Confederate States Army

One of the Confederate forces in the American civil war. Because the Confederacy was besieged from birth, its army became the expression of the will of the southern American states to be free of northern domination. Regional, class, and racial fissures unquestionably became important, but any society subjected to intense pressure will crack. The struggle was not decided by inherent social and economic weakness, but by the inability of a conservative Confederate leadership to unleash the politically revolutionary power of that will.

Many arguments about the manner in which the Confederacy was suppressed, and why it took so long, arise from asking the wrong questions. Only if Lincoln's definition of the war as a police action is accepted does the duration of the conflict become remarkable; seen as an episode in American imperial expansion, it is not. In fact, it took a further century for the conquered territories to be assimilated, and fading echoes of southern nationalism continue to this day.

So much interest is concentrated on the Army of Northern Virginia that the six other military departments comprising 95 per cent of Confederate territory get correspondingly less attention. Yet outside the tiny area around the two capital cities, the Confederate States' armies had a nearly unbroken history of defeat which, particularly in the first two years, cannot be explained by the balance of forces and the river and railway systems that finally and overwhelmingly favoured the Union.

More narrowly, the argument that improvements in weapons had abolished the battlefield decision flies in the face of the rapid results achieved in the contemporary wars of Europe. Within each theatre the distances involved were not greater, and railways between theatres rendered their wide separation less significant than mere mileage suggests. The battlefields themselves were about the same size, as were the numbers involved, at or beyond the limit of even an exceptional commander's ability to control events. By virtually any standard of measurement, if not quite what Moltke ‘the Elder’ called it, a ‘brawl between armed mobs’, the conflict was very much more a Napoleonic war than a precursor of WW I.

With Confederate railways, industry, officers, and trained soldiers concentrated in Virginia, the correct strategy was to fight a holding action in the west while seeking a quick decision in the east. Tennessee was second in industrial development and infrastructure, and the resources of Arkansas, Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas were considerable. Texas also contributed a percentage of manpower second only to Virginia. A resolutely defensive posture in Tennessee would have inflicted punishing delays on the Union's ‘Anaconda Plan’, but instead western forces were dissipated in ill-conceived counter-invasions that became a net drain on the only theatre where the war might have been won outright.

Undue emphasis on Lee and Jackson tends to obscure the fact that the defining Confederate failure came from the top. As a national leader and his own de facto secretary of war, Jefferson Davis compares most unfavourably with Lincoln. Davis never had to use the threat of force to keep individual states in line, and if anything his great adversary's problems in maintaining political unity and with the diversion of resources by individual state governments were more debilitating. By contrast, faced with a tangible unifying threat, Davis never defined and still less rallied his nation behind realistic war aims. Above all, he was an arrogant man who refused to delegate, more concerned that talented men might usurp his authority than with harnessing their energy.

Among field officers, the fact that the South commanded the loyalty of the bulk of the pre-war officer corps worked against it. A levée en masse in the French Revolutionary style and Napoleon's ‘career open to talent’ was precluded by the extreme orthodoxy of Lee and his fellow generals. It can be argued that the spirit of the South was first crushed by its own leaders, and this can most clearly be seen in the western theatre. Only Joseph Johnston belatedly tried to make sensible use of this much put-upon western army, but he was preceded by the rancorous Bragg and followed by the criminally incompetent Hood.

Neither political nor military leadership offer any explanation as to why the Confederacy survived as long as it did, nor why the Union ultimately resorted to making war on the civilian population. The answer is to be found in the casualty figures, which argue that battlefield attrition worked very effectively—against the Union. Multiple enlistment and poor Confederate record-keeping render the figures approximate, but they appear to have fielded 1.1 million men against 2.8 million, for a military participation ratio of only 13.1 per cent versus 10.7 per cent. What is remarkable is that the Confederate armies, outnumbered over two to one, killed 110, 000 and wounded 275, 000 in battle, suffering only 74, 500 and 137, 000 themselves, even though average regimental strength declined from 500-50 in 1862 to less than 100 by 1865. Morale had certainly eroded by the end, but although Union troops were very much better fed, shod, and clothed and received better medical attention, non-battle fatalities also favoured the Confederates by 259, 000 to 124, 000.

Grass-roots motivation remains the outstanding reason why an industrially underdeveloped and diplomatically isolated nation survived the onslaught of a much more powerful neighbour for four years. What made Union generals treat the Confederate States Army with extreme respect until the end was the unyielding disposition and the innate military skill of the average southern soldier. His troops might have hated Bragg less had they known what he wrote after the battle of Stones River: ‘We have had to trust to the individuality and the self-reliance of the private soldier. Without the incentive which controls the officer, without the hope of reward and actuated only by a sense of duty and of patriotism, he has, in this great contest, justly judged that the cause was his own and gone into it with a determination to conquer or die.’

Bibliography

• Griffith, Paddy, Battle Tactics of the Civil War (London, 1987).
• McMurphy, Richard, Two Great Rebel Armies (Chapel Hill, NC, 1989).
• Vandiver, Frank, Rebel Brass (Baton Rouge, La., 1956).
• Data bank at: http://www.cwc.lsu.edu/other/stats/warcost.htm

— Hugh Bicheno