Conciliation and Its Failure, 1861-1862

Conciliation and Its Failure, i 861-1862 Mark Grimsley In November 1862 a military commission convened in Cincinnati to review the actions of Maj. Gen. Don Carlos Buell, recently removed from command of the Army of the Ohio. Although primarily concerned with Buell's apparent failure to come effectively to grips with Confederate forces, the commission also probed the beleaguered general's conduct toward Southern civilians. It summoned a variety of witnesses, most of whom firmly believed that Buell had treated Southern civilians too leniently. He should not have extended protection to everyone, regardless of their sympathies. He should not have restrained his troops when they needed to forage supplies from the countryside. Instead, he should have dealt sternly with open secessionists, arrested them and confiscated their property. But other witnesses staunchly defended Buell; and although clearly hostile to the general, the commission conceded that his actions toward the enemy population were unassailable. He had simply adhered to what was "familiarly known as the conciliatory policy." Whether wise or foolish in its effects, the commission concluded, "General Buell deserves neither blame nor applause for it, because it was at that time understood to be the policy of the Government. At least he could violate no orders on the subject, because there were none."' On the face of it, it seems odd that the commission could characterize the government's policy toward Southern civilians as "conciliatory" while maintaining that no specific orders on the subject existed. But the Lincoln administration had indeed given no formal instructions on the issue—in fact, would 1 Opinion of the [Buell] Commission, undated, in The War ofthe Rebellion: Official Records ofthe Union and Confederate Armies, 128 vols. (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1 880-1901), ser. I, vol. 16, 1:8-9 (hereafter cited as OR). Except where noted, all citations are to series 1. For background on the so-called "Buell Commission," see James Robert Chumney, "Don Carlos Buell: Gentleman General" (Ph.D. diss., Rice University, 1964), 1-32. See Testimony of William G. Brownlow before the "Buell Commission," Apr. 7, 1863, OR, vol. 16, 1:673-75. Civil War History, Vol. XXXIX, No. 4, © 1993 by The Kent State University Press 3l8CIVIL WAR HISTORY offer none until April 1863, two full years after the war had begun2—and yet an informal policy did exist, which Buell had earnestly tried to follow. The eventual demise of that policy signaled a major shift in the war's nature and level of severity. The standard current interpretation of the American Civil War depicts it as the first of the modern total wars. Although begun as a limited conflict to quell rebellion, it eventually became the "remorseless, revolutionary struggle " of Lincoln's fears. A number of gifted historians have described and explained this development in a variety of ways, many ofthem quite insightful.3 This essay builds on their work by examining the roots of the conciliatory policy and its early success. It then analyzes the various strains that beset the policy's implementation and critiques the competing explanations for its eventual failure. Finally, it suggests that the present conception of a one-step transition from conciliation to "hard war" may be too simplistic. An identifiable intermediate step, here called the "pragmatic policy," was conciliation's initial successor . Like conciliation, the pragmatic policy was essentially a conservative program that emphasized the need to win victory by battlefield success, not by subjecting Southern civilians to the burdens of war. Although it permitted greater severity toward those who engaged in or abetted guerrilla warfare and offered larger scope for Union foraging operations, it did not yet view the Southern population and economic infrastructure as major targets. The pragmatic policy differed from conciliation primarily in that it lacked a coherent strategic purpose. The mild policy, by contrast, sought to coax Southern civilians back to their former allegiance to the United States in order to erode support for the Confederate government and hasten its demise. In many ways the idea made excellent sense, given the widespread belief that secession had been the product of a small, slave-holding aristocracy. According to this view, the 350,000 slaveholders in the South—a mere...