Grant Takes Control
The Transformation of the Army of the Potomac and the Evolution of Civil-Military Relations in the Final Year of the Civil War
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The transformation of the Army of the Potomac during the final year of the American Civil War highlighted the critical evolution in military leadership and strategy necessary for Union victory. This period also saw the introduction of new officers like Philip Sheridan and James Wilson, who revitalized key components of the army. The complexities of civil-military relations, the integration of battlefield experience, and the eventual streamlining of command structures were pivotal in overcoming initial setbacks and leading to decisive victories. This shift not only demonstrated the adaptation of the Union's military strategies to the realities of modern war but also the importance of effective leadership and coordination between civilian and military authorities in achieving strategic objectives.
(This post is a continuation from my previous post: Lincoln and Grant Meet)
While Grant was negotiating in Washington with Lincoln, George Meade was also remaking the Army of the Potomac in his image. For the most part, the political hacks and career officers that undermined the civilian leadership were gone. In their place were younger more vigorous generals most of whom started from the bottom of the army as captains and majors and worked their way up. Most of the West Pointers who led brigades had graduated between 1850-1860 and were under the age of 35. Meade himself was a product of this who began as a regimental commander and three years later now commanded the Union's largest field army and held the rank of general. The army went from seven corps to three corps to help Meade manage the battlefield and further get rid of the generals who weren’t up to the task at hand. Commanding II Corps was Winfried Hancock who was tough, courageous, and the army's most experienced corps commander but he was still recovering from wounds received at Gettysburg, something that would nag him for the rest of the war. Leading V Corps was Gouverneur Warren, he was originally the army’s chief engineer but had performed well enough at Gettysburg to merit a Corp command. Rounding out the army was the VI Corps under the command of John Sedwick who earned the nickname “Uncle John” from his troops and had held his command since Gettysburg.
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It wasn’t just at the corps level that the experience changed but even at the brigade and regimental level. The political officers who led the volunteer regiments in the early years of the war were largely gone and were citizen soldiers whose skill and competence had allowed them to survive three years of hard fighting. At the beginning of the Overland campaign, nearly three-quarters of the army's 48 infantry brigades were citizen soldiers who had not attended West Point or had any formal military education; their education was on the battlefield.[1] Even still, there were concerns, besides the veteran soldiers, almost all of the recruits arriving to fill out regiments were men who were either forced to be there or enticed by massive signing bonuses.[2] A large contingent included “bounty men” who took signing bonuses to enlist then deserted and proceeded to do so again, but by 1864, there was a massive crackdown and many were forcibly conscripted into the army as a result.[3] The other problem was that there were still political generals, Meade had made an effort to weed out the ones he could but some still held critical political connections. This dilemma presented a serious problem but as Pulitzer Prize winning author Bruce Catton pointed out when it came to the American Civil War,
“If there was a war that met the textbook definition and was simply an extension of politics – ward and country and state-house politics, politics at the most intensely lived in levels – it was this one, and nobody but professional soldiers was especially shocked thereby.”[4]
The compromise would be that they would be kept on a tight leash and with Grant in charge, political connections became a liability, not an asset. The transformation of the Army of the Potomac under George Meade, marked by the infusion of younger, more capable generals and citizen soldiers, signaled a significant shift in its leadership and composition, reflecting how the army was rapidly changing in the face of modern war.
Personal relationships are the foundation of civil-military relations and the pair exemplified this from the moment they met. For all the tediousness of the Spring strategy sessions, the president and Grant formed a good rapport. Even as the Army of the Potomac’s senior leadership was solidified, Grant saw fit to bring a group of officers with him to hold key leadership positions who were dedicated to their profession and couldn’t have been more different from the Machiavellians that had occupied most of the key leadership positions in the Army of the Potomac for much of the war to that point. The most notable arrival of new officers was Philip Sheridan (pictured below) and James Wilson. At the battle of Stones River, anticipating a Confederate attack, Sheridan had his entire division up early while the rest of the Union army slept. Indeed, a Confederate attack came, and his division held on long enough for the rest of the Union army to safely withdraw. Sheridan was a hard, charging aggressive commander who had gone from the rank of major to major general in six months. Russell Weigley pointed to Phil Sheridan as the trailblazer for an operation command style characterized by personal toughness and a willingness to remove subordinates deemed inadequate for their roles, a tradition later upheld by World War II generals like Joe Collins and James Gavin. [5] James Wilson was a “young, fire-eating, just-out-of-West Point” officer but had mostly played an administrative role under Grant, but he turned out to be an outstanding combat leader in his own right.[6] They were both tasked with leading a Calvary Corps in the East that had dramatically improved but desperately needed vigorous leadership.
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George Meade characterized Grant's strategy simply to “overwhelm them” and cause so many strategic dilemmas that the Confederacy's thin resources would be overwhelmed. This was a strategy that Lincoln had been advocating for several years but was always hampered by incompetence and second-guessing from the generals. The campaign planning heading into 1864 was hamstrung by what historian Stephen Sears called a “rouges gallery” of generals that had somehow survived despite incompetence and bumbling. One of these was Benjamin Butler who might have been the most political general in the Union Army. He was a bit of an outlier in the army as a war democrat and largely was able to retain his generalship despite years of incompetence through political favors and his political positioning. He was also supposedly the one Union officer who would be executed without a trial by the Confederates.[7]
More generals that Grant wanted to get rid of but couldn’t were Franz Sigel and David Hunter, Sigel a self-proclaimed representative of German Americans, and Hunter, an outspoken abolitionist were exiled to campaign in the Shenandoah Valley to not cause headaches for Grant. Even Grant’s effort to fire General Nathaniel Banks after botching the Red River Campaign in Arkansas in March resulted in a rebuke from Halleck who wrote, “Banks is a personal friend of the president and has strong political supporters in and out of Congress. There will undoubtedly be a very strong opposition to his being removed or superseded.” Halleck went on to say that the president might go along if there was a true national need for his removal which in the grand scheme of things was not.
This group of generals all represented important constituencies that President Lincoln needed for the upcoming election in November so getting rid of them would have been a political headache. Understanding this dilemma, Grant gritted his teeth and kept them around but at a distance so they might not directly cause problems. However, they did directly cause problems by doing what they did best, being incompetent. This allowed Lee to pull reinforcements from where they were and inflicted huge casualties on the Army of the Potomac during the Overland Campaign resulting in a stalemate in Petersburg. But Lincoln’s electoral victory in November finally gave Grant a get-out-of-jail-free card, all three were subsequently sent away or resigned in favor of Grant’s favorites such as Philip Sheridan who took over the campaign in the Shenandoah Valley and played a critical role in the defeat of Lee in 1865. Grant faced significant challenges dealing with a group of politically connected but often incompetent generals, and it wasn't until Lincoln's electoral victory in November that he could finally remove them and place more capable leaders in key positions.
While Grant was the leader the army of the Potomac desperately needed. It wasn’t immune from challenges. The command structure of the army was bizarre due to army politics. In theory, Grant was supposed to be the strategist while Meade was the tactician. But as Meade’s chief of staff, Andrew Humphreys wrote in effect it was, “two officers commanding the same army.”[8] Meade was also annoyed that the press was, “uniformed and consistent in endeavoring to make him out the actual commander of this army” and that, “should success attend its operations that my share of the credit will be less, than if he were not present.”[9] The return of Ambrose Burnside from the west who had commanded the army of the Potomac briefly also confused things as he reported to Grant and not Meade. So, if Meade wanted Burnside to do something he had to go to Grant who in turn would go to Burnside. It certainly made for a puzzling command structure especially since Meade was supposed to be the tactician but technically didn’t have direct control over a quarter of his army. The complex command dynamics and challenges within the Army of the Potomac during Grant's leadership serve as a reminder of the intricacies and difficulties inherent in coordinating a large military force, even under a capable strategist like Grant.
When the campaign got underway in May, Robert. E Lee and the Army of Northern Virginia fought a skilled campaign against the Yankees eventually reaching a stage of stagnation around Petersburg in June. The “Overland” campaign was the bloodiest yet, the Army of the Potomac suffered 55,000 casualties in a month and a half.[10] Benjamin Butler’s Army of the James who was supposed to slip into Richmond’s backdoor while Grant occupied Lee moved so slowly that Grant eventually took troops away to prosecute his siege at Petersburg. Sherman fared no better in the West where the Confederate Armies steadily withdrew closer and closer to Atlanta also meeting stalemate by mid-August. Other Union offenses floundered and by the summer, the war had largely stalemated again with thousands of casualties. No doubt the Confederacy had taken a beating, but it was not decisive. Lincoln floundered in the White House and prepared for electoral defeat to George McClellan while a member of the New York Sanitary Commission proclaimed, “Both Grant and Sherman are on the eve of disaster.”[11]
On the surface and to the average northerner, it might have appeared that the Union was on the verge of disaster and it certainly seemed to the Northern public. It also might have appeared that the Union armies had reached what Clausewitz described as the “culmination point”; the point at which an attacking force, despite previous successes, reaches its maximum strength and effectiveness. Beyond this point, the attacking force may face diminishing returns, exhaustion of resources, and increased vulnerability, potentially leading to a reversal of fortunes. Despite the main Union efforts being bogged down in the East and the West, it had tied up most of the Confederate forces. This first allowed Admiral David Farragut’s fleet to attack and blockade Mobile, the last significant blockade-running port in the Gulf of Mexico. This was followed up with Sherman outflanking Atlanta, cutting the last railroad from the city and forcing Confederate forces to retreat. This set the stage for a final showdown in the Shenandoah Valley.
The Shenandoah Valley campaign in the fall of 1864 offers a case study of both the dysfunction and eventual synchronization of the civil-military relations in the North. The Shenandoah Valley was a strategically important area linking East to West. A parade of Union commanders and armies had fought in the valley but never brought it under control, which supplied Richmond and Lee’s army. Even the arrival of Grant didn’t solve the problem. But with the Army of the Potomac stalled at Petersburg in June, there was an important opportunity to reevaluate the strategic situation. Starting with the fact that four different departments held some type of command in the valley, all of whom had gotten very good at finding a way to blame their problems on another department. Grant initially sent Sheridan to take command of the Army of the Shenandoah in August of 1864 with a simple objective; to turn the Shenandoah Valley into a “Barren Waste.”[12] Grant's first venture to the Valley to see for himself did not go smoothly as one of Grant’s staff officers noted that the department leadership under David Hunter was, “doing nothing and not knowing what the enemy was doing.”[13] Lincoln offered blunt advice he generally refrained from giving to his commander writing to Grant,
“You may have received from here even since you made that order, and discover, if you can, that there is any idea in the head of any one here of ‘putting our army south of the enemy,’ or of ‘following him to death’ in any direction. I repeat to you it will neither be done or attempted, unless you watch it every day and hour and force it.”[14]
With the full blessing of the president, Grant's solution was to reorganize the departments into a single military division under the command of Sheridan (Hunter had resigned). The appointment of Sheridan was met with skepticism from the War Department with some officials wondering if he was too young for the command, but Lincoln deferred to the military expertise of Grant again both agreeing with his strategy and appointment of Sheridan.[15]
The evolution of Lincoln as a civilian leader is important to note. In three years, he had gone from a “professional supremacist” to “civilian supremacist” to “professional supremacist”, but he finally found a military officer who agreed with him and could work with him professionally thus seeding the mechanics of the war to the military. Professional supremacists argue that the recurring problem for civil-military relations specifically in wartime is ensuring the military an adequate voice and keeping civilians from micromanaging and mismanaging matters.[16] The other camp argues that the central problem is ensuring that civilian guidance is followed even when the military disagrees with that direction.[17] But Lincoln was fine endorsing either view if it got results hence the back and forth Lincoln experienced throughout the war.
The fundamental question Lincoln had been attempting to solve for three years was, how should civilians handle a situation in which the military’s expertise or autonomy doesn’t achieve the strategic and political objectives set forth? Lincoln could not turn to the State Department of Treasury Department to fight Lee along the Potomac. Professional supremacists assume that military expertise or autonomy either directly on the battlefield or indirectly by listening to military advice will inevitably obtain victory.[18] However, as we see with the leadership challenges with the Army of the Potomac, this is not an inevitable outcome, and civilian intervention is often needed which was the path that Lincoln ultimately chose.
The command change that Grant chose ultimately worked culminating in “Sheridan’s Ride” into history where Sheridan personally rallied Union forces snatching victory from the jaws of defeat at the battle of Cedar Creek decisively routing the Confederate troops finally bringing the Shenandoah Valley fully under Union control. Besides Sherman’s capture of Atlanta, no victory contributed more to Lincoln’s reelection than Sheriden’s victorious campaign in the Shenandoah Valley. The Shenandoah Valley campaign of 1864 serves as a compelling illustration of the challenges and eventual success in streamlining civil-military relations in the North, ultimately contributing significantly to both the military effort and President Lincoln's eventual reelection.
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While the South was on its heels in late 1864, its total defeat was not assured and there is little doubt that Lincoln, Grant, and Sherman brought the war to its end the fastest given the constraints they faced. Yet this team is given very little credit or mentioned in the study of U.S. Civil-Military relations in favor of 20th and 21st-century case studies. Most scholarship focuses on dysfunction in Civil-Military relations and if they look at a positive case, point to George Marshall and Franklin Roosevelt as the models for a healthy relationship but Lincoln and Grant are overlooked. They met regularly to discuss strategy and measure the progress of the conflict and for the first time, there was a truly coordinated military strategy that marshaled the superior resources of the North to attack the South at their weakest points. The butcher’s bill for these battles was immense, but ultimately, the strategy worked, and the South surrendered in April of 1865. The often overlooked but highly effective partnership between Lincoln and Grant during the U.S. Civil War serves as a remarkable historical example of coordinated civil-military relations that played an essential role in bringing about the ultimate victory and end of the conflict in 1865.
References
Catton, Bruce. 1953. A Stillness at Appomattox (Army of the Potomac, Vol. 3). New York: Doubleday.
—. 1968. Grant Takes Command. Boston: Little, Brown, and Company.
Feaver, Peter. 2007. "The Right to Be Right: Civil-Military Relations and the Iraq Surge Decision." International Secuirty 87-125.
Huntington, Samuel. 1957. The Soldier and the State: The Theory and Politics of Civil-Military Relations. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
McPherson, James. 1988. Battle Cry of Freedom. New York: Oxford University Press.
Sears, Stephen. 2018. Lincoln's Lieutenants: The High Command of the Army of the Potomac. Boston: First Mariner Books.
Weigley, Russell F. 1981. Eisenhower's Lieutenant's": The Campaigns of France and Germany, 1944-1945. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Williamson Murray, Wayne Wei-siang. 2018. A Savage War: A Military History of the Civil War. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
[1] Stephen Sears, Lincoln's Lieutenants: The High Command of the Army of the Potomac (Boston: First Mariner Books. 2018), 626.
[2] Bruce Catton. A Stillness at Appomattox (Army of the Potomac, Vol. 3), (New York: Doubleday. 1953), 23.
[3] Ibid., 24.
[4] Bruce Catton, Grant Takes Command. (Boston: Little, Brown, and Company. 1968), 145.
[5] Russell F. Weigely, Eisenhower's Lieutenant's": The Campaigns of France and Germany, 1944-1945. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press. 1981), 99.
[6] Catton, Grant Takes Command, 171.
[7] Catton, A Stillness at Appomattox, 207.
[8] Catton, A Stillness at Appomattox, 156.
[9] Sears, 626.
[10] Williamson Murray and Wayne Wei-Siang, A Savage War: A Military History of the Civil War (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016), 399.
[11] McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 756.
[12] Sears, 738.
[13] Sears, 733.
[14] Sears, 733.
[15] Catton, Grant Takes Command, 344.
[16] Peter Feaver, "The Right to Be Right: Civil-Military Relations and the Iraq Surge Decision." International Security, (2007): 89.
[17] Ibid., 90.
[18] Samuel Huntington, The Soldier and the State (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1957), 99-100