When studying for my Masters of Arts in military history at Norwich University a few years ago, I was required to take a course on American military history. As might be expected, my favorite area of that class was the history of the Civil War. More so than most people, in large part because I grew up as a Northern-born proud Yankee raised in the rural South [1], I have a strong degree of interest in the Civil War [2]. Among the fiercest debates I have with others about the Civil War is the legitimacy of the hard war undertaken by Northern generals like Sherman and Sheridan, often at the behest of General-in-chief Ulysses Grant, who told Sheridan to make the fertile Shenandoah valley such a barren waste that crows flying over it would have to carry their own victuals with them, because no food would be found in the valley itself after Sheridan’s force was done with it [3]. And so it was. The legitimacy of the logistical warfare of the North against the South in the second half of the Civil War remains a subject of contentious debate, and from time to time I have thought about it and debated it.

From the beginning of the Civil War, at the very outset of rebellion, Southerners were reminded by no less a person than William Tecumseh Sherman himself that the North had overwhelming advantages in areas of logistics. To be sure, the advantages the North had over the South in the Civil War were not on the level of the advantages of the contemporary Triple Alliance over landlocked Paraguay, but they were larger than the logistical advantages of Prussian-led Germany over France, to put it in some kind of contemporary context. Far more than most rebels, the South was vulnerable to logistical warfare in a unique way. Most nations that rebel, including the northern part of the United States during the American Revolution, had areas where they could retreat to that afforded them some safety from invading armies, and a simple enough society that the loss of cities would not be disastrous for the sake of the rebellion. The rebellion of the South, though, was a revolt by a privileged if declining elite in defense of a particular system of plantation slavery, and as the wealth of the South was concentrated in land and slaves, the land which could not move and the slaves who were all too happy to move to Northern lines and freedom, the South was vulnerable to logistical warfare in ways that few rebellions are.

In light of the paradoxical double-bind that the Confederacy found itself in, where it was inferior in terms of logistics to the North but simultaneously vulnerable in that it was fighting for an unjust system of slavery that led its wealth to be concentrated in areas that were easily accessible to coastal, riverine, and railroad-based invasion, it would appear that logistical warfare would be an obvious strategic choice that could have been made from the very beginning of the Civil War. It should be noted that some Union generals, most prominent among them Benjamin Butler, recognized this from the beginning by declaring runaway slaves to be contraband and refusing to return them to secessionist slaveowners, a policy that was tacitly endorsed by Lincoln and that ended up providing an initial push to what became the mortal wound of chattel slavery in the United States. Yet the widespread regard of the respect for property within the United States protected the Confederacy for a time from the worst ravages of such warfare in the hope that dealing with gentleness would lead the errant rebels to return peacefully to the Union on the terms of a status quo ante, along with an acceptance of the demographic power of the North and a shift in the basis of majoritarian power to the free states on a more or less permanent basis. Yet it was the very initial success of the South that led to its ultimate ruin when generals like Grant, Sherman, and Sheridan first practiced the harder hand of war in places like Mississippi during the Vicksburg campaign and then expanded its use as their armies invaded deeper and deeper into the South.

From time to time I have pondered the possible outlines of civil war within the contemporary United States. Like the antebellum South, we too are an affluent society with massive logistical vulnerabilities, including a population that is largely based in towns and cities with long supply routes and that lacks knowledge in how to produce its own food supplies, and whose water and power sources are based on vulnerable lines and infrastructure as well, to say nothing of the vulnerabilities of our transportation routes, which would ensure gridlock and an inability for areas to flee any sort of sudden trouble. For example, this past week the traffic in Portland was particularly terrible because there was a landslide blocking off I-5 in Southern Washington, forcing traffic to reroute to the next bridge to the West, a considerable detour through a highway not designed for interstate-level traffic in addition to its own. This sort of problem could be repeated ad nauseum in basically any metropolitan area of the United States, where there are many people, few excess lanes for high speed travel, and slow conditions even under normal circumstances. We truly are a vulnerable people when it comes to matters of logistical warfare. Let us hope we never have to suffer because of those vulnerabilities, but I am not a sanguine person in such matters.

In my debates I have defended Sherman and others from the charges that their methods of warfare were particularly barbarous. After all, Sherman’s army, and that of others, was a finely tuned instrument that did not destroy indiscriminately, and whose logistical warfare ended as soon as an area was reached that was not a hotbed of rebellion, namely North Carolina. The Northern march was not accompanied by raping and slaughter, unlike some marches through enemy territory. The two sides were able to see each other in a humane enough way that at Appomattox and Bennett Farm, to give but two examples, the surrender of the principal Southern armies was done in a spirit of generosity and broad-mindedness that was done with the intent to help make the peace afterwards as enduring as possible. And so, for the last 150 years, there has been no serious internal rebellion in our nation, an enviable record in a world that has known many such conflicts. May it be that the knowledge that there is much to lose by choosing rebellion hinders others from choosing that option. Let us hope we do not live to see days when our own well-being may be threatened by our political folly.

[1] See, for example:

Non-Book Review: To Live And Die In Dixie

Cracker Country

For Who Gives In And Turns His Eye

Wearing Orange On St. Patrick’s Day

It’s The Truth, It’s Actual, Everything Is Satisfactual

Not So Different After All

Cork Station

Too Delicate A Sense of Honor

Names I Call Myself: A Musing on the Politics of Self-Identity

Entering Through The Front Door: The Endurance of Antebellum Hospitality

Death Is A Hungry Hunter

[2] See, for example:

Being A True And Faithful Account Of The Battle Of Filbert Grove

Join Or Die

We’re Manly Men Of Maine

On The Legitimacy Of Historical Reenacting

For The Love Of The Game

[3] Long, David E. The Jewel Of Liberty: Abraham Lincoln’s Re-election And The End Of Slavery. Mechanicsburg, PA: Stackpole Books, 1994, 213.