Railroads in the Civil War: The Impact of Management on Victory and Defeat

6. The Failure of Confederate War Management

6 The Failure of Confederate War Management All our sacrifices of life and all our successes lead to no decisive result. . . . Is this owing to our inferior numbers, or to want of solidarity in the commands, or, finally, to want of genius in our commanders? —Josiah Gorgas Generations of myth, romance, and historical perspective have left many Americans with the impression that Union victory in the Civil War was inevitable. Historians cite the Union’s vastly greater industrial resources and population four times larger than the southern whites’, the Union navy’s strangling blockade, a flawed Confederate military strategy, and to some critics, the allegedly limited strategic vision of General Robert E. Lee. This sense of inevitability, however, escaped the people who lived through the experience. On August 23, 1864, a weary and discouraged Abraham Lincoln took stock of the war. General Grant, in spite of a summer of constant fighting with horrifying casualties, had neither defeated Lee nor captured Richmond. General Sherman maneuvered outside Atlanta, unable to get a bear hug on General John Hood’s army. The president reflected, then wrote a personal memo, sealed it in an envelope, and had his cabinet members sign their names across the seal. The memo 214 Railroads in the Civil War read: ‘‘This morning, as for some days past, it seems exceedingly probable that this Administration will not be re-elected. Then it will be my duty to so co-operate with the President-elect as to save the Union between the election and the inauguration; as he will have secured his election on such ground that he cannot possibly save it afterward.’’1 Abraham Lincoln had possibly the surest feel for the American political pulse of any president in the history of the Republic. His despair calls into question the Civil War’s ‘‘inevitable’’ outcome. Eight days after Lincoln wrote the memo, Sherman took Atlanta and broke the Confederacy’s back. The victory assured Lincoln’s reelection , with the rebellion crushed, its slave-based society destroyed, and the Union preserved. America would face the future as one nation indivisible, although thousands more Americans would have to die before the fighting stopped. Had Confederate arms denied Sherman his prize for another ten weeks, Lincoln’s memo might have proved prescient . Some historians claim that the Confederacy’s smaller population, limited manufacturing and railroad assets, lack of a navy, and modest financial resources condemned the Cause to defeat from the start. James A. Huston states that ‘‘ultimate victory has generally gone to the side having the greater economic strength and thus the greater logistical potential.’’ Richard N. Current argues, ‘‘It is hard to believe, and impossible to prove, that the Southerners did a worse job with economic affairs than Northerners would have done in the same circumstances .’’ He believes that, because of the Union’s significantly greater economic resources, Confederate managers ‘‘would have had to be several times as able, man for man, as those of the North’’ (emphasis added). He concludes that northern industry only had to perform as efficiently as southern for the Union to win the war.2 One respectfully disagrees. Rebellions by definition fight from positions of weakness—those in power have no need to rebel. Successful 1. Basler, Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, 7:514. 2. Huston, Sinews of War, 159; Richard N. Current, ‘‘God and the Strongest Battalions,’’ in Donald, Why the North Won the Civil War, 15. The Failure of Confederate War Management 215 rebels, as George Washington, Mao Tse-tung, and Ho Chi Minh attest , find ways to compensate for their limitations and capitalize on their strengths while neutralizing the enemy’s strengths and exploiting its weaknesses. Many rebel causes, such as the colonial Americans, Chinese Communists, and Vietnamese, to be sure, received valuable aid from sponsor governments hostile to their adversaries, while the Confederacy did not. British merchants, however, sold a war-sustaining volume of supplies on credit to the Confederacy, which blockade runners delivered through the aquatic equivalent of the Ho Chi Minh Trail. This suggests that capitalist greed exerts as powerful an appeal as liberty or socialism. For all its limitations, the Confederacy enjoyed some significant advantages that directly influenced logistical considerations. First, it was huge. The states east of the Mississippi River embraced a land area almost as large as France, Germany, and the Low Countries combined. In addition, the armies...