Today is July 3rd, which Civil War enthusiasts might know was the last day of the Battle of Gettysburg some 154 years ago. So I thought it might be nice to have a Civil War post. It’s not really political, though I guess you could see it as a bit of a statement of values.
Now, over the weekend, a curious story came out of various militias, full of Neo-Confederates, White Nationalists and the sort, who congregated at Gettysburg over the weekend armed and looking for a fight. The reason? They had heard that the anti-fascist group antifa was coming to tear down various confederate memorials.
In the end, antifa didn’t come (they never planned to) and the militia men didn’t end up shooting anyone but themselves. But as much as the whole episode was the paranoid fantasy of fringe groups actively looking for brawls to participate in, the whole thing wasn’t entirely a figment of their imagination. In the past year or so, people on the left have become increasingly interested in iconoclastically tearing down the old monuments of the old Confederacy, though more often than not they mean this symbolically rather than literally.
And all and all this is probably long past due. I can understand the desire of people to find a certain degree of solace in loss, and yes, many of the people who fought for the South were basically good men even if the cause they fought for was obviously not. But the cause they fought for was not good, and the glorification of Confederate figures to near superhuman levels actively played into justifying the violent and stagnant political order of Jim Crow.
The Union Army Was A Ridiculously Diverse And Fascinating Cast Of Characters
Just looking at the ethnic gives you a good impression of how diverse the Union military was. Only about 45% of the men were native old stock protestants. On the other hand, about 45% were immigrants, with German and Irish immigrants making up about half that number, and another 10% were free blacks and former slaves. Even if one assumes that a large number of the Germans were not immigrants in the strict sense (second generation Germans often got rolled up in the category), that still implies that fully half of the army was outside the ethnic “mainstream”, so to speak. And the raw numbers only tell half the story. A large number of these immigrants couldn’t even speak English.
And all of these diverse groups of people often had diverse politically leanings, which informed how they viewed the war effort. On the one hand, there were of course the abolitionists who saw the war in a moral, and even revolutionary, endeavor to reshape society. Even northerners who were indifferent to the aims of the abolitionists still largely saw the war as a necessary conflict to destroy the slave holding aristocracy that they viewed as an existential threat to the Republic. A large portion of the Germans in the union army, and even a good number of generals, were expatriated German revolutionaries whose views ranged from republican to hard core Communist. Many of the Irish men in the union army had been engaged in the mass politics of Catholic emancipation in their homeland, and some were radical Feinnian militants who advocated of violent resistance to British rule in Ireland (a few thousand of them went on to periodically invade Canada in the years after the war). Both the German, Irish, and other European immigrants saw the war as an extension of the war against the exploitative political/economic systems they had emigrated to the US to escape. And, of course, it’s impossible to overstate what the war meant to the newly freed slaves as a matter of personal and collective liberation.
There’s often very little room for these characters in the sort of Ken Burns/Killer Angels interpretation of the war, with it’s high minded soliloquies about the moral weight they carried and wistful recriminations of fraternal war. We don’t hear about people like August Willich, who fought in the Revolution of 1848, led a faction of the early Communist movement in the 1850s and gained the affection of his men by re-engineering wagons into bakeries so they could have fresh bread. You don’t hear about the German immigrants who saved St Louis in the early days of the war thanks to their prewar preparations. You don’t hear of the Chinese student who came to the United States and was so enthralled with the Union war against southern slave power, which he likened to his country’s struggle against Machu overlords, that he almost enlisted. You don’t hear about the Roanoke Freeman’s Colony, where hundreds and thousands of former slaves earned their education, served in distinction in the Union army, and briefly tried to assert their autonomy after the war before being forcibly disarmed. We hear the Battle Hymn of the Republic as a slow, solemn piece, not the up tempo march it was originally written as.
The Northern war effort was expansive enough to incorporate all of these people, not because they were assimilated, but because the egalitarian values it represented was universal.
The Northern War Effort Was A Better Exemplar Of Modern, Industrial War Than Anything Which Had Come Before
There’s an ongoing debate as to whether or not the Civil War can be considered the first modern war. Proponents point to the use of modern technologies, like iron clad ships and repeating rifles, the development of sophisticated logistical networks based on trains and industrially prepared foodstuffs, and the similarity of the trench warfare in later phases of the war to the western front in World War I. Detractors point out that, while new technologies had mad older Napoleonic tactics obsolete, commanders largely did not do much innovating because they lacked the sophistication of some professional European militaries. For example, even though both sides did use railroad based logistical networks, they did not execute the sort of innovative strategies on the level of the tightly coordinated train based maneuvers that the Prussians would use to great effect in the Franco-Prussian War a few years later.
I think both sides focus a little too closely, and are missing the forest for the trees. I would say that the Union war effort was, for all intents and purposes, groundbreaking, but for reasons that are a little more abstract than just the weapons and tactics used. Namely, the union was the first industrial power to engage in something approaching total war. The way it produced weaponry and mobilized men was unprecedented. The way US industry and munitions were organized was particularly ahead of its time, namely in terms of standardization, economies of scale, replaceable parts, and democratized use.
Contrary to popular belief, the early phases of the industrial revolution wasn’t defined predominantly by large organized factories churning out standardized products. Instead, the early until the latter half of the 19th century industry was still largely diffused into smaller shops and was still very much a craft rather than a systemic process. Because of this, industry didn’t scale up easily, and could still be prone to bottle necks. Hence why Britain, which was the workshop of the world in 1850s, still suffered crippling munitions shortages during the early days of the Crimean War (and would again face shell shortages in World War I).
On the other hand, the United States had been an early adopter of the concept of interchangeable parts. Thomas Jefferson had been introduced to the concept of interchangeable parts while in France, and it was at his behest that Eli Whitney was contacted to build 12,000 standardized muskets in 1798. In 1801, Whitney demonstrated his firearms in front of Congress, and the Congress was so impressed they decided to implement the system on a mass scale. In the next few decades, manufacturers in New England were at the forefront of pushing the boundaries of standardization and interchangeable parts. And with a large market in terms of population and geographic size, and governments willing to support them through strategic investments in infrastructure, they were able to take advantage of greater economies of scale than even many European powers as they did so.
So by the time of the Civil War, the North had facilities like the Springfield Arsenal, which at its peak was capable of churning out the 600 arms a day and almost 800,000 firearms over the course of the war. This sort of productive capacity was unprecedented at the time, and along with the Rockville Arsenal and other more small scale arms producers, allowed the Union to scale up from 16,000 men at the beginning of the war to more than 2,500,000 throughout the war without running into the same supply shortages that the British ran into a decade before.
And it wasn’t just small arms. For all it’s technical advances, the most impressive thing about the Monitor class ironclads is that they only took about 8 months to make. Within a year of the Monitor entering service, there were already dozens of ironclad ships exactly like it in service.
The point is, the North in the Civil War wasn’t just industrialized relative to the South, it was very much a world class industrial at the time, and in many respects was even the most advanced. And it hadn’t just defaulted to this position, as accounts of the Civil War often seem to presume, but had gotten there through a combination of foresight, ingenuity, and a socioeconomic system that fostered it. And throughout the war, they displayed the insight to realize that war was as much a matter of mobilizing resources and men as anything else. They appreciated this more than the South, and the appreciated it more than Prussian military commanders who dismissed them as merely disorganized mobs, and it’s why they were able to beat both of them time and again.
The Union Military Was Much Stronger As An Institution Than The Confederate One
This is more or less born out when you look at how the respective Union and Confederate militaries performed on average. It’s true that in the Eastern Theater, where the Army of Northern Virginia, headed by Robert E. Lee, with Stonewall Jackson and James Longstreet at his side, represented a rare combination of military genius, and this helped the South delay Union victory by several years. But in the western theater, command the leadership was generally comparable, and with the advantage in resources the union advance was more or less consistent.
So why did Southern military commander’s get such favorable treatment?
Well, for one thing there was the overt efforts in the South to romanticize “The Lost Cause” after the war, while no such effort took place in the North. During the war, of course, Northern newspapers were full of dashing stories of commanders and their feats of daring do, and many of these retained their notoriety after the war. But again, Northerners were not exceptionally invested in memorializing their wartime experiences as the south was.
I’d also speculate that it was largely due to the fact that they were vastly different organizations. The Confederate military was a newly formed organization, and as such it hinged far more on the personal charisma of its leadership. By contrast, the Union army was an established entity whose capabilities were largely embedded in the structures and informal practices of the organization. And, as with the industrial technologies cited earlier, this allowed for much greater democratization, allowing the Northern military to work on the basis of replaceable parts. Commanders may be highly competent, and a good many of them were very competent, but they weren’t essential and could be treated as replaceable parts. Compare and contrast how the Union and Confederate armies were impacted by changes in leadership. The Army of Northern Virginia was irreparably set back by the loss of Stonewall Jackson, meanwhile the Army of the Potomac saw 4 major changes to it’s leadership in the span of a year in 1862-63 and it’s functionality was barely impacted.
An analogy with silicon valley tech companies. The Confederate military was more like a new start up whose success and public image often hinges on their charismatic founders. By contrast, the Union army would be more like IBM, a large established organization often seen as bumbling and obtuse, but which is in fact quite efficient when you get into it. The IBM’s of the world are a lot more sustainable, and the edgy startups that become market leaders usually have to become a lot more like IBM in the process, though they may hate to admit it.
All this is even more impressive when you consider what a diverse of hodge-podge of different peoples the Union military was. While it’s important not to overstate the importance of cultural/ethnic uniformity, it is none-the-less true that homogeneity is generally an asset when talking about organizational cohesion, especially when that means a large percentage of people don’t even speak the same language. Austria Hungary generally didn’t benefit from it’s diverse fighting force, after all. From this perspective It’s a wonder that the Union army functioned as well as it did. But again, the union military was institutionalized and democratized to a point where that wasn’t an issue.
Conclusion
Taking all of this together, and we get a very clear idea of the particular ethos of the North in the Civil War. In the Union, we see the vision of an expansive, democratized, forward looking society that was able to engender the voluntary effort and creativity of free men. The common soldier, civil engineer, line worker and so forth became the heart and soul of the war effort, rather than a narrow elite trained in military prowess and élan. If you want to look at the home front of World War II came from, with it’s can do attitude of men and women coming together to turn row after row of Sherman tanks and flying fortresses off the line, you can see the seeds of it in the Union Army.