The Civil War as “psychological test”

An interesting perspective from across the Atlantic in military historian Charles Townshend’s introductory chapter in the updated 2005 edition of The Oxford History of Modern War:

Had Europeans been able to recognize it, a still more sobering vision of the future had been provided by the American Civil War. Moltke himself dismissed the American armies—nearly half a million men on the Confederate side, over twice that number raised by the Union—as mere mobs chasing each other about the countryside. Certainly they were quite unlike European armies, more mercurial in temper and unreliable in discipline. But the failure to meet Abraham Lincoln’s unambiguous demand to ‘destroy the rebel army’ was not simply due to lack of military efficiency. Admittedly, Union generals before Ulysses S. Grant often lacked his confidence and energy. His epigrammatic assertion that ‘the art of war is simple enough; find out where your enemy is, get at him as soon as you can, strike at him as hard as you can, and keep moving on’ was suitably Clausewitzian; but even he could not easily overwhelm entrenchments of the kind dug by the Confederate defenders of Petersburg in 1864. The fruitless pursuit of decisive military victories was eventually replaced by a policy of devastation, targeting the civilian roots of Confederate strength. General Philip Sheridan's systematic devastation of the Shenandoah Valley in the autumn of 1864 was paralleled by William T. Sherman’s frankly terrorist six-month ‘march to the sea’ across the heartland of the Confederacy.

The American Civil War was a war of attrition, won by the slow mobilization of the industrial and technical superiority of the Northern states.* But it was not primarily a technological struggle. The Confederacy could only succeed by making the cost of the war too great: ultimately, the war was a psychological test. On the Union side, the challenge produced a response which was, in Clausewitzian terms, absolute. But while the Confederate President Jefferson Davis declared ‘we are fighting for existence’, the South proved ultimately unable to draw on the resources of modern national solidarity. The war thus confirmed the European model: national will was the basis of military force.

I appreciate the cultural and political emphasis here rather than the easy but incomplete technological or material explanation. Why the Confederacy was thus “unable to draw on the resources of modern national solidarity” is covered well in books like Emory Thomas’s The Confederate Nation and, in a much more specific study of how this affected a specific army, Larry Daniel’s Conquered: Why the Army of Tennessee Failed.

Viewing the Civil War alongside the simultaneous wars of Italian and German national unification, in which strong states (Piedmont-Sardinia, Prussia) invoked artificial national identities to enforce union and conformity, with long-running culture wars to follow, really helps make sense of what was happening on our side of the Atlantic at the time. Certainly, when teaching Western Civ II, when I invoke the Civil War after having taught the unification of Italy and Germany, I can see the relationship click for students. Conscription, propaganda, constitutional flexibility, and the state suppression or demonization of anti-war or pacifist elements are other familiar aspects of nationalist wars that relied (and rely) on the psychology of mass politics for victory.

Of course, Townshend’s invocation of attrition in the grinding bloodbath of the Civil War subtly underscores the psychological or “national will” factor. Since I’ve mentioned him here several times lately anyway, here’s John Keegan in Intelligence in War—which, coincidentally, includes a long chapter on Stonewall Jackson’s Shenandoah Valley campaign:

War is ultimately about doing, not thinking. . . . War is not an intellectual activity but a brutally physical one. War always tends towards attrition, which is a competition in inflicting and bearing bloodshed, and the nearer attrition approaches to the extreme, the less thought counts.

Severe attrition in ancient and medieval armies usually resulted in one side breaking after a few hours at most, but modern armies—the mass conscripted armies of “people’s wars,” the subject of other chapters in The Oxford History of Modern War—endure it for days, weeks, months, with far worse results than in ancient and medieval wars. Here, as Townshend suggests, the Civil War is a prototype.

* Protip: Avoid mentioning this aspect of the outcome of the war online; though manifestly true, it will summon someone with a Sherman profile pic to come and call you a “Lost Causer.”