ALSO BY JOHN KEEGAN The Iraq War Intelligence in War The First World War The Face of Battle The Nature of War (with Joseph Darracott) World Armies Who’s Who in Military History (with Andrew Wheatcroft) Six Armies in Normandy Soldiers (with Richard Holmes) Warpaths The Mask of Command The Price of Admiralty The Second World War A History of Warfare Fields of Battle The Battle for History War and Our World: The Reith Lectures 1998 An Illustrated History of the First World War Churchill: A Life To Lindsey Wood CONTENTS LIST OF MAPS INTRODUCTION 1. North and South Divide 2. Will There Be a War? 3. Improvised Armies 4. Running the War 5. The Military Geography of the Civil War 6. The Life of the Soldier 7. Plans 8. McClellan Takes Command 9. The War in Middle America 10. Lee’s War in the East, Grant’s War in the West 11. Chancellorsville and Gettysburg 12. Vicksburg 13. Cutting the Chattanooga—Atlanta Link 14. The Overland Campaign and the Fall of Richmond 15. Breaking into the South 16. The Battle off Cherbourg and the Civil War at Sea 17. Black Soldiers 18. The Home Fronts 19. Walt Whitman and Wounds 20. Civil War Generalship 21. Civil War Battle 22. Could the South Have Survived? 23. The End of the War NOTES BIBLIOGRAPHY ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS MAPS The American Civil War, 1861–65 American Railroads in 1861 First battle of Bull Run (Manassas), July 21, 1861 Shiloh, April 6–7, 1862 The Seven Days’ Battles, June 25–July 1, 1862 Antietam, September 17, 1862 Chancellorsville, May 2–6, 1863 Convergence of forces in the North Gettysburg, July 2–3, 1863 The Vicksburg Campaign, April—July 1863 The Push to Petersburg Sherman’s March, May 1864—April 1865 INTRODUCTION I began an earlier book with the sentence “The First World War was a cruel and unnecessary war.” The American Civil War, with which it stands comparison, was also certainly cruel, both in the suffering it inflicted on the participants and the anguish it caused to the bereaved at home. But it was not unnecessary. By 1861 the division caused by slavery, most of all among other points of division between North and South, was so acute that it could have been resolved only by some profound shift of energy, certainly from belief in slavery as the only means by which America’s colour problem could be contained, probably by a permanent separation between the slave states and their sympathisers and the rest of the country, and possibly, given the ruptions such a separation would have entailed, by war. That did not mean, however, that war was unavoidable. All sorts of political and social variables might have led to a peaceful resolution. Had the North had an established instead of a newly elected president, and a president whose anti- slavery views were less provocative to the South; had the South had leaders, particularly a potential national leader, as capable and eloquent as Lincoln; had both sections, but particularly the South, been less affected by the amateur militarism of volunteer regiments and rifle clubs which swept the Anglo-Saxon world on both sides of the Atlantic in mid-century; had industrialisation not so strongly fed the North’s confidence that it could face down Southern bellicosity; had Europe’s appetite for Southern cotton not persuaded so many planters and producers below the Mason-Dixon line that they had the means to dictate the terms of a separatist diplomacy to the world; had so many “had nots” not clustered in the mentality of both North and South, then simple and scant regard for peace and its maintenance might have overcome the clamour of marching crowds and recruiting rallies and pointed the great republic through the turmoil of war fever to the normality of calm and compromise. Americans were great compromisers. Half a dozen major compromises had averted the crisis of division already during the nineteenth century. Indeed, a tacit resort to compromise had led the whole country to adopt compromise as the guiding principle of relations with the old colonial overlords at the beginning of the century and to forswear conflict with Britain, after the aberration of the War of 1812, in perpetuity. Unfortunately, Americans were also people of principle. They had embodied principle in the guiding preambles to their magnificent governing documents, the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, and, when aroused, Americans resorted to principle as their guiding light out of trouble. Even more unfortunately, the main points of difference between North and South in 1861 could be represented as principles; the indivisibility of the republic and its sovereign power and states’ rights both had to do with the passions of the republic’s golden age and could be invoked again when the republic’s survival was under threat. They had been invoked, iterated, and reiterated throughout the political quarrels of the century’s earlier decades by protagonists of great sincerity and eloquence, Henry Clay and John Calhoun. It was finally unfortunate that America produced opinion leaders of formidable persuasiveness. It was the South’s ill fortune that, having dominated the debate in the first half of the century, at precisely the point when the issue of principle ceased to be a contest of words and threatened to become a call to action, the North had produced a leader who spoke better and more forcefully than any of the South’s current champions. War must have been very close beneath the surface of debate in 1861, for scarcely had the South moved to the level of organisation for secession than it was appointing not only its own Confederate president but also a secretary for war, as well as secretaries of state and of the treasury and the interior. Scarcely had President Lincoln assumed office before he was embodying the militias of the Northern states for federal service and calling for volunteers in tens of thousands. In only a few weeks one of the most peaceable polities in the civilised world was bristling with, if not armed men, then men demanding arms and marching and drilling in the manual of arms. It would take time for the arms to appear. The delay would not, however, abate the turmoil, for the challenge to the republic’s integrity and authority had aroused profound popular passions. In the Old World, it had become, through struggles for national liberation, as much in the Spanish- speaking part of the continent as in the English-speaking half, the concern of populations. The Americas of 1861, North and South alike, had decided by unspoken consensus that the issues of principle the quarrel provoked by the election of Abraham Lincoln was grave enough to be fought over. The decision was to invest the coming conflict with a grim purpose. It would become a war of peoples, and those of each side, who had hitherto considered themselves one, would henceforth begin to perceive their differences and to consider their differences more important than the values that, since 1781, they had accepted as permanent and binding. The coming