Strategy is a piece of the puzzle that is warfare, the most confusing and complex of human endeavors, and cannot be studied apart from its critical accompanying factors. The most important of these is policy, meaning the political objective or objectives sought by the governments in arms (these are sometimes described as war aims, or what they are fighting for). The policy should inform strategy and provide the framework for its pursuit, but not dictate it. Understanding the political objective is critical because it determines so much of where and how the war will be fought. Strategy flows from this. Unfortunately, the term policy is often used when what is really being discussed is strategy or operations. Civil War leaders often spoke of military policy while today we would speak of military strategy or operations, depending upon the context. To pursue their goals in wartime, states tap their economic, political, and diplomatic resources and capabilities, as well as their military ones. All of these are elements of grand strategy. Strategy means the larger use of military force. Some examples include implementing blockades, attrition, exhaustion, and applying simultaneous pressure at many points. Tactics govern the execution of battles fought in the course of operations. In much military literature, the words tactics and strategy are used interchangeably and indiscriminately; they are starkly different.
Since strategy flows from policy, it is here where we must begin. The North’s initial political objective was clear: Restore the Union. Later, emancipation, or freeing the slaves, became another objective. The Confederacy wanted its independence.
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The Confederacy initially implemented a cordon strategy or cordon defense, meaning that it tried to defend the entire scope of the Confederacy, and soon had troops scattered from Virginia to Texas. Politically, Confederate President Jefferson Davis had little choice but to do this. Governors worried about Union descents, and the Southern people expected to see physical manifestations of their new government’s military strength. Davis also feared that any Union penetrations into the Confederacy, even if the captured lands were recovered, would completely destroy the slave system in the area, making it irredeemable. Importantly, this was a de facto instead of a purposeful decision.
The Union’s most important initial strategic proposal came from Major General Winfield Scott. The 300-plus pound septuagenarian general-in-chief proposed what became derisively known as the “Anaconda Plan.” Scott foresaw a Union column of 80,000 men pushing down the Mississippi River, severing the Confederacy in twain while the Union navy instituted a blockade to suffocate the South. One of the factors underlying Scott’s strategy was his belief (common among Union military and civilian leaders) that the bulk of Southerners were pro-Unionists simply suppressed by a troublesome minority. This meant that a slow approach to waging the war would allow time for this latent Union sentiment to reclaim its rightful place. Scott’s scheme overestimated the depth and strength of Southern Unionism and underestimated Southern support for secession. President Abraham Lincoln instituted the blockade, something that became a foundational and consistent element of Union strategy, and the primary plank of Union naval strategy (the South responded by trying to break the blockade with ironclads while conducting guerre de course, or commerce raiding). Lincoln, though, did not support Scott’s slow squeeze. He wanted a quick war and pushed for action. Believing it militarily feasible, Lincoln ordered an offensive in Virginia by the armies of Major Generals Robert “Granny” Patterson and Irvin McDowell that aimed to take Manassas Junction. This culminated in a Union defeat on the banks of Bull Run (July 21, 1861). The Southern cordon held—for now.
The Union regrouped and in August 1861 Lincoln brought to Washington George B. McClellan, the successful commander of Union forces in what became West Virginia. Though not yet general-in-chief, McClellan immediately proposed one of the earliest and most far-reaching American strategic plans for prosecuting a war. It called for offensive action against a variety of points of the Confederacy at the same time and even urged the consideration of assistance from Mexico. McClellan hoped to end the war in one campaign—after properly preparing. The key components of his strategic plan included: Clearing Missouri with the troops there; sending a force of 20,000 men, plus those raised in eastern Tennessee and Kentucky (once it abandoned its neutrality), down the Mississippi River; the seizure of Nashville, as well as eastern Tennessee and the state’s rail lines; a move from Kansas and Nebraska against the Red River and western Texas, all intended to take advantage of supposed Union and free state sentiment; and consideration of an advance from California via New Mexico, as well as help from Mexico itself. Most importantly, a force of 273,000 would be raised for an advance into Virginia (which McClellan viewed as the main theater), and then further into the Deep South in conjunction with the forces in the west. Naval forces would support these moves and cooperate with Union troops to seize key Confederate ports. What modern military parlance defines as jointness, meaning joint army-navy operations was a consistent characteristic of McClellan’s strategic and operational planning. This initial plan became the cornerstone of McClellan’s strategic thought and the fact that the administration never gave him exactly what he wanted, or allowed him to act exactly when and where he wanted, and under the conditions he desired, became an excuse for inaction by McClellan. Moreover, this plan, and its subsequent manifestations in various forms, were all weakened by the fact that McClellan intended for the army under his command to deliver the biggest and most decisive punch. In other words, other Union offensive movements were subservient to his advance.
Both the plan and the outline upon which it was based foreshadowed a later conflict between McClellan and Lincoln: A disagreement on the level of violence that should be used to conduct the war. McClellan argued for light measures against civilians and their property. Initially, Lincoln did not disagree, but as the war dragged on, and grew deadlier, his attitude hardened. McClellan wanted a “soft” war (inasmuch as there is such a thing), recommending “a rigidly protective policy as to private property and unarmed persons.” His peers and superiors came to prefer something else.
There were problems with McClellan’s plan, the most obvious being the raising and provisioning of his 273,000-man force. This, though difficult, was not beyond Union means (McClellan had more than 200,000 in early 1862). But the most important issue was that if McClellan did not move strategic paralysis could grip the Union, and as McClellan acquired greater influence this was exactly what happened, at least for a time. Executed by someone with the talent for implementation, McClellan’s plan stood an excellent chance of delivering the Union's political objective. Nonetheless, McClellan, for all his many gifts, lacked sufficient ability to effectively use his Army of the Potomac operationally or tactically. All of this only scratches the surface of a deeply complex issue.
When McClellan assumed the mantle of general-in-chief in November 1861, he reorganized the Western theater, establishing two commands under Henry Wager “Old Brains” Halleck and Don Carlos Buell, respectively. McClellan attempted to coordinate the movements of his western subordinates with his so that their advances would make possible his own. But the central issue of where to advance was almost incidental to McClellan and the Union departmental commanders because they invariably insisted that nothing could be done.
Union Quartermaster General Montgomery Meigs wrote of McClellan that he “would prefer to send forward any other troops than those under his present command.” Meigs also identified one key to McClellan’s personality: an insufficiency of what Prussian military theorist Carl von Clausewitz defined as the courage to bear the responsibility for tough decisions, something that may also help explain his propensity for exaggerating the size of the forces opposing the Army of the Potomac. McClellan had no lack of Clausewitz’s other kind of courage, the physical, his bravery under fire in the Mexican War attests to a surfeit of this. And he was a man of many talents: planning, training, organizing, but what had become clear by January 1862 was that McClellan lacked the decisiveness Clausewitz believed necessary for good leadership at the topmost rungs. True to Meigs’s assessment, McClellan responded by ordering Buell to advance into Eastern Tennessee.
Lincoln, frustrated and besieged politically, produced his famous January 13, 1862, letter to Buell which showed a Lincoln absorbing the ideas of his military-related reading, as well as his military chiefs—then taking them further. “I state my general idea of this war to be that we have the greater numbers,” the president began, “and the enemy has the greater facility of concentrating forces upon points of collision; that we must fail, unless we can find some way of making our advantage an overmatch for his; and that this can only be done by menacing him with superior forces at different points, at the same time; so that we can safely attack, one, or both, if he makes no change; and if he weakens one to strengthen the other, forbear to attack the strengthened one, but seize, and hold the weakened one, gaining so much.”
“Simultaneous pressure” describes Lincoln’s strategic approach perfectly. The same phrase fits McClellan’s strategic ideas, but with Lincoln, the prongs were potentially all equal in importance. To McClellan, the arm he intended to swing was decisive. Most importantly, none of this pried the Union generals from their stumps. This raises an important ancillary question, one that should be kept in mind in any discussion of Union strategy: If Lincoln was the brilliant, active strategist that so many have insisted on, why do his ideas fail to produce strategic results?
As the Union dithered, the Confederacy scrambled to gather its strength, both in the East and West. The cordon was expanded into Kentucky on September 3, 1861, when Confederate general Major General Leonidas K. Polk destroyed the state’s self-declared neutrality by authorizing its invasion. This disastrous act opened the western regions of the Confederacy to Union penetration—particularly via the Cumberland and Tennessee Rivers. Davis’s old friend, General Albert Sidney Johnston, assumed command of the bulk of Southern Western forces on September 15, 1861. General Joseph E. Johnston controlled the most important Confederate troops in the eastern theater. Both commanders worried about the growing Union threat. Strategically, the defense held sway.
The Union war machine finally began to uncoil itself on February 2, 1862, when Major General Ulysses S. Grant and Flag Officer Andrew H. Foote moved to take Fort Henry, then Fort Donelson, shattering the Confederate cordon. The impetus for this came not from Lincoln’s order to move, or from Halleck, the departmental commander, but from Halleck’s subordinate, Grant. Ironically, Halleck only approved the advance after receipt of an intelligence report indicating that Confederate General P.G.T. Beauregard was coming west with Confederate reinforcements, one that later proved half-false (Beauregard was coming but without more troops). Moreover, Grant had to ask three times before Halleck bent. This push, combined with Buell’s drive into Kentucky and Central Tennessee, completely destroyed the South’s strategic position in the West.
This disaster struck a great Confederate nerve, and well it should have. The South responded by adopting what is best called a strategy of concentration. The much-reviled general, Braxton Bragg, in a letter to Secretary of War Judah Benjamin, not only relayed the reasons for Confederate failure in the west but also proposed the most cogent strategic plan offered by any Confederate leader during the course of the war: “Our means and resources are too much scattered,” Bragg wrote. “The protection of persons and property, as such, should be abandoned, and all our means applied to the Government and the cause. Important strategic points only should be held. All means not necessary to secure these should be concentrated for a heavy blow upon the enemy where we can best assail him. Kentucky is now that point.” Bragg recommended abandoning all their posts on the Gulf of Mexico except Pensacola, Mobile, and New Orleans, as well as all of Texas and Florida, “and our means there made available for other service.” “A small loss of property would result from their occupation by the enemy,” he continued, “but our military strength would not be lessened thereby, whilst the enemy would be weakened by dispersion. We could then beat him in detail, instead of the reverse. The same remark applies to our Atlantic seaboard. In Missouri, the same rule can be applied to a great extent. Deploring the misfortunes of that gallant people, I can but think their relief must reach them through Kentucky.” He also stressed the need for unity transcending local interests. His later correspondence with Beauregard reinforced these views. “We should cease our policy [strategy] of protecting persons and property, by which we are being defeated in detail.” But doing this left the Confederates weak in many areas where they could not afford to be.
This brief overview merely scratches the surface of the formulation and execution of strategy in the Civil War. In the end, the decisive element in Union victory was its construction and implementation of a coherent strategy that addressed the nature of the war, one the North tenaciously pursued as long as it took. This was in part the result of the critical fact that from the beginning of the conflict Lincoln sought a method for winning the war; Davis never sat down and tried to figure out how the South could achieve its political objective of independence—and the Confederacy perished.
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