Discipline in American Civil War Armies

[Razgovory]

Okay, let me phrase that with less ambiguity.  I am absolutely certain that the Confederate Constitution forbade the slave trade.  It is in article 1 section 9.

[alfred russel]

Had the Confederacy won independence, the labor pool could be replenished.

Although that would have probably required re-opening the African slave trade, which would have lead to conflict (not necessarily open warfare) between the Confederacy and European powers, as well as the USA.

My objection isn't just that the slaves were freed and thus post war there wouldn't be slaves. The "trade space for time" strategy as outlined by BB was that you avoid critical defeats while allowing the union to move forward, and simply move back into territory as the union moved elsewhere (the Confederacy being too large to completely occupy). My objection is that with the slaves being freed (and frequently assisting the Union's war effort), the railroads destroyed, cotton gins wrecked, etc, the territory reoccupied was no longer capable of supporting the military.

I think that BB was recommending that the South use Washington's Revolutionary War strategy. There were problems with this strategy caused by increases in population density and industrialization. But the biggest problem is that an anti slavery country was facing off with a slave state, and the slave portion was (quite logically) inclined to the union once the union got to them.

[But realistically, post war there wouldn't be slaves to replace those that were freed. This was the 1860s. The UK and other nations were not going to let the Confederacy replace millions of freed slaves with African imports, even if that was feasible (which it wasn't). ]

[Berkut]

Yeah, the space for time strategy simply would not work except in very local areas, and even in those areas it had a huge political cost. Arkansas threatened to secede from the Confederacy when Confederate troops were pulled out, so they sent the army back in where it was promptly stomped on at Prarie Grove and Fort Hindman. Because there was no realistic way for the South to actually support a significant force out there.

That is actually kind of an interesting story. IIRC, van Dorn pulled his army out of Arkansas, Arkansas bitched up a storm and threatened to leave the Confederacy, so they sent another general (Hindeman) in - he got to Little Rock, noticed he didn't have an army, so promptly enforced marshal law, and just started drafting by force ever able bodied man he could find, and wasn't all that nice about doing so and "requisitioning" supplies for his new army. This kind of worked in that he was able to muster an army of some 12,000 men or so, but of course the howling of his being an authoritarian tyrant (YOU SAID YOU WANTED AN ARMY!) was loud.

Anyway, he marched off and lost the battle of Prarie Grove, and Arkansas was pretty much done with the war. Be careful what you wish for, you just might get it...

[ulmont]

Okay, let me phrase that with less ambiguity.  I am absolutely certain that the Confederate Constitution forbade the slave trade.  It is in article 1 section 9.

"importation."  Just conquer a piece of Africa for the CSA and Bob's your uncle.

[HVC]

why would a slave state stop the importation of slaves?

[Valmy]

BB, if you are still reading this thread, I'm interested how you would respond to my point that the South couldn't trade space for time (namely because they were slave society, and if they traded space that space was effectively lost forever--the manpower would effectively vanish, if not joining or supporting the enemy).

Had the Confederacy won independence, the labor pool could be replenished.

Although that would have probably required re-opening the African slave trade, which would have lead to conflict (not necessarily open warfare) between the Confederacy and European powers, as well as the USA.

I think the Confederate constitution forbids this.

I'm not sure, but I do know that some of the southern "fire-eaters" definitely wanted to re-open the slave trade.

They had another plan: a Caribbean empire. More space and people for slavery.

[Valmy]

why would a slave state stop the importation of slaves?

The African Slave Trade was considered immoral. For reasons. Also the British wouldn't let them.

[alfred russel]

Yeah, the space for time strategy simply would not work except in very local areas, and even in those areas it had a huge political cost. Arkansas threatened to secede from the Confederacy when Confederate troops were pulled out, so they sent the army back in where it was promptly stomped on at Prarie Grove and Fort Hindman. Because there was no realistic way for the South to actually support a significant force out there.

That is actually kind of an interesting story. IIRC, van Dorn pulled his army out of Arkansas, Arkansas bitched up a storm and threatened to leave the Confederacy, so they sent another general (Hindeman) in - he got to Little Rock, noticed he didn't have an army, so promptly enforced marshal law, and just started drafting by force ever able bodied man he could find, and wasn't all that nice about doing so and "requisitioning" supplies for his new army. This kind of worked in that he was able to muster an army of some 12,000 men or so, but of course the howling of his being an authoritarian tyrant (YOU SAID YOU WANTED AN ARMY!) was loud.

Anyway, he marched off and lost the battle of Prarie Grove, and Arkansas was pretty much done with the war. Be careful what you wish for, you just might get it...

I think that the other obvious problem with space for time is that Lincoln wasn't going to give up. The earliest that Lincoln would leave office was March 1865. By this point the Confederacy was effectively out of space: every state capital save Florida's (which I understand was basically not captured for humanitarian reasons as the war was essentially over) was captured by April 1865, and a significant portion of the territory the union didn't control was ruined.

The Confederacy had a huge amount of territory, but losing territory at the rate it did left it effectively out of space at the earliest the Union would have quit with a space for time strategy.

[Berkut]

Yeah, the space for time strategy simply would not work except in very local areas, and even in those areas it had a huge political cost. Arkansas threatened to secede from the Confederacy when Confederate troops were pulled out, so they sent the army back in where it was promptly stomped on at Prarie Grove and Fort Hindman. Because there was no realistic way for the South to actually support a significant force out there.

That is actually kind of an interesting story. IIRC, van Dorn pulled his army out of Arkansas, Arkansas bitched up a storm and threatened to leave the Confederacy, so they sent another general (Hindeman) in - he got to Little Rock, noticed he didn't have an army, so promptly enforced marshal law, and just started drafting by force ever able bodied man he could find, and wasn't all that nice about doing so and "requisitioning" supplies for his new army. This kind of worked in that he was able to muster an army of some 12,000 men or so, but of course the howling of his being an authoritarian tyrant (YOU SAID YOU WANTED AN ARMY!) was loud.

Anyway, he marched off and lost the battle of Prarie Grove, and Arkansas was pretty much done with the war. Be careful what you wish for, you just might get it...

I think that the other obvious problem with space for time is that Lincoln wasn't going to give up. The earliest that Lincoln would leave office was March 1865. By this point the Confederacy was effectively out of space: every state capital save Florida's (which I understand was basically not captured for humanitarian reasons as the war was essentially over) was captured by April 1865, and a significant portion of the territory the union didn't control was ruined.

The Confederacy had a huge amount of territory, but losing territory at the rate it did left it effectively out of space at the earliest the Union would have quit with a space for time strategy.

Indeed.

Also, the real hope for the Confederacy lay in international recognition. And that relied on being able to present themselves as an actual, functioning sovereign nation.

The north was not going to just meekly take whatever territory the South was willing to concede. They aggressively carved the Confederacy into non-functional chunks. They seized the Mississippi, and specifically targetted (at least in the West) Southern infrastructure and transportation links, and its not like there were many to begin with....and the geography in the West, with the country being pierced by multiple large rivers that the North had control over, and the South relied on for transportation, made the actual amount of operational space much more limited than strict geography actually suggests.

Quite simply, while the South was geogrpahically large, it wasn't THAT large. And the parts with lots of empty space were mostly in the deep South, where it didn't matter much. The South had to have Texas, Tennessee, Kentucky,  Virginia, and the Mississippi corridor to be a viable nation in any practical sense of the word. They could not simply concede those states and hope for the best.

[OttoVonBismarck]

Interesting thread.

In terms of discipline I don't think it should be surprising at all that both sides were significantly undisciplined. America's Army going into 1861 was small and irrelevant compared to other industrial powers of the day. By the time the war ended Lincoln stood at the head of the actual largest army in the world, and one that, with major infrastructure and logistical improvements undertaken by Halleck, was probably the most modern in the world. Europe had a longer history of standing armies in 1861 than America for sure, and standing armies in Europe had been drilling and training extensively for tactics that dated back to the 18th century, and that emphasized incredible discipline and the force of will to execute brutal bayonet charges. Neither of those things is developed easily in men, and less so when you don't have the infrastructure set up to do that. A lot of the farm boys on both sides who had grown up shooting guns would be familiar with them, and would be skeptical of using their guns as a spear against a wall of men firing at them. As has been demonstrated too, the simple increase in effectiveness of 1860s era rifled muskets versus late 18th century to early 19th century muskets was simply very significant. At several points in the ACW it was very obvious the commanders were ignorant of this fact (Fredericksburg infamously), by the time of Pickett's charge there was no rightful way anyone was ignorant of it--but Lee's arrogance was on full display that day.

If you go to Gettysburg today and visualize the initial length of the line for the charge versus how much it had shrunk by the time it reached the high water mark, all due to men being ripped apart by incessant artillery and musket fire, it's fairly obvious just how devastating it was.

The Union's war effort was frequently ill conducted and disorganized, but the long list of advantages they had, and how it was much less disorganized than the South, and the fact they just had more factories and more men make victory for the South difficult.

I think if the South was to have won they'd need international support, and they also probably needed to win some decisive battles to bring that about, they would need to also win some more decisive battles to make the North lose enthusiasm for the war. A big issue for them was Lincoln had an iron will and a desire to fight, and no matter how unpopular the war got he was never going to be impeached. Might he have lost the 1864 election? Yes, but I think if you have to, as has been said, fight the Union until March 1865 that's a rough situation regardless. Insurrections have frequently benefited from guerrilla tactics but those would have been all but impossible for the South the carry out--for the same reasons a general Fabian strategy would have been difficult to execute.

It's very hard to execute tactics that by necessity require you to allow the enemy to take land, farms, slaves--when each individual state is quasi-independent at running the war (sometimes refusing to even send men/taxes to the war effort.) The South was also more critically split, with a large portion of its population being slaves who would run away the second they were freed, making the land they had worked incapable of contributing to the war effort again even after Union forces left. The South also was more divided on the war itself in my opinion. There were a number of Union regiments from Confederate states, and "Unionism" was a problem for the Confederacy throughout the South. A significant portion of their population may have held some sympathies with the Southern cause, but were highly skeptical of the "solution" of breaking away from the Union and fighting a war over it. While the North certainly had significant Copperhead activity and draft riots and general war opposition, it had a much larger population to begin with, and even still you never saw regions of the North turn into mini-civil wars with Unionists or at least Anti-Confederate/Anti-War armed bands periodically controlling internal portions of the CSA and fighting with men more aligned to the overall CSA war effort.

There's so many things the South likely needed to do in order to win, like defend Richmond, defend the West, stop the Union from taking the Mississippi, stop the Union from taking New Orleans, keep the CSA states politically aligned, keep the armies fed/supplied etc that they really, structurally, just couldn't do all at once.

The society and structure of the South was such that a more modern insurgency just wasn't possible. Fighting an insurgency like that is only palatable if your life is already pretty terrible. Most Southerners had land, homesteads, lives that they wanted to continue. The war directly impacted all of them in a negative way. The South's political leadership were mostly slaveowners who desperately wanted to retain their political and economic power, and there was no easy way to say, concede large swathes of territory and fight an insurgency, while attaining those goals. To a a non-slaveholding southerner and to a plantation baron, losing slaves and land and then hiding in the forests and swamps to bushwhack Yankees just isn't a deeply appealing way of life.

A Washington-esque Fabian Strategy ala the American Revolution was also going to be much harder to execute due to advantages the Union had versus the Brits. The Union had a big internal rail/water network, supply lines were vastly shorter (and didn't require shipping men and materials across the Atlantic Ocean), political opposition at home paralyzed British politics also, while Lincoln got a tight hold on power early and while he dealt with a lot of opposition, it never affected his ability to control the country. The British also were primarily fighting to keep the colonies because of perceived economic benefit and general imperialist desires. Laying waste to all the fields and destroying the domestic economy of the colonies would have seemed very counterproductive. The British adopted a strategy where they believed capturing and holding key cities would cause the insurrection to wither and die, and that just didn't work at all.

The Union and Lincoln were fighting to keep their country whole, and literally felt almost any price was worth paying--thus the tolerance for shocking casualties and economic cost. The North clearly had no problem completely despoiling the economy of the South, with general recognition there would be a rebuilding process after.

[Razgovory]

why would a slave state stop the importation of slaves?

Because the British would hang anyone involved in the Atlantic slave trade as a pirate.  The US, a slave state at the time, outlawed the Atlantic slave trade in the early 19th century.  Continuing with the slave trade would likely create situations that could lead to war with Britain.

[Malthus]

Indeed.

Also, the real hope for the Confederacy lay in international recognition. And that relied on being able to present themselves as an actual, functioning sovereign nation.

The situation is made complicated because the only hope for the Confederacy was in obtaining English recognition (and hopefully alliance) - but that was unlikely as long as the Confederacy remained a slave state. Yet ultimately the nation split on the issue of slavery - if the Confederacy gave up slavery, it had little reason to rebel.

[The Minsky Moment]

why would a slave state stop the importation of slaves?

Because restricting supply increases price and therefore makes existing slaveholders richer.

[alfred russel]

The situation is made complicated because the only hope for the Confederacy was in obtaining English recognition (and hopefully alliance) - but that was unlikely as long as the Confederacy remained a slave state. Yet ultimately the nation split on the issue of slavery - if the Confederacy gave up slavery, it had little reason to rebel.

I think what is underestimated is the impact that the war had on southern opinion. Secession was a controversial topic, but support for independence gained quite significant support with invasion.

The size of armies is debatable, but Wikipedia put the size of the manpower of the confederate army at 750k-1m (through the entire war). The union army was 2.2m.

There were roughly 5.5m whites in the south, and 22m people in the north. That means the south mobilized between 13.6% and 18.2% of its eligible population, while the north mobilized 10%. That probably understates the answer to the call to arms for the south, because a lot of its territory was occupied early in the war and the north enlisted quite a few immigrants and some former slaves.

There was an emancipation movement in the South--as a means to secure victory (not as a social justice issue). As early as the summer of 1861 General Ewell (a future confederate corps commander) told Jefferson Davis that the outcome of the war was very much in doubt and the slaves should be freed and armed. That was a fringe opinion at the time, but it wasn't by the war's conclusion (freed slaves were beginning training when the war ended--though a number of generals favored a more universal emancipation, the confederate congress only authorized slaves voluntarily freed to be eligible to serve).

[alfred russel]

why would a slave state stop the importation of slaves?

Because restricting supply increases price and therefore makes existing slaveholders richer.

Also flooding the country with slaves will make a rebellion likely.