West Pointers and the Civil War: The Old Army in War and Peace (review)

Wayne Wei-siang Hsieh, assistant professor of history at the United States Naval Academy, has written a forceful and provocative book about the Civil War. He argues that the Civil War was long and indecisive in large part because both sides relied on graduates of the United States Military Academy to lead their forces. Those graduates were too evenly matched— had too many shared habits and flaws—to destroy one another in battle and win the war before 1865.

Although nineteenth-century Americans were deeply suspicious of regular soldiers and standing armies and preferred to rely primarily on citizen-soldiers to defend the republic, in 1861 they turned to regulars to lead the citizen-soldiers who would make up the armies of the Union and the Confederacy. They did so because graduates of West Point were the only men available who had experience with large forces and also because these men were accustomed to accepting civilian direction and to waging war as an instrument of state policy. Perhaps above all, in the Mexican War, West Point graduates had proved themselves capable of training volunteers, managing supplies, developing strategy, and conducting operations that brought victory over an enemy that had the advantages of fighting in defense of a primitive country with popular support. Yet for all their experience, West Pointers were far less successful in the Civil War than they had been in Mexico. In the Civil War they were fighting opponents who shared their understanding of war (of weapons, tactics, organization, and command), who were leading similar forces of citizen-soldiers, who were vulnerable to the impatience of civilian leaders and the unwarranted optimism of literate populations, and who learned the art of war at about the same pace. In short, the West Pointers who led the Union and Confederate forces in the Civil War were too much alike to achieve decisive results and end the war in fewer than four years of destructive fighting.

Hsieh's argument challenges some widely shared understandings about the Civil War. Most obviously, he minimizes the advantages that historians argue improved weapons (weapons with greater range and accuracy) combined with earthworks gave to armies on the defensive. He regularly attributes the failure of attacks to poor training and leadership at the tactical level and to the inability of generals to control their armies at the operational. According to Hsieh, at Fredericksburg in December 1862, Burnside's attack failed not just because the Confederates had a strong defensive position but especially because Burnside's subordinates did not know how to mount a coordinated assault on enemy lines and did not execute his turning movement around those lines. Similarly, Grant might have ended the war in 1864 had his subordinates followed his plans. The failures of his division and corps commanders were as important in creating the stalemate of 1864 as were Lee's earthworks and rifled weapons. Grant's overly cautious subordinates were unable to coordinate the forces needed to exploit such tactical advantages as Upton's breakthrough at Spotsylvania and Union engineers' success in blasting a gap in Confederate works at Petersburg. Hsieh is aware that skilled generals used earthworks to stop more numerous enemies (Lee at Chancellorsville) and to disrupt an entire campaign (Sherman's advance on Atlanta). Even so, he goes well beyond other historians in minimizing the advantages that fieldworks and rifled weapons provided a Civil War army on the defensive.

So too does he go beyond other historians in arguing that West Pointers exerted a moderating effect on the Civil War. He may be right in saying that Confederate officers discouraged guerrilla warfare and that they were unwilling to jeopardize social stability in a partisan war, but he is less convincing in asserting that Union officers were reluctant to make war on civilians and private property. As historians like Mark Grimsley and Charles Royster...