The American Civil War and the Origins of Modern Warfare (review)

BOOK REVIEWS The American Civil War and the Origins ofModern Warfare. By Edward Hagerman. (Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1988. Pp. xviii, 366. $37.50.) Most Civil War military history, like most military history in general, consists of narrative-analyses of campaigns and battles as seen through the eyes, so to speak, ofthe contending commanders. Edward Hagerman's The American Civil Warandthe Origins ofModern Warfare is not that kind of history. It takes what the author calls an "organizational" approach and focuses on how and why the Civil War was conducted the way it was rather than on what happened as such. One might say that instead of the traditional eagle's view, with its emphasis on the subjective and dramatic, it offers a mule's perspective on the Civil War, in which the objective and mundane are the center of attention. Hagerman, however, begins with the theoretical as he examines the nature ofAmerican military thought prior to 1861 . He finds it ambivalent. On the one hand it extolled the Napoleonic pursuit ofquick, decisive victory by means ofthe tactical offensive; on the other hand it stressed, notably in the writings of Dennis Hart Mahan, the value of the tactical defense based on field fortifications. Moreover, reflecting its prime source, Jomini, it suffered from a "mechanistic" divorce of organization from strategy. For these reasons, and also because oftheir ambiguous experience in the Mexican War, the generals of the North and South were inadequately prepared intellectually to fight the sort of war they had to fight in actuality. Hagerman then proceeds to devote the rest of his book (which derives in substantial part from his 1965 Duke University dissertation, "The Evolution of Trench Warfare in the American Civil War," and large portions of which have been previously published in essentially the same form in this and otherjournals) to demonstrating how Civil War armies coped with the challenges they encountered after April 12, 1 86 1—challenges that were unprecedented , unanticipated, and which arose from the technological, ideological , organizational, geographical, and social conditions of midnineteenth -century America. Broadly speaking there were three of them: (1) supplying tens of thousands of men and animals over long distances and periods oftime while far from water and rail transportation and oper- BOOK REVIEWS173 ating in regions where the terrain was rugged, roads few and poor, and population and forage sparse; (2) communicating information and orders in a timely and reliable fashion so that commanders could exercise effective control over these huge hosts; and (3) finding a solution to the tactical and strategic problems posed by the battlefield dominance ofthe rifled musket. The answer to the first challenge, overland supply, was the mule-drawn wagon. Civil War armies employed wagons on a scale far exceeding that of Europe or any previous war. Indeed, at times wagons were so numerous in Union armies that they impaired what they were intended to facilitate— mobility. To alleviate this problem, the Federals, with Quartermaster General Montgomery Meigs taking the lead, endeavored to reduce the ratio of wagons to troops by increasing the amount of rations the latter carried, using more pack mules, and developing better marching techniques. Their efforts achieved considerable success, notably in the Army ofthe Potomac, where the wagon-troop ratio was reduced from 45: 1000 during the Peninsular Campaign to 20: 1000 during Mead's post-Gettysburg maneuverings in Virginia. However, when Grant took defacto command ofthe Army of the Potomac in 1864 he scrapped many of Meigs's reforms and raised the ratio to 40: 1000. By the same token Rosecrans, when faced in 1863 with the need to traverse nearly a hundred miles of virtually barren country between Murfreesboro and Chattanooga, accumulated seventy wagons for every thousand soldiers in his army—the highest such ratio of the entire war— and the following year Sherman for similar reasons had fifty-two wagons for every one thousand men (the second highest ratio of the war) despite orders drastically curtailing regimental transport. In contrast, the Confederates , out ofnecessity and because theirarmies were smaller, got by with a much lower (although still high by European standards) ratio, at least until the closing months of the war when a shortage of...