On Leadership: Heroes and Villains of the First Modern War

On the first day of my upper-level Civil War class, I play a game of word association with my students at Appalachian State University to demonstrate the prevalence of the Lost Cause in their understandings of the conflict. As part of that exercise I display pictures of Robert E. Lee and Ulysses S. Grant. Lee's image elicits immediate responses such as "military genius" and "gentleman." However, in thirteen years of teaching the course (including two sessions with high school teachers as part of a Teaching American History seminar), whenever I display a picture of Grant, the first response is always "drunk." Despite the fact that Civil War scholars have for decades deservedly praised Grant as the military mastermind who won the war, this pejorative stereotype remains deeply ingrained in the nation's psyche.

Add Williamson Murray and Wayne Wei-siang Hsieh to the list of those scholars who wish to destroy that Lost Cause interpretation once and for all. This is an unabashedly traditional, top-down approach that is interested in viewing the war solely through the eyes of its military leaders. The authors rely almost exclusively on published primary and secondary sources, utilizing biographies, campaign histories, and Official Records familiar to all Civil War scholars. They devote short chapters to the origins of the war and its strategic framework before dedicating the remainder of the book to the war years. They conclude that, ably supported by Abraham Lincoln and William Sherman, Grant was the linchpin of military victory. As the authors assert, Grant's leadership and strategic acumen "place him among the great generals in history and as the greatest general of the Civil War" (p. 353).

Such a volume is not exactly blazing a new trail through the historiographical wilderness. Over six decades ago, in his classic work on Northern military strategy, Lincoln and His Generals (1952), T. Harry Williams analyzed Lincoln as commander-in-chief and found him to be a savvy director with a better grasp of strategy than his generals. In his analysis, Lincoln, Grant, and Sherman emerged as the true savants of modern war. Similarly, Russell Weigley, in A Great Civil War (2000); David Eicher, in The Longest Night (2001); and Donald Stoker, in The Grand Design (2012) all find Lincoln, Grant, and Sherman to be the triumvirate that wins the war, although they differ on points of analysis.

Perhaps the primary outlier to the Union Holy Trinity led by Father Abraham was How the North Won (1983), in which Herman Hattaway and Archer Jones thought they were correcting Williams' interpretations. Less convinced of the strategic credit Lincoln deserved, they delved deeply into how the ideas of Swiss military theorist Antoine Henri Jomini influenced officers and shaped the conduct of the war. They stressed the effects of rifle technology as pivotal in the outcome of the war. They also lauded Henry Halleck as a general who intuitively grasped the war's logistical difficulties and recognized that technological developments in weaponry had rendered decisive victories that destroyed armies well-nigh impossible. In their view, Halleck teamed with Grant and Sherman to wage a war of exhaustion on the South. Murray and Hsieh strongly disagree with each of these interpretations.

A Savage War convincingly argues that the Civil War was the first war to merge the French Revolution and the Industrial Revolution. The ideals of nationalism and mass mobilization from the former matched with the technological developments of the latter to increase both the killing zones and the number of those who lined up to be slaughtered. But the Industrial Revolution led to logistical transformations as well. The infrastructure needed to feed a million men in the Union armies and 600,000 in the field was provided by locomotives and riverboats. Those steam engines "would prove to be the crucial enabler of the North's victory, because they shrank the tyranny of distance" (p...