The Fourth Battle of Winchester: Toward a New Civil War Paradigm (review)

To many historians, counterfactuals are the bane of serious inquiry. Yet as Richard McMurry demonstrates in this short but clever offering, such propositions can serve as useful pedagogic tools. Challenging "the common 'Virginia-centric' view" of the American Civil War "that still hampers so many of those who seek to understand how [it] unfolded" (p. 50), he constructs a series of imaginary Southern victories in the East to illustrate his thesis: "Defeat for the Rebels came in the West" (p. 144). Dominant conceptions of the conflict must be reframed accordingly.

McMurry asks his readers to imagine the following scenario: suppose the Confederates had been able to check the twin offensives of Phil Sheridan and Ulysses S. Grant against the Shenandoah Valley and Richmond-Petersburg sectors and the year 1864 closed in Virginia as had the previous two—with a stalemate along the Rappahannock River. Suppose, too, that the resulting effect on Northern opinion would have cost Abraham Lincoln his re-election. Total defeat of the South would have occurred the following spring regardless, McMurry insists, because "the ultimate military outcome of the war would not have changed" (p. 49). The main Confederate field force in the West (the Army of Tennessee) would still have been destroyed at Franklin and Nashville, and William T. Sherman's forces would still have marched through Georgia and the Carolinas, trapping Robert E. Lee's men in a Confederacy reduced to "a shrinking rectangle in eastern and south-central Virginia" (p. 39).

McMurry reminds scholars and buffs alike that as the Army of the Potomac and the Army of Northern Virginia contested the one hundred miles of ground separating their respective capitals for four years, "other great armies fought their way from the Ohio River to the Gulf of Mexico, from the Mississippi Valley to the Atlantic Coast, and from the mouth of the Ogeechee River on the Georgia coast below Savannah to Raleigh, North Carolina." He argues that the conflict must be examined within these broader parameters to reach a proper understanding of "why and how the South lost and why and how the North won" (pp. 53–54). To maintain independence, the Confederacy needed to avoid major defeats in both theaters; in the West, Southern arms experienced "a virtually unbroken string of defeats" (p. 66).

One can easily take issue with a number of McMurry's specific pronouncements. His presentation of final military results as functions of little more than the sum of all combat action smacks of the same type of overly-narrow paradigm he seeks to challenge. Further, his plea for the primacy of the West over the East overlooks substantive issues of connectivity; in McMurry's analysis, as in his counterfactual, the two theaters operate in artificial isolation from each other. Nevertheless, at a time when the historiography of the Civil War is bloated by a ceaseless parade of exhaustive tactical studies of eastern battles, and the cottage industry of Gettysburg scholarship provides almost bullet-by-bullet accounts of three arguably inconsequential July days, this admonition to remember the space between the Mississippi River and the Allegheny Mountains comes none too soon.