Civil War Supply and Strategy: Feeding Men and Moving Armies by Earl J. Hess (review)

Once again, Earl J. Hess offers us an innovative approach to Civil War writing in his groundbreaking new book Civil War Supply and Strategy: Feeding Men and Moving Armies. Hess investigates the connection between armies’ strategic movements and their critical ability to feed and supply their men and animals. His argument is succinct: commanders who placed strategic operations ahead of supply and logistical concerns did so at their own peril. The author covers critical campaigns in the eastern, western, and trans-Mississippi theaters, although he pays particular attention to Union operations in the West where great distances, inhospitable civilians, and challenging environments hampered movements. Overcoming these obstacles to feed men and animals deep inside Confederate territory, Hess argues, was an “achievement...unprecedented in American history” (p. 21).

Railroad management figures prominently in Hess’s book. Both the Union and Confederate armies used extensive wagon trains to supply their men, and both lived off the countryside. However, the Federal army quickly learned how to successfully manage the railroads. The North developed a remarkable system of railroad transportation, maintenance, and repair. By 1865, the United States Military Railroad, under the direction of Daniel C. McCallum, had become the largest railroad company in the world.

For the North, operating on external lines of communication, the supply problems were enormous. To reach the tip of the spear, the North developed a supply chain that extended from major depots such as Cincinnati and Louisville to front-line units sometimes 350 miles away from their supply base. Confederate cavalry and guerrillas operating behind Union lines often ruined miles of track, bridges, and tunnels. Such damage threatened to leave an army vulnerable to starvation and capture deep inside Confederate territory, as nearly happened to General William S. Rosecrans’s Army of the Cumberland at Chattanooga (1863) and General Nathaniel P. Banks’s Army of the Gulf at Grand Ecore on the Red River (1864). Only the ingenuity of quartermasters allowed these armies to escape total disaster. Hess argues that the Union could not have won the Civil War unless its armies could maintain mobility and meet the challenges that otherwise would have impeded Union operations deep inside the Confederacy.

The author’s insightful strategic and logistic analysis of the movements of Union and Confederate armies offers scholars and general readers a fresh approach to the way historians should consider, study, and write the Civil War’s military history. For example, the author points out that during the Kentucky campaign of 1862, although General Braxton Bragg “continued to rely on wagon trains and foraging to feed both the Army of the Mississippi and the Army of East Tennessee,” he had no real supply line; and consequently, after the battle of Perryville he was forced to retreat through the mountains of East Tennessee, his men living off parched corn (p. 45). This lesson of moving rapidly and living off the countryside was not lost on Union general William T. Sherman, who later commented that he would “imitate” Bragg’s example but make sure his army remained tethered to a supply line (p. 47).

As in his previous book Civil War Logistics: A Study of Military Transportation (Baton Rouge, 2017), Hess pays more attention to Union operations because far more information is available and because building functioning supply lines was particularly challenging when attacking deep inside the Confederacy. Hess points out that the Confederacy’s institutional and administrative problems in feeding its soldiers created a number of strategic disadvantages. What Hess does not offer is a reason why those institutional problems existed in the South and not in the North.

Hess has written an important book. Military histories look at the strategic movement of armies but often discount the problem of supply. The author has shown us a different way of writing about war. Strategic operations must be considered within the framework of supply, and...