Book Review: Emory M. Thomas, The Dogs of War: 1861
I find the charge of presentism one of the most annoying things someone can say to a historian. Every historian is deeply affected by the times in which they live. There is no such thing as pure objectivity nor history disconnected from politics or everyday life. Each generation brings its own perspective to the field. Moreover, current events make us ask different questions about the past. Such is the case with Emory M. Thomas, who, in the context of American actions in Iraq and Afghanistan, wants to understand why Americans plunged into war in 1861 without serious thought as to the consequences.
Thomas prefaces his book with this statement: “I know and insist here that issues about slavery and race inspired secession among Southern states. Anyone who still doubts this truth should read Charles B. Dew’s Apostles of Disunion.” No question about that and a good way to clear the decks in a book about the start of the Civil War that is almost exclusively about whites. Not that this is a detriment. Rather, Thomas sees leaders in both the Union and Confederacy making decisions that would transform the country and kill 600,000 people without much serious thought about what such a war would look like.
Thomas’ argues that Americans went to war in 1861 because they did not understand the costs of the conflict. Or as he puts it, “the Civil War happened because nearly no one had a clue about what they were doing. Public and private discourse was loud and long and wrong about what might happen if war broke out.” This is not at all different from 2003 when we went to war with Iraq. Although Thomas doesn’t really explore this, a romanticized and superficial view of war has led Americans into many of our wars. A crisis of masculinity helped lead the U.S. into the Spanish-American War and World War I. Memory of World War I’s horrible reality helped build the isolationist movement that remained strong until the eve of World War II and it’s not like Americans really romanticized war during the height of the Cold War. It was too real and scary and world-ending. Even Vietnam was hardly proceeded with the kind of public sabre-rattling of 1861 or 1898 or 2003. But beginning with Reagan’s wars in Central America and especially during and after the first Gulf War in 1991, a lot of Americans decided that kicking ass should be the basis of our foreign policy. While this came into question after Somalia, the rise of video game culture combined with the cheap patriotism of the modern Republican Party (more flag lapel pins!) to create an atmosphere of Americans ready to fight some wars. Iraq didn’t turn out to be the video game so many Americans thought it would be. All three dates were periods when heroic war veterans were dying off or had died off relatively recently and America had seemed to lost its martial characteristics that many men (and some women) believed we needed back.
The particulars of Thomas’ book are as interesting as the general premise. He faults Lincoln, and I think rightly, for never understanding Southerners, even though he was born in Kentucky and married into a slaveholding family. He truly believed until the end that the mass of the South was ready to affirm loyalty to the Union if just the secessionist cabal could be beaten back. While there was significant opposition to the Confederacy in the South, a majority of southern whites in most states clearly supported their leaders in secession; the pro-Confederate aftermath of the war only reaffirms this. Because of this Lincoln was slow in preparing for the war and after it started slow in understanding what it would take to win the conflict. His persistence in this belief later undermined Reconstruction when Andrew Johnson and southern apologists would cling to Lincoln’s extremely generous plan for reconciliation to sabotage any possibility of postbellum racial justice.
Thomas argues that Jefferson Davis, as a relatively experienced military officer in a nation sorely lacking in military experience, had a somewhat more developed idea of what the Civil War would look like. He knew that the Confederacy faced long odds and would have to defeat a much more developed and economically advanced nation to win. But he also thought the Confederacy could win that war due to it fighting on its own soil. That he had a better sense of what modern war would look like yet still plunged into it does not make one feel very good about Davis, a man who seems deeply unpleasant from any angle.
The Northern and Southern public hardly helped the situation. Both sides thought a war would be good for a weakening national character, a sentiment even stronger in the North. The South on the other hand, steeped in Sir Walter Scott and contemptuous of industrial capitalism (even though it benefited them tremendously) basically believed the North wimps that were not even deserving of the basic rights deserving men of honor. This is why Preston Brooks beat Charles Sumner nearly to death in 1856 rather than challenging him to a duel. Honorable men fought duels, but Sumner had proven himself below the southern idea of manhood. Both sides thought the war would be quick, relatively bloodless, and re-energizing to a generation too distant from a martial experience. And boy would both sides be wrong.
This very short book is also written in an entertaining fashion with long (and often hilarious) quotes from contemporary newspapers slandering the Union or Confederacy as the case may be. North Carolina’s residents eat mud, Texans are horse thieves, Yankees are cowards and fools. The Dogs of War would be a great book to bring into the classroom or for an enjoyable yet thought-provoking evening reading on the nature of why people decide to kill each other.
I disagree a lot with what you write in other posts when it comes to politics, but I think your book reviews are first-class writing, and I enjoy reading them.
Depends upon what you mean by ‘presentism. Of course each generation of historians asks new questions based on their on historical experience. If that’s all you mean by presentism, I agree it’s a fine practice.
But when you get to the answers to those questions, they need to be understood in the context of their time (even if they might then be evaluated by the standards of today.) If they are not, you are not doing history, but something else.
I come to this question from the history of science, where the question of presentism (or, as it is more often phrased, Whig history) still carries a lot of weight. We can ask questions about Newton inspired by our own era. But the answers have to be couched in his own: he was not a modern day physicist, but easily combined alchemy and physical observation, and to evaluate him as a modern physicist is presentism at its worst, and does him–and the discipline of history–a grave disservice.
There’s no question about what you say. I consider myself basically a policy person who grounds that policy in history, but not all people see this. Not to be very specific, but I was introduced to a high ranking university administrator this year at a conference that dealt with aspects of the future and when he found out I was in history, he gave me a look that said “what the hell would a historian have to say about the future” and said the same thing in more guarded tones. So I try to wave the relevance flag with vigor.
Kind of off topic, but I knew a professor who taught an undergrad class called “history of the future.” It was about utopian movements and other movements that posited a vision of what the future could or should look like, so, for example, they read “Looking Backward.”
Yes. What happened then affects us now, but as the writer says the past is a foreign country and they do things differently there. Presentism has a bad reputation for a reason.
You certainly do that, no question.
A war of some sort was inevitable.
The Yankees could not have surrendered and/or retreated fast enough to avoid being shot at somewhere on their way to the US Canadian border.
“Peace” with the slaveowners would have entailed conceding all territory south of the Mason Dixon line from the Atlantic to the Pacific, including the Nations Capital and Kansas. And an agreement to let armed Southerner roam the remaining states of the Union to enforce of the Fugative Slave Act of 1850. This was just for a start.
In a couple of years there would have been more demands, and more concessions to keep the peace.
I wish that didn’t sound quite so much like dealing with Congressional Republicans….
Basically the same people, with the same goals.
The only thing different was a party switch during the late 1960s and early 1970s. The remaining Democratic voting people in the South are either minorities or the descendants of pro-Union Southerners.
exactly what I was thinking
“Thomas’ argues that Americans went to war in 1861 because they did not understand the costs of the conflict.”
I could understand that they went to war, not fully anticipating the costs, but not, “because”.
I would say that the “because” lay in a conflict, over slavery, made fundamental and constitutional by the theories they had about the constitution, and more generally, about political strategy and how to persuade others to cooperate politically.
The doctrine of unilateral secession was a deep, passionately held conviction in the mind of Jefferson Davis. He could not fathom the need to ask permission of the Union, for a separation, and therefore, he could not think through what it would mean to cultivate political alliances with northern elements, which might be open to separation.
In Davis’ mind, a state had an unassailable and unilateral right to secede, and once accomplished, solely on the state’s motion, it was a done deed. Unfortunately, the actual Constitution left the federal government, resting on its own bottom of electoral support, fiscal support and sovereign claims, untouched, as a practical matter. The southern states had seceded, but the U.S. took no official notice. Nothing about the formalities of secession forced the issue, and Lincoln thought he might be able to outwait the passions of the moment.
Davis, if he, or the would-be nation-state he led, admitted another sensibility, they might have applied for U.S. approval of a separation, and begun an appeal for nothern support for separation. In such circumstances, war and an appraisal of its costs surely would have weighed more heavily. But, Davis, concluded that the Confederacy must vindicate its rights by a contest of arms.
Davis’ ideas of war, as ways and means, were singularly unstrategic, for a graduate of West Point. Even after the war started, he never fixed in a practical way on how Confederate strategy might ultimately persuade the Union to consent to separation. And, in this, he embodied the will of his would-be nation-state.
The Union did, early on, move toward a practical grand strategy for winning the war, authored by Winfield Scott, the strategic genius, who had won the Mexican War. It called for war on an enormous scale, carried out along lines that would make use of the Union’s advantages, and would progressively reduce’s the South’s material ability to resist.
It may be that Lincoln did not appreciate the costs, at the outset. I can scarcely credit the idea that he did not appreciate what the country he led was about by the Fall of 1862. The Union effort, in their mammoth proportions were fully outlined, and the butcher bill was coming in, daily.
It is worth noting that the Union had no appreciable military establishment in 1861, and the war, carried out on an enormous scale, had been concluded within four years. The aims were clearly delineated, and the issue decided in a finite time period. In this, the contrast with Iraq and Afganistan is stark.
The problem with saying the war was concluded in a given time period is that everyone on both sides publicly said the war would be over in a matter of months. It might seem to us today that a 4 year war is a bounded time, but it absolutely did not seem that way to people in either the Union or the Confederacy in 1863.
I’m in the war-was-inevitable camp, but it’s hardly news that Lincoln was egged by his own political allies in Congress as well as the northern abolitionist press into doing something, and that northerners truly believed a quick strike into the South would end it all. Hence, the First Battle of Bull Run, which didn’t turn out to be the one-sided rout the northern public imagined it would be.
However, everyone on both sides immediately came to their senses after Bull Run. I don’t think there was any doubt that everyone knew as of 22 July 1861 that the war wasn’t going to end any time soon. But I have to agree with Erik that, despite all the war planning, there was no way to know, even after Gettysburg, how long the war would go on.
It’s worth pointing out that Washington kept the Revolutionary War against the British going by simply keeping his army intact. Lee managed to slip out of Pennsylvania with a sizable and experienced army after Meade screwed up. As long as the South had a large standing army (and Lee’s wasn’t the only one), there was no way to predict the duration or outcome.
Ir really wasn’t even all that certain after Appomattox. It was another several weeks before all the main bodies of the Confederate Army had surrendered.
If there’s one lesson to be learned that we never seem to, it’s that there is no way to know how long a war will last.
I would argue that it wasn’t until after Shiloh that people really started understanding what this war would be like.
Well, after Shilo is when Grant said he figured out what it would take to win the war.
It is not the decision to go to war, per se, that ultimately determines costs or time horizon. Those are consequences of how strategic objectives are defined and means to achieve those objectives identified.
The Confederacy failed to identify a practical means to achieve their objective of independence, beginning with a failure to fully appreciate that they would have persuade the U.S. to grant that independence. The Confederate military strategy never evolved beyond Lee’s vague hope of a dramatic enough battlefield victory, “a Cannae” (highly improbable, given tactical organization, and merely symbolic in its primary channel of effect). The Union did identify a practical military grand strategy in the Anaconda Plan, though it was one, which required mobilization on a massive scale. That mobilization began in earnest in July 1861, which is pretty early, though McClellan’s alternative of an easy hand and a grand demonstration was not discarded until he failed to execute it.
Among the Anaconda Plan’s virtues was that it defined a clear and progressive path to a Union victory, by persistence, not luck. The Union could fight for key objectives many times, and only needed to win once, and each Union victory reduced the South’s material capacity to resist appreciably. So, while both sides were exhausted, discouraged and distressed by 1863, the strategic significance of Union victories were clearly understood on both sides, even when they were a long time coming. People understood the significance of the Fall of New Orleans, the Fall of Vicksburg, the Fall of Atlanta, etc. Progress on that plan was critical to Union morale and willingness to continue the war, as well as cultivating Confederate understanding of the hopelessness of their cause.
The Confederacy never solved their strategic problem, even conceptually. They were fumbling at best in trying to find a means to discourage the Union, or cooperate with potential allies. Jefferson Davis tried to induce elements of the Democratic Party’s peace faction to foment violent insurrection — a clear misunderstanding of what a peace faction might be ready to do. The first ambassador he sent to antislavery Britain was a fierce advocate of re-opening the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Long before Lincoln could enforce his declared blockade, the South began an embargo, instead of shipping cotton to finance military purchases in Europe.
The U.S. occupation of Iraq and the war in Afganistan were strategic failures, because there never has been a strategic objective anyone would admit to, let alone a means identified to achieve it. Afganistan has become the longest war in American history because the “strategy” is to be there indefinitely. To leave is to lose. It is idiocy, but not much about having unrealistic popular expectations at the outset.
I think at best you could dispute that the North entered the war because it was mistaken about the costs; it had a huge industrial base and millions of people and arguably could be somewhat cavalier about the whole thing (like they were, what with the graft and waste and all).
The South, though? The South was clearly mistaken, both about the costs of the war and the effects of the war even if they won. Imagine if instead of arguing the war would last a few weeks, Jefferson Davis had argued that the war would last a decade, 25% of all Southern males were going to be casualties, and the Southern economy would be ruined for 100 years. Not really that compelling compared to the Republican aims (basically) of no Fugitive Slave Act and free territories.
It’s hard to put myself in a slaveholder’s shoes, but reading the stuff they wrote before it became all about the Lost Cause most of them thought the war was a complete waste.
We actualy have it on very good authority that neither side understood the costs of the war when it started–see Lincoln:
On the occasion corresponding to this four years ago, all thoughts were anxiously directed to an impending civil war. All dreaded it—all sought to avert it. While the inaugural address was being delivered from this place, devoted altogether to saving the Union without war, insurgent agents were in the city seeking to destroy it without war—seeking to dissolve the Union, and divide effects, by negotiation. Both parties deprecated war; but one of them would make war rather than let the nation survive; and the other would accept war rather than let it perish. And the war came.
One-eighth of the whole population were colored slaves, not distributed generally over the Union, but localized in the Southern part of it. These slaves constituted a peculiar and powerful interest. All knew that this interest was, somehow, the cause of the war. To strengthen, perpetuate, and extend this interest was the object for which the insurgents would rend the Union, even by war; while the government claimed no right to do more than to restrict the territorial enlargement of it.
Neither party expected for the war the magnitude or the duration which it has already attained. Neither anticipated that the cause of the conflict might cease with, or even before, the conflict itself should cease. Each looked for an easier triumph, and a result less fundamental and astounding
Did not intend to be anonymous at 10:11 pm Sorry.
I don’t know. My impression of the invasion of Iraq is that it accomplished exactly what they wanted it to, at first— they destroyed the nation. Firing all the Bathists, for instance, which meant getting rid of the majority of secular professionals with experience in running things, and destroying the vital infrastructure like water treatment plants, communications networks, and electrical grids laid the entire society to waste for the purposes of building it anew in the neocons’ image.
It was real Year Zero shit.
What didn’t work according to plan, was Chalabi and all the other expatriate grifters taking over the governing of the country and selling it out from under the residents at low, low prices to any filthy rich Master of the Universe who could afford it. I have to wonder about just how few MOUs could have bought the entire nation at the fire-sale prices you can get after you bring an entire nation to its knees, and ensure that they can’t reliably get electricity (in the desert, mind you), or clean water, or safe access on roads to transport any of life’s necessities.
It looked to me more like a failed experiment in neoliberalism than any of the bullshit lies and excuses they gave to launch a preventive war to be followed by an occupation, followed by “freedom” and “liberty”, etc. The “freedom” and “liberty” was supposed to go to the buyers.
They got pretty far on some accounts, and I don’t know if all or most of it has been rescinded; but one of the laws passed quickly through— arrgh— what did they call it? The something something Authority passed a law making it illegal for Iraqis to harvest their own seed. They could buy genetically modified seed and that was all. No doubt, Dupont, et al, had every intention of suing Iraqi farmers for patent violations for having the nerve to have their fields contaminated by errant seed, so that they could, through court action, end up owning those farms, the equipment, and the farmers themselves. Much like they’ve done here and in Canada.
I guess it worked out a lot better in their heads, than it did in the meat world, where people fight back, tooth and nail, to protect everything they have and love from psychopaths with a well-oiled killing machine. What could they do, but everything in their power even if that meant to die trying?
This is one example of the reasons that I’m anti-war, but not a pacifist. Sometimes, the only thing that make sense is to fight with all you have, because letting the destroyer/exploiter win is a loss so big that it extends beyond yourself and your country. It’s important for all of humanity not to let the psychopaths win. That just makes them want to take more.
Of course, our views of the past can change and THE WAY we views the past can change. It’s a healthy exercise, and it doesn’t just go one way. You view the civil war differently, then ipso facto, you view the invasion of Iraq differently.
Obviously the Civil War is dust, but wouldn’t “presentism” be something more along the lines of ascribing 21st century motives to key players in the Civil War?
The something something Authority passed a law making it illegal for Iraqis to harvest their own seed. They could buy genetically modified seed and that was all.
Slight correction: What the law allowed was for third parties to patent ALREADY EXISTING varieties of seeds that had been planted by the locals for centuries, and demand payment from farmers for planting them. No genetic modification needed. So it was even worse than you thought.
<emDW: In your latest book you made reference to Civil War soldiers shooting “as they had voted,” and to the kind of political education they had received over the previous period. The soldiers didn't have to be propagandized, they had some understanding of what they were involved in.
</emJM: There was no need for Civil War soldiers to have something like Frank Capra's series of propaganda films in the 1940s, Why We Fight, because that generation, I think probably more than almost any other generation in American history, had been totally politicized by these events of the 1850s, which were part of the common political culture of the time.
<emThis is an age in which young men, men in their late teens or twenties, as well as older individuals, were far more involved in the political culture than their counterparts would be today. There was no competition, for one thing. There was no television, no movies, no organized sports, nothing except public events to involve them outside their workaday life. Politics was a form of recreation.
</emElections were more frequent; the participation of the eligible electorate in elections was far higher than it is today. In the presidential elections in the middle part of the nineteenth century it was about 80 percent. It was over 80 percent in the elections of 1856 and 1860. So it was about double what it is today. Of course the electorate is much larger today. It was just white males, 21 years and older then, who were citizens. Those immigrants who had declared their intention to become citizens could vote in most states too.—James M. McPherson
http://wsws.org/articles/1999/may1999/mc1-m19.shtml
I’m going to take slight issue with your analogy to Iraq in 2003. In fact, we defeated Saddam even more readily and quickly than expected. However, we decided to become an occupying force and get into the nation-building business. This second phase was of course badly underestimated also, but the war planners were essentially correct about the invasion itself.
To be clear, Thomas makes these analogies even more bluntly than I do. He directly compares Henry Wirz to Janice Karpinski.
And he calls Andersonville a picnic compared to Abu Ghraib, which I’m not so sure about.
A hell of a lot more dead at Andersonville.
And to be fair to the Confederates, a lot less in the way of deliberate torture at Andersonville. They wre really apples and oranges.
The heart of the comparison, which I thought about writing about in greater detail in the review itself but it was getting wrong, is that both Abu Ghraib and Andersonville evolved out of situations where governments hadn’t thought through war enough to realize there would be prisoners and to figure out what to do with them, leading to outrages and violations of human rights.
“getting long,” surely?
Andersonville had a lot to do with lack of Confederate resources, even though that’s far from excusing what happened.
Abu Ghraib involved prisioners getting tortured. It was not the case that we didn’t have resources to keep them without torturing them.
Was there ever any question that we would engage in nation-building, though? I mean, obviously we didn’t know how long it would take or what would be involved, but did anyone ever actually think that after Saddam was defeated we were just going to leave?
Probably not. But there was that initial “decapitation” attempt: the airstrike on Baghdad, ostensibly in hopes that Saddam et al. would be killed, rendering an invasion unnecessary.
I have no idea how true that piece of spin was, but I recall at least some news outlets reporting that as the aim.
At the time, I thought they would follow the “decapitation” strategy, where they would keep the existing government intact, but just replaced the senior leadership. I thought the model would be Japan.
From what I remember, the Bush team thought that the model would be Japan to. The problem was that nobody in the Bush administration could act as MacArthur or the team of New Dealers that helped reconstruct Japan after WWII. The Americans who reconstructed Japan were statists rather than anti-statists. This made reconstruction a bit easier. Nor was there anybody in Iraq that could play the role of Hirohito, the Japanese bureaucracy, and early LDP leaders.
Iraq was completely different than Japan and what happened in Japan could not be replicated. Even Japan wasn’t easy. Originally, the American occupation wanted to let the Japanese write a new constitution for themselves. The result was a slightly more liberal version of the Meiji Constitution, so we decided to write the new Japanese constituion ourselves.
Success in Iraq may not have been in the cards, but if they had actually followed Japan as a model, then at least the level of disaster might have been mitigated. One big difference is that in Japan the US kept the central government intact, while in Iraq they fired everybody. This predictably lead to chaos. Another big difference (which you allude to) is that in Japan they brought in actual competent people, while this time around they treated the occupation as a source of patronage jobs for friends and family of neoconservative politicians. I don’t think you could successfully occupy an elementary school under those conditions, let alone an entire country.
When one is engaging in nation-building, it helps if one is a statist. The state is the organziation that runs the nation. If you really don’t believe in a state or only see it as a way to enrich yourself, friends, and family than you are not going to be a successful nation builder.
I don’t disagree with this at all.
That was probably Rumsfeld’s plan. Rumsfeld knew that wasn’t the administration’s plan, but he probably thought he would convince the rest of them. Rumsfeld added weight to his argument by ensuring that we were as unprepared as possible to engage in “nation building”. If you recall, tens of thousands of soldiers were added to the force over Rumsfeld’s objections toward the end of the build up.
In 1861, America’s most recent military experience was the Mexican campaign of 1846-48. That put the idea in people’s minds that war was a quick and tidy process, and so they marched off in 1861 with that mindset.
The Mexican War was not that quick and tidy. It took 2 years when most Americans thought it would be very quick. It took the march from Veracruz to Mexico City to end the thing. And it was a nasty conflict, especially on that march.
More accurately, it didn’t kill enough Americans to also kill off the romanticization of war.
It took 2 years when most Americans thought it would be very quick.
I’m not sure that was the case.
A lot of very knowledgeable people looked at the fact that the Mexican army was a lot bigger and ostensibly more professional than the US army, and thought we’d get clobbered.
No it wasn’t real – it was just hyped up by the MIC so that they could continue to suck the US Treasury dry. The Soviet Red Army was never going to come charging through the Foulda Gap and the Cuban Missile Crisis only happened because of US Jupiter missiles in Turkey. If the so-called Cold War had ever turned hot, it would have been because of American hubris/stupidity rather than Soviet aggression. The one good thing about the GWOT is that it has persuaded some Americans that the it is a fabrication of the MIC, but probably not enough.
Oh, really? That’s alright then.
Or as he puts it, “the Civil War happened because nearly no one had a clue about what they were doing.”
Okay, sure, but that also applies to WW1, probably to WW2 (1939), and probably to a lot of other wars.
War in general is such a bad thing that something has usually gone wrong with the political leadership if they think war (with a comparably powerful state) is a good solution to the problem du jour.
To be fair, didn’t Lincoln have to adopt that viewpoint to proceed with the war? If Lincoln admitted that most whites in the South were fine with secession, would that not have raised a legitimacy question at that time? (In 1861, few whites thought that blacks counted.)
I’m glad that you noted the Brooks assault on Sumner, for in many ways it is an excellent metaphor for the South’s view of the universe: only we are Honourable, no matter how we act, and what is Fair is determined by us getting our way. This was an attack by an armed younger man on an unarmed, older man taken by surprise, one who was sitting down and then pinned by his desk: it was the act of a coward and a brute and a criminal… and, like other crimes, was made possible by a fellow criminal with a gun who held off the efforts of people to stop the vicious brutality. Yet it was self-viewed by the criminals and by most of the south as a decent and gentlemanly act. When you pat yourself (or someone else) on the back for a criminal sneak attack grounded in cowardice then you obviously have some serious mental health issues … Brooks did, and so did the rest of the damned South.
Oh, and let’s not forget that when Brooks was faced with a duel — one in which he issued a challenge — he suddenly lost his enthusiasm for violence and chickened out.
I have always found a bit of justice in the fact that Brooks died soon after the attack and Sumner lived over 20 more years.
I wonder if a greater recognition of the effects of the war* would have prevented it? The Confederacy could have assumed that the Union would never suffer so much just to keep them in the Union, and the Union might assume that the Confederacy would never suffer so much just to leave.
You’d need both an accurate anticipation of the suffering to come, and an accurate assessment of each side’s willingness to endure that suffering to avoid the conflict.
_______
* I’m not talking about perfect prescience. I mean the scale of the desctruction.
The Union theory of the war at the outset — that they were vindicating the authority of the government — kind of makes cost-benefit analysis irrelevant. In game theory terms, the Union is administering a costly punishment, which, to be effective, must escalate beyond all reasonable proportion. And, the Union did begin organizing a massive effort in the first year; indeed, the closest the Union came to losing the War was in Winter 61-62, when the strains created by the scale of the effort, financial and organizational, were felt acutely.
I think it is harder to see why the Confederates did not see the war in cost-benefit terms. They were defending a material interest in slavery, and war was well-known, from the experience of the American Revolution, to be likely to erode slavery.
I think the mentality behind the Sumners-Brooks incident, mentioned above, played a large part in the evident inability of Confederate leadership to think through what they were doing, and what was necessary to accomplish their objectives. It wasn’t resources that condemned their efforts from the start, it was stupidity and moral obduracy.
It’s the all-volunteer military. We’ve created a military of professional soldiers that can go off and fight wars for us, while we remain relatively disconnected. I hate to say “bring back the draft” but that might be the only way to stop the madness.
“War happened because nearly no one had a clue about what they were doing. Public and private discourse was loud and long and wrong about what might happen if war broke out.”
I agree that both sides, but especially the South, were ill-prepared for war and had no idea what they were getting into, but I’m not sure this is a major revelation. Isn’t this true of most, if not all, wars? I don’t think anyone, in 1914, expected a four-year slogfest in muddy trenches and I’m not sure anyone could have anticipated that. (With the possible exception of Lord Kitchener and it’s not clear why he believed what he did, if he based that on solid analysis or made a lucky guess.) I can’t imagine anyone in World War II, on any side or in any theater of war, expecting that that war would develop the way it did.
I look forward to reading this book, though. I always enjoy reading about the South’s delusions of its own glory being destroyed (to the extent they have been).
There is a kind of converse way that the U.S. can get carried to war: knowing that war is the most deadly, costly, serious step we could take, how could a President advocate for war and not have clear, strong evidence for its urgent need? Surely that must be the explanation, anything else would be too ghastly to contemplate.
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