Civil Warriors

Originally published in Blog Them Out of the Stone Age, August 24, 2005

Only the most devoted readers of this blog will recall that I’m under contract to write a book in the Oxford University Press Pivotal Moments in American History series, edited by David Hackett Fischer and James M. McPherson. McPherson published the inaugural volume in the series — Antietam: Crossroads of Freedom — in 2002. Fischer’s contribution to the series, Washington’s Crossing, came out last year. Six other books in the series have also appeared, with at least one more in press.

My “pivotal moment” deals with 1864. It was a presidential election year, so the most obvious pivot is the question of Lincoln’s reelection. Usually this is framed in terms of whether the Democratic nominee, George B. McClellan, might have defeated him in November, and whether that, in turn, might have led to a compromise peace or even Confederate independence. But given that Lincoln faced no fewer than three challenges from within his own party, one must also think about the chances of his being replaced — by Salmon P. Chase, John C. Frémont, or some other candidate. Believe it or not, the name of Benjamin F. Butler was bruited about more than once. And Lincoln quietly but carefully sniffed out Grant for possible presidential aspirations before appointing him general in chief.

Eighteen sixty-four was also the year in which white Americans, North and South, began to come seriously to grips with a change in the racial status quo. African Americans had a significant, albeit informal, influence over this shift, most obviously because Blacks were becoming increasingly important as a reservoir of military manpower.

In the realm of counterfactuals and contingency, Lincoln’s reelection is widely thought to have hinged on the perception of Union military success.

If the election had been held in August 1864 rather than November, Lincoln would have lost. . . . This did not happen, but only because of events on the battlefield — principally Sherman’s capture of Atlanta, and Sheridan’s spectacular victories over Jubal Early in the Shenandoah Valley. These turned northern opinion from deepest // despair in the summer to confident determination by November.” (James M. McPherson, “American Victory, American Defeat,” in Gabor S. Boritt (ed.), The Collapse of the Confederacy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 39-40.

“There was nothing inevitable about northern victory in the Civil War. Nor was Sherman’s capture of Atlanta any more inevitable than, say, McClellan’s capture of Richmond in June 1862 had been. . . .” (Ibid., 41)

Albert Castel agrees, and greatly amplifies this thesis in

Albert Castel, “The Atlanta Campaign and the Election of 1864: How the South Almost Won By Not Losing,” in Castel, Winning and Losing in the Civil War (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1996), 15-32.

However, William W. Freehling — though in agreement that Atlanta “was the Confederacy’s last best hope to escape strangulation,” thinks that it was nonetheless a forlorn hope, that the point of no return had been reached in 1863. And he argues that certain structural factors — e.g., superior Northern military and industrial strength and internal stresses within the Confederacy — make Confederate victory unlikely in any event. As for Lincoln’s reelection being dependent on a timely military triumph, and Union victory being dependent on Lincoln’s reelection:

“[F]or military historians to be declared right that Sherman’s victory alone could have saved Lincoln’s victory, or that Lincoln’s victory alone could have saved Union victory, political historians must be proved dead wrong about antebellum politics in general and the Democratic Party in particular.” [William W. Freehling, “The Divided South, the Causes of Confederate Defeat, and the Reintegration of Narrative History,” The Reintegration of American History: Slavery and the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 226-227] The former because 90 percent of 19th century American voters remained loyal to party, the latter because Peace Democrats were a minority within that party.

See also Freehling’s The South vs. the South: How Anti-Confederate Southerners Shaped the Course of the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), esp. pp. 177-199.

William C. Davis shares Freehling’s skepticism in “The Turning Point That Wasn’t: The Confederates and the Election of 1864,” The Cause Lost: Myths and Realities of the Confederacy (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1996), 127-147. Davis does concede, grudgingly, that Confederate military success in 1864 could have unseated Lincoln, but ups the ante by implying it would have taken more than Atlanta.

In the end the only Confederate acts that could have — not necessarily would have — affected the outcome were those in the one theater in which the war was being decided from the outset: the battlefield. If Jubal Early had captured Washington and held it for some appreciable time. If Sterling Price had wrested Missouri from the Union and been able to hold it. If the forts at Mobile had been able to repulse Farragut and his fleet. If Lee had been able to take some action against Grant, however small, to embarrass him in the trenches at Petersburg. And most important of all, if Joseph E. Johnston or John Bell Hood had been able to turn Sherman decisively, not just away from Atlanta, but back on his base at Chattanooga. If all these ‘ifs’ had come to pass, they would have constituted a series of body blows to Union morale and Lincoln’s prestige, at the rate of one every few weeks during the last four months of the election campaign. Then quite possibly, even probably, sagging Northern spirits would have translated into Democratic votes.” (137)

This comes fairly close to the famous Saturday Night Life sketch that asked, “What if Eleanor Roosevelt could fly?” Even if the Confederates ran the tables, it would have resulted only in a McClellan victory, and Davis argues that McClellan would have continued the war and would have inherited a military position in which he could hardly have failed to win it.

Larry J. Daniel concurs with Davis and systematically critiques Albert Castel’s essay in “The South Almost Won By Not Losing: A Rebuttal,” North and South Magazine vol. 1, no. 3 (February 1998):44-48, 50-51. (BTW, I’m grateful to Eric Wittenberg for the loan of this article, which I was finding hard to locate.)

Most recently we have:

Richard M. McMurry, “The Atlanta Campaign and the Election of 1864,” appendix four of Atlanta 1864: Last Chance for the Confederacy (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000), 204-208. He writes:

[F]orays into counterfactual history can be instructive. They often help us get a better understanding of the past by forcing us to examine roads not taken and the reasons why they were not. Such exercises, however, lose validity as they become more and more complex. They must keep within the bounds of the possible. It helps if we limit them to possibilities that were probable.

To apply such counterfactual speculations to the Atlanta campaign and the 1864 election, we have to work our way successively through a maze of at least a dozen counterfactual scenarios.

Which he does on pp. 206-207, and concludes:

In arguing that Lincoln had to have military success (or perceived success) in 1864 to win reelection, Castel was correct. I believe, however, that success came late on May 8 at Snake Creek Gap, not at Atlanta on September 2. Given the passive way [Confederate Gen. Joseph E.] Johnston was determined to conduct his campaign, loss of that meant that the Rebels could not — or at least really would not attempt to — halt Sherman’s advance into Georgia. (207)

It’s that last contention that justifies the focus on Snake Creek Gap in the Snake Bite series of posts. My purpose, however, is neither to introduce new revelations about this operation nor to argue that America’s future necessarily hinged on what occurred here. It’s to better understand the role of counterfactuals and contingency in historical interpretation — and figure out how to explain this to the readers of my OUP book.

Some photos from a rainy visit to Valmy last week with my wife and daughter. The photo below on the left is of me and Corinne at the Kellerman monument; the photo on the right is of the famous Moulin de Valmy, a major landmark on the 20 September 1792 battlefield that was reconstructed a few years ago. Further down is a photo of the rear of the Kellerman monument looking toward the windmill.

Perhaps the most notable participant in this battle, aside from General Francois Kellerman (later given the title the Duc de Valmy), who famously rallied the French army by shouting “Vive la Nation!”, was Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Goethe later wrote of his experience:

I had now arrived quite in the region where the balls were playing across me: the sound of them is curious enough, as if it were composed of the humming of tops, the gurgling of water, and the whistling of birds. They were less dangerous by reason of the wetness of the ground; wherever one fell, it stuck fast. And thus my foolish experimental ride was secured against the danger at least of the balls rebounding.

In the midst of these circumstances, I was soon able to remark that something unusual was taking place within me. I paid close attention to it, and still the sensation can be described only by similitude. It appeared as if you were in some extremely hot place, and, at the same time, quite penetrated by the heat of it, so that you feel yourself, as it were, quite one with the element in which you are. The eyes lose nothing of their strength or clearness, but it is as if the world had a kind of brown-red tint, which makes the situation, as well as the surrounding objects, more impressive. I was unable to perceive any agitation of the blood; but every thing seemed rather to be swallowed up in the glow of which I speak. From this, then, it is clear in what sense this condition can be called a fever. It is remarkable, however, that the horrible uneasy feeling arising from it is produced in us solely through the ears. For the cannon thunder, the howling and crashing of the balls through the air, is the real cause of these sensations.

After I had ridden back and was in perfect security, I remarked, with surprise, that the glow was completely extinguished, and not the slightest feverish agitation was left behind. . . .

At last I was called upon to say what I thought of the engagement, for I had been in the habit of enlivening and amusing the troop with short sayings. This time I said, “From this place and from this day forth commences a new era in the world’s history, and you can all say that you were present at its birth.”

This passage was evidently on David L. Thompson’s mind when he recalled in an essay in Battles and Leaders that during the 9th New York’s attack at Antietam: “the air was full of the hiss of bullets and the hurtle of grape-shot. The usual strain was so great that I saw at that moment the singular effect mentioned, I think, in the life of Goethe on a similar occasion–the whole landscape for an instant turned slightly red.”

I was curious to know the strength and distribution of U.S. Colored Troops on the eve of the 1864 campaign.  Comprehensive strength info is hard to come by, so I substituted numbers of USCT regiments or (in case of artillery) regiment equivalents.  Here’s what I found.  First number represents units at nominally full strength; second number represents detachments or units significantly under strength.

Department of Arkansas – 11 +2 under strength units (OR 34/4, 607-609) [9.9 percent of total USCTs]
Department of the Cumberland – 6 (OR 32/3, 551-560) [5 percent]
Department of the East – Not found; probably none
Department of the Gulf – 37 + 3 (OR 34/4, 611-619) [33 percent]*
Department of Kansas – 0 (OR 34/4, 619-622)*
Middle Department – 0 USCT (OR 33, 1051-1052)
Department of the Missouri – 3 (OR 34/4, 623-625) [2.5 percent]*
Department of the Ohio – 1 (OR 34/4, 570-573) [>1 percent]
Department of the Potomac – 5 USCTs + 1 detachment (OR 33, 1047-1053) [5 percent]
Department of the South 15 + 1 (OR 35/2, 78-79) [13.5 percent]
Department of the Susquehanna – 0 USCT (OR 33, 1053)
Department of the Tennessee – 20 + 3 (OR 32/3, 560-569) [18 percent]
Department of Virginia and North Carolina – 12 + 2 detachments (OR 33, 1053-1058) [10 percent]
Department of Washington – 1 USCT (OR 33, 1047-1050) [>1 percent]
Department of West Virginia – Not found; probably none

* June 30; organizational tables unavailable for March, April, May 1864

TOTAL:  111 USCT regiments at nominally full strength; 11 detachments or units obviously well under strength

First Addendum:  Military Division of the Mississippi:  27 + 3 [24 percent]

Second Addendum:  USCT strength as of October 1863, 58 regiments with a total strength of 37,482; USCT strength 140 regiments with a total strength of 101,950 as of October 1864.  Averaging these numbers and applying them to the 111 USCT units in April 1864 yields an estimate of 76,282 troops as of April 1864; figure 80,000 if you include under strength units.  Obviously these are provisional estimates; still thought they might be worth passing along.

I don’t know why it never before occurred to me to shove a camera down the muzzle of a 3-inch ordnance rifle, but the effect is kinda cool.

. . . the year of the Ox.

Cross-posted from Blog Them Out of the Stone Age

David Bosco in The American Scholar has a nice precis of Lieber’s Code, the world’s first officially issued guidelines for the conduct of war. Published by the U.S. War Department at the height of the Civil War, the code takes its name from its author, the German American jurist Francis Lieber, who persuaded Union general in chief Henry W. Halleck that a set of guidelines was needed.

As Bosco notes, Lieber’s Code had scant influence on Union generals but enormous influence on the subsequent development of international law concerning the conduct of war, especially the Hague and Geneva Conventions — what might be called Lieber’s Code 2.0. Those rules of war came under tremendous pressure in the twentieth century, and in an era in which asymmetric warfare by non-state enemies is the norm, they may be badly outdated.

Why not then craft a new code or revise the old ones to deal more effectively with today’s conflicts? As the realities of warfare have changed, the law has changed many times to adapt. Some specialists have argued that a new protocol is needed to better define who is entitled to prisoner-of-war status, what force is appropriate against nonstate terrorist networks, and what rules should govern interrogations. The realities of today’s conflicts, they contend, no longer fit the legal structures society has developed. In effect, a new Lieber is needed for today’s General Hallecks.

Unfortunately, the prospects for another “Lieber moment” appear slim. Many American leaders feel estranged from recent developments in international humanitarian and criminal law. The bewildering network of international conventions, courts, and commissions that is so inspiring to activists often appears menacing to those officials responsible for security policy. The ICC’s birth, for example, occasioned far more handwringing than applause in the Pentagon and the State Department. The pride Lieber felt about being part of the international effort at codification has all but dissipated in government circles. . . .

Lieber and Lincoln proudly published their code, flawed and ambiguous though it was. The nation’s current leadership has preferred secret memoranda and strained interpretations. Too often now, the noble effort to expand and codify the international law that Lieber gloried in no longer appeals to the world’s most powerful state. For the good of international law and of the United States, that must change.

(Hat tip to Abu Muqawama via Jonathan Winkler)

As a follow up to my post of a few months ago on a Wilderness-Spotsylvania Staff Ride, I thought I would get another perspective on the program from Christopher Stowe. For those not familiar with Chris, he is a Univ. of Toledo Ph.D. who is the historian on the CGSC-Fort Lee teaching team, and is working on a biography of George G. Meade.

First, thanks to Ethan & the other Civil Warriors for allowing me to “guest post” on what is without question a first-rate blog, one I visit time and again (perhaps too often!) as my “Meade work” continues . . .

As in last April, the Fort Lee, VA, teaching team (myself & Team Leader Bob Kennedy) decided to take a look at these 1864 Overland campaign battles as a means to gain insight principally into the strategic and operational levels of war. In addition, we at CGSC always highlight leadership challenges, “fog of war” issues, the critical aspect of logistics, and tactical outcomes as part of our staff ride methodology. In all the above respects, I think we (myself, Bob, Ethan, and Dr. Curt King from the Combat Studies Institute at Fort Leavenworth) did a better job than in April, not only because we already had learned what worked and what did not from our first ride, but also because major changes in the traffic flow at the Spotsylvania unit of FSNMP forced us to make major changes in turn.

Perhaps foremost in planning a staff ride is wise time management at each stand. Last time, the staff groups spent a great deal of time at the initial stand (Lacy House) setting the strategic / operational / organizational stage. To prevent this from happening again, I devoted two sessions briefing the students beforehand — as part of their “Preliminary Study Phase” — on Civil War tactics, army organization, and the “current operating environment” 1864 style. This helped us, I think, in getting the officers off and running at Elwood. We quickly transitioned from the (Federal and Confederate) strategic setting to 1864 operational goals to the specific operations conducted in May of that year. Once again, Mr. Dwight Mottet of the Friends of the Wilderness Battlefield lent a much-appreciated assist by getting us through the Elwood gate at 0800 on Monday, 13 August, not to mention briefing my group on the Lacy House and Stonewall Jackson’s wayward left arm, which is of course buried on the Elwood grounds.

(Continued)

Due to a lack of interest, the elective on the Civil War I teach at the Command and General Staff College has been cancelled the last two or three times it has been offered. Consequently, I have begun reworking it into a course on “Unconventional Violence in the Era of the Sectional Conflict” and plan to offer it the next time students are signing up for electives.

We are pretty restricted on what we can assign our students. Being army officers, they expect to get just about everything associated with their job—be it a rifle or book—issued to them, so there is strong pressure not to assign many readings they will have to spend their own money on. Also, we are very, very strongly discouraged from giving them more than 50 pages of reading for each of their twelve class meetings. Working within these restraints, I have put together the following set of readings and figured I would post it here and solicit (beg for) suggestions for how this can be improved. In addition to the readings, I am also putting together a staff ride to Lawrence and other Border War sites as part of the course block on the Missouri-Kansas border war.

I am especially interested in seeing if anyone knows of any real good, short readings on Reconstruction that might be useful. The only one I could fit in within the parameters imposed from above, was the all-too-short few pages from Birtle’s book. I found in a recent meeting of one of my core course classes that when I started talking about Reconstruction (not being part of the formal curriculum, there were no assigned readings on the subject, so I basically gave a lecture), the majors were fascinated and made comments along the lines of “This is what we should be studying!” Must have been all that stuff about dead-enders from the old regime (disenfranchisement of white Southerners=de-Baathification!, Chemical Ali-”Bah-bi” Lee), the employment of terror and guerrilla tactics (Klan, sectarian militia—what’s the difference?), good intentioned outsiders trying to fix a broken society, and, of course, deep-seated ethnic tensions in which a previously oppressed class is suddenly enfranchised.

Anyway, here is where my head is in terms of class structure and what I am looking at in terms of readings:

COURSE SCHEDULE

LSN 1 – Conventional and unconventional war in the American Experience, 1607-1860

Robert R. Mackey, The Uncivil War: Irregular Warfare in the Upper South, 1861-1865 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2004), 3-23; Carl von Clausewitz, On War, edited by Michael Howard and Peter Paret (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984 ed.), 75-78, 87-89, 479-83; Declaration of Independence

LSN 2 – The Conventional War and Northern Strategies for the Unconventional

Herman Hattaway and Ethan Rafuse, “Military and Diplomatic Course of the Civil War,” in The Oxford Companion to American Military History, edited by John W. Chambers II (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 128-34; Andrew Birtle, US Army Counterinsurgency & Contingency Operations Doctrine: 1860-1941, (Washington: Center of Military History, 1998), 23-53; General Orders No. 100 (“Lieber Code”), OR, ser. 3, vol. 3: 148-64.

LSN 3, 4, 5 – People in friction: Yankees and Rebels

Stephen V. Ash, When the Yankees Came: Conflict and Chaos in the Occupied South, 1861-1865 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), 1-130

LSN 6 – Case Study: The Unconventional War in Missouri

Don R. Bowen, “Guerilla War in Western Missouri, 1862-1865: Historical Extensions of the Relative Deprivation Hypothesis.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 19 (January 1977): 30-51; Albert Castel. “Quantrill’s Bushwhackers: a Case Study in Partisan Warfare.” Civil War History 13 (March 1967): 40-50.

LSN 7 – Staff Ride Prep: No class meeting

LSN 8, 9 – Bleeding Kansas Staff Ride

Thomas Goodrich, Bloody Dawn: The Story of the Lawrence Massacre (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1992)

LSN 10 – Case Study: People’s War in Arkansas

Mackey, The Uncivil War, 24-71

LSN 11 – Case Study: Mosby’s Partisans

Mackey, The Uncivil War, 72-122

LSN 12 – Unconventional Warfare and Confederate Defeat

William B. Feis, “Jefferson Davis and the ‘Guerrilla Option’” The Collapse of the Confederacy, ed. Mark Grimsley and Brooks Simpson (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000), 104-28; Daniel E. Sutherland, “Guerrilla Warfare, Democracy, and the Fate of the Confederacy,” The Journal of Southern History 48 (May 2002), 259-92; Birtle, Counterinsurgency & Contingency Operations, 55-58.

Please do not hesitate to send me suggestions for improvement (within, of course, the parameters with which I have to work laid out above)!

In the course of preparing the Antietam guide for Mark, Brooks, and Steve’s series at Nebraska, I naturally found myself wrestling with the Ninth Corps’s problematic efforts to seize the Lower Bridge. The plan that Burnside and Cox came up with and put into motion when McClellan’s attack order arrived at around 10 a.m., was for Col. Henry Kingsbury’s 11^th Connecticut to rush forward to the creek in open order and then to provide a covering fire for elements from Brig. Gen. George Crook’s brigade as they charged in massed formation across the bridge. One of the mysteries that emerged was how five regiments from the 28^th Ohio with which Crook made the attack against the bridge could have gotten badly misdirected and ended up reaching the creek a couple hundred yards upstream from the bridge, instead of attacking it directly as planned. Sheer incompetence did not strike me as a sufficient explanation, as Crook, although rather young (USMA 1852) in September 1862, was an able officer who would go on to have a very distinguished career in the Civil War and postwar army.

Neither Crook’s after-action report, nor his autobiography provide any explanation for what happened, so when I was at Antietam a few months ago, Tom Clemens, the head of Save Historic Antietam Foundation who has been working for some time on what will be the definitive edited edition of the Carman manuscript, and I decided to take a closer look at the ground. We walked along the creek and all over the high ground on the Union side of the creek and what we found cleared up the mystery somewhat. The problem, it quickly became clear, was that high hill directly opposite the bridge. Directly in front of the bridge it is very rugged and steep, and we found just making our way down the hill as individuals very difficult even though it was heavily wooded and we were able to find a tree or two to help us negotiate our way down to the flood plain. We also found cuts into the hill similar to those on the heights where Benning’s men were posted, which suggested that perhaps quarrying had taken place on that side of the Antietam as well. Although this provided Benning’s men with fine defensive positions, for the Federals the combination of the hill’s steepness and the cuts would have made maintaining mass formations and executing an attack down the hill extremely difficult, if not impossible. It seemed likely to us that Crook saw this and decided to keep moving north along the rear of the hill until he found a spot where its face would not make his attack so difficult. He would have found one, but it is a few hundred yards north of the bridge. In other words, at a point from which an attack would have ended up reaching the Antietam where Crook’s men did.

Fortunately, now visitors to the park don’t have to fight the woods the way Tom and I did to see what we did. When I went over to Antietam Battlefield during the SMH to help out a West Point staff ride in April, I saw the area around the Kingsbury monument and the hill over which Tom and I had explored were much clearer thanks to the efforts of SHAF and the park.

I apologize to my fellow Civil Warriors for my failure to contribute recently. One of the reasons for this was a trip last week to Virginia, where I spent part of my time with Curt King, Kevin Kennedy, and Glenn Robertson of the Combat Studies Institute as they refined the Mosby staff ride they are developing for the Army. Not an easy task. Unlike most Civil War battles, which take place in a particular time and place that can be put into some kind of rational order for a tour or ride, Mosby’s operations took place over such a large area and in an order that makes putting together something that is somewhat comprehensive, makes chronological sense, and doesn’t have you retracing your steps all over the place something of a challenge. Plus there is the problem of negotiating the traffic and road network in Northern Virginia.

Although Mosby’s operations were, in the big picture of the Civil War, not all that significant, the value of such a staff ride for officers we are preparing (in part) for the current operating environment is pretty obvious. At the same time, concern was expressed over the fact that you are almost forced to focus your effort on the tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) of the insurgent/partisan/guerrilla and don’t give as much attention to those of the various Union commanders who had to deal with Mosby. We are, after all, training officers to play the role of Charles Lowell, not Mosby.

Anyway, although the other folks who were engaged in the staff ride recon no doubt finished with somewhat differing views, I came away envisioning a one-day staff ride consisting of:

(Continued)

Last evening I gave a talk on this subject before the Central Ohio Civil War Round Table. People enjoyed the PowerPoint presentation, which used a lot of images, but afterward a couple of them hinted that they wished I’d supplied handouts so that they could have a permanent record of my main points.

Well, there are two ways to get those. The first is to purchase one of the battlefield guides that Brooks, Steve and I have developed: each one contains a standard section that deals with the general principles involved in battlefield study.

The second is to visit a web page I developed many years ago when we were drafting the first guide books. It doesn’t exactly replicate the talk I gave, but it does supply the basics.

In the past day or two I’ve found myself reflecting a lot on the conflict between Israel and Hezbollah, particularly the fact that civilian casualties far outstrip combatant casualties and indeed, civilians seem to be not just targets (inadvertent or deliberate) but in some cases human shields. This has led me to return to a long-standing interest of mine: the problem of moral judgment in war.

There are a number of key milestones in the development of principles governing the just conduct of war, but of enormous importance was the promulgation of General Orders No. 100 during the Civil War. What follows is part 1 of a six-part series I did last year on G.O. 100 and Francis Lieber, the German-American jurist who, for all practical purposes, wrote what justly became known as “Lieber’s Code.” The other parts are on an earlier platform of Blog Them Out of the Stone Age. If you choose to read the whole thing (and I hope you will), please come back here to write any comments.

Some years ago, Robert Fulghum wrote a simple credo that became famous: “All I ever really needed to know I learned in kindergarten.” I suspect that many Americans of my generation could say, with equal sincerity and even greater accuracy, “All I ever really needed to know I learned from Star Trek .”

My next entry in the Encyclopedia of War and American Society concerns General Orders 100, better known as Lieber’s Code. Published by the U.S. War Department in the middle of the Civil War, General Orders 100 has the distinction of being the world’s first official set of ethical guidelines concerning military conduct in the field. When I first began thinking about the entry, a snatch of Star Trek dialogue ran through my head. “There are rules, even in war.”

At first the words were comforting. It took me a moment to think of the context. The phrase was spoken by Leonard McCoy, chief medical officer of the Enterprise. That checked — of the three principal characters in the series, Kirk, Spock, and McCoy, McCoy was the one who most closely embodied humanity.

But then I realized that the episode in which he uttered them was “Day of the Dove.” In it, an alien entity that feeds on violent emotion provokes combat between the Enterprise crew and a crew of Klingons and then harvests sustenance from the resulting fury and hatred. The “rules even in war” utterance occurs at a point where McCoy, treating a crewman wounded in a melee, looks down at the hapless man and snarls, “Those filthy butchers. There are rules, even in war. You don’t keep hacking at a man after he’s down.”

There may be rules, even in war. But here the rules are invoked not to restrain the violence, but to justify a sense that the enemy is demonic and restraint would be folly. A bit later in the episode, when Kirk and Spock first awake to the reality that a malevolent entity has created the crisis and forms the real threat, McCoy is outraged to hear them suggest the wisdom of a truce with the Klingons.

“A truce?! Are you serious? I’ve got men in sick bay, some of them dying, atrocities committed on their persons. And you talk about making peace with these fiends? Why, if our backs were turned they’d jump us in a minute. And you know what Klingons do to prisoners. Slave labor. Death planets. Experiments. While you’re talking they’re planning attacks. This is a fight to the death, and we’d better start trying to win it!”

In the episode, Spock’s logic and Kirk’s determination carry the day. A truce is, heroically, arranged, and together the Federation and Klingon crewmen literally laugh the alien entity off the ship. But thinking again on “rules, even in war,” I couldn’t help but wonder if McCoy’s exploitation of the phrase to legitimate slaughter carried the real truth of the drama. When I picked up General Orders 100 and read them again, it was with new eyes.
Left: McCoy in a different episode (“A Piece of the Action”) cradles a weapon he would dearly love to have had available in “Day of the Dove.”

Part 1 – Part 2 – Part 3 – Part 4 – Part 5 – Part 6

In my previous post I began presenting the case for writing a book on the exploits of the detachment of the Army of the Tennessee known as A. J. Smith’s Gorillas (among other things). I argued that straight-forward, more-or-less traditional military history still has a valid place in the study of the past. This time I’d like to continue by presenting my reasons for considering the Gorillas a worthwhile topic for such a study.

The three-division detachment commanded by A. J. Smith had a knack for turning up in the midst of many of the key events of the last year of the war. Their presence helped saved Nathaniel P. Banks’s dismal Red River Campaign from ending in complete disaster with the possible loss of thousands of prisoners and even the bulk of the Mississippi River gunboat fleet, an outcome which might have at least temporarily reversed the flow of the war in the West. They dealt a rare check to Bedford Forrest in northern Mississippi in the summer of 1864, helping to keep the Wizard of the Saddle off of Sherman’s vulnerable supply lines during the Atlanta Campaign. Later that year they helped repel Sterling Price’s Missouri raid and then traveled to Nashville, where they were first to break Hood’s line, beginning the rout of the Confederacy’s only major army west of the Appalachians. In the closing weeks of the war, they became a key element in the campaign to take Mobile, Alabama, the Confederacy’s last remaining strategic port. Thus a history of the Gorillas provides an opportunity to discuss some of the important, if peripheral, events of the closing year of the Civil War.

(Continued)

The past couple of weeks most of my scholarly work has been the on convergence of two of my projects, the edited diary and letters of Capt. Otis Whitney of the 27th Iowa and a history of the three-division detachment of the Army of the Tennessee that operated under the command of Maj. Gen. A. J. Smith (pictured) during the last year of the war. The men of the detachment had several nicknames for themselves, one of which was “A. J. Smith’s Gorillas.” So that’s what I’m using for a working title at the moment. Actually, the Gorillas aren’t quite at the front of the queue of my writing projects, but the Whitney diary is. So since I’m going to be working on Whitney, whose regiment was part of Smith’s command, I’m using the occasion to get in some preparation for the larger project as well, not only making note cards (yes, I do use note cards) from Whitney’s material but also gathering material from Texas Christian University library’s impressive collection of regimental histories on microfiche and sifting through a listing of Civil War articles in the National Tribune to identify the ones I’ll want to look at when our library’s new collection of National Tribune microfilms arrives next month.

At this point maybe I ought to explain why I believe Smith’s Gorillas merit coverage in a book. To lay the foundation for that explanation, I want to state first of all why I think traditional military history is still valuable. We need to face the fact that whether we like it or not — and I don’t — wars make major changes in the course of human events. They may well be as decisive as any other type of human interaction. The winner may not get to start the world anew or put Humpty-Dumpty back together again, but he does get to do a great deal of reshaping of previous arrangements. In the case of the Civil War, the victorious North was able to preserve national unity and abolish slavery. True, the defeated white South succeeded in hanging on to its third objective — racial control — but even on this point the North could probably have reaped a much larger result from its victory had it been unified in seeking the goal of full citizenship for the newly freed African Americans. The defeat of a determined effort by 5.5 million persons to take their states out of the Union and the eradication of American slavery in half a decade were achievements that would have made the most sanguine abolitionists giddy in 1860. Even the regrettable post-war system of Jim Crow was (though few could see it then) in the course of ultimate extinction.

All this was accomplished by a war, which in turn was decided by events on the battlefield, and the opposite conclusions could have been reached had those battles turned out differently than they did. As far as human agency was concerned, the outcome turned on a web of myriad contingencies. Some combinations of different outcomes to those contingencies would have produced a different outcome to the battles and thereby given us a different world to live in today.

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