Engineering Victory: How Technology Won the Civil War by Thomas F. Army Jr (review)

As William Tecumseh Sherman's army began its march from Atlanta to the sea, Confederate general Joseph E. Johnston observed, "If his army goes to hell, it will corduroy the road" (p. 264). In this important book, Thomas F. Army Jr. does a masterful job of proving Johnston's assessment correct. Indeed, Army shows that northern victory depended on engineering prowess to overcome swamps, mud, mountains, rivers, and trench warfare, as well as Confederate cavalry raids, advantages in interior lines, and a deteriorating southern railroad system.

Army's central thesis is that the antebellum North embraced education, technology, and progress, therefore creating a culture that encouraged common schools, mechanics' institutes, and agricultural reform. He makes a solid case that northern attitudes played a significant role in giving the Union the "masters and mechanics" with the educational and technical background to meet the engineering demands that radically transformed and modernized the Union army (p. 1). He also avers that the antebellum South rejected these same ideas, and that southern resistance toward progress and technological change were driven by a commitment to slavery. Although this thesis is familiar, some historians, especially those who study the antebellum southern economy, will find much of Army's argument on the southern economy less persuasive.

By far, the strongest sections of Army's study involve how the Union war effort evolved over time and how military commanders came to understand that engineering was the key to victory. Beginning with Ulysses S. Grant's use of engineers to try to circumvent Vicksburg by changing the course of the Mississippi River, Army gives a compelling account of how Union engineers overcame remarkable obstacles through innovation, organization, and Yankee can-do-ism. Army also explains the managerial revolution associated with railroads, notably how military leaders and civilian railroad managers coordinated their actions with the creation of the United States Military Railroad. In contrast, the Confederacy never centralized its railroad system, whose management remained chaotic throughout the war. Army contends that historians have overplayed the role, in this resistance to national control, of ideology and a belief in states' rights, while not giving enough credence to the South's hostility toward technology and change as a factor. Although Army strives to provide a balance in his analysis, it is heavily weighted toward the Union army's engineering efforts.

Overall, Army has made a major contribution to the understanding of how engineering and technology played a vital role in Union victory. Every scholar interested in the Civil War, the Union war effort, and the history of technology should grapple with his arguments and their implications. Southern historians may be disappointed in Army's analysis of the South, but it shows that more research needs to be done on the role of technology in the South. Along with Mark R. Wilson's The Business of Civil War: Military Mobilization and the State, 1861–1865 (Baltimore, 2006), Army's Engineering Victory: How Technology Won the Civil War provides essential scholarship on how logistics, management, and technology revolutionized both the economy and warfare in nineteenth-century America.