade was not a great general, but he was sound, and efficient.
In panoramic view, it remains remarkable that, out of a body of trained officers not more than 3,000 strong, America should have produced between 1861 and 1865 two unquestionably great soldiers, Grant and Sherman, of whom Sherman was also a visionary. Just below their level it also produced a gifted battle-winner in Lee, who would have shone in any of the contemporary European wars of manoeuvre. Not far below them in workaday talent belonged the resolute George Thomas and such exotics as Nathan Bedford Forrest, the self-taught genius of cavalry raiding, J. E. B. Stuart, Philip Sheridan, and the Cromwellian Stonewall Jackson. The American Civil War continues to provide a wealth of material for the study of generalship of the highest order.
Temperament, a factor in human affairs widely ignored by professional historians, was of the greatest importance in distinguishing the good from the bad, the effective from ineffective, among generals of the Civil War.
It was most notable in the case of McClellan, who provides material almost for a clinical study in the psychology of generalship. He was an extraordinary mixture of timidity and overweening self-importance, always overcome by self-doubt and anxiety in the face of the enemy, combined with tiresome belief in his superiority over all the colleagues with whom he worked during the war, from Lincoln downwards. He was not alone in his capacity for self-doubts. Halleck, too, found his enthusiasm for battle strongly diminished the closer he approached the enemy. Hooker suffered from the same disability. In the opinion of Professor T. Harry Williams, an excellent judge of the Civil War generals" characters, Hooker lacked the ability to make war "on the map." He functioned well only as long as his troops were under his eye. Once they moved beyond his field of vision, he lost the power to visualise their whereabouts. A contrast to Hooker was William Rosecrans, who also failed when action promised. His fault, however, was not timidity, but overexcitement. A great talker, he would work up a head of steam while he outlined his plans; his excitement grew as he listened to himself so that he lost his composure and, with it, his ability to implement his plans. He was successful as a junior commander of small forces, but in a major command he never brought off a great project. John Pope, too, was a great talker, who greatly impressed the world of Washington in 1862. Pope was always promising to fight and looked as if he would, being tall and of impressive appearance. But he too was afflicted by ineffectiveness; a later fault of Pope"s was quarrelsomeness. He got on the wrong side of McClellan, his direct superior in Virginia in 1862, and never re-established good relations. Pope was not as quarrelsome as Don Carlos Buell, who differed with any colleague he had and also failed in all his enterprises. Curiously, he was liked by McClellan, perhaps because he never threatened to be a rival in any respect.
The two consistently successful generals of the war, Grant and Sherman, were blessed with equable temperaments. Close friends, they cooperated admirably and avoided quarrelling with others. Grant even kept his temper with McClernand, who, in his egotism, would have tried the patience of a saint. In his frenzy to have the reputation he thought he deserved, he tried to intrigue his way into command on the Mississippi. He magnified every encouragement Lincoln gave him until he eventually overstepped the boundary of military propriety and gave Grant incontestable grounds to remove him for insubordination, thus sparing Lincoln, who valued his political connections in the Midwest, the need to do so.
Lincoln, a totally inexperienced commander in chief, was confronted from the onset of his presidency by a kaleidoscope of temperamental difficulties among his military helpmeets which would have brought down a lesser person. The verdict on the military leadership of the Union during the Civil War is that there was too much personality in play and far too little talent. Only Lincoln showed greatness from beginning to end. It was a war caused by his election and ultimately won by his capacity for compromise, an unexpected strategic skill.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Civil War Battle
BATTLE WAS THE defining characteristic of the Civil War. Some authorities count as many as 10,000 battles fought between 1861 and 1865. It is easy to reckon up between 200 and 300 named battles familiar to a general reader. Such a number, compressed into four years of warfare, speaks of a quite remarkable intensity, compared, say, to the experience of Wellington"s army in Spain and Portugal in 1808-14, when one major battle a year was nearer the norm. Civil War armies appear to have fought all the time, at very short intervals, so that it was not uncommon for individuals to have taken part in dozens of battles. It is the frequency of battle which makes the Civil War distinctive. There was no gradual intensification. Americans fought each other as if imbued with deadly mutual hatred from the outset. First Bull Run was as hard-fought as Second Bull Run a year later, which was as hard-fought as Gettysburg. It is difficult to define why this should have been so. Americans in 1860 did not hate each other as Spanish workers and the Spanish middle cla.s.s did before 1936. Though identifiable sections existed in the United States before 1860, "sections" referred to geographical areas of the country, of which the cotton-growing South was one and the industrialising North another. But the sections were not h.o.m.ogeneous. There were notable internal divisions. In the South the most important division was that between the large landowning regions and those of subsistence farming, from which the Confederate army was to draw most of its recruits. Particular sections were the Low Country of the Carolinas, where the first large concentrations of black slaves were established and which became in consequence hotbeds of Confederate patriotism, and Tidewater Virginia, homeland of the state"s political cla.s.s. Virginia was socially the most distinct of the colonies and later of the states, because it was deliberately set up in imitation of the English landed counties by its mid-seventeenth-century governor, Sir William Berkeley. Berkeley recruited the younger and therefore landless sons of English landowning families, which bequeathed all to the eldest, with the promise that in the New World they would be able to set up as landed gentlemen themselves. He succeeded perhaps better than he hoped. As early as 1660 every seat on the ruling Council of Virginia was held by members of five interrelated families, and as late as 1775 every council member was descended from one of the 1660 councillors. As Berkeley had endowed many of the settlers he attracted with large grants of land, the families were not only politically powerful but rich. They remained so and their names were to become celebrated in American history, the Madisons, the Washingtons, the Lees. They supplied the young United States with many of its Founding Fathers and the Confederacy also with many of its leaders. The strength and extent of the Virginia oligarchy helps to explain the speed and completeness of the Confederacy"s establishment. The old families, who were also large plantation holders and slave owners, felt the most threatened of