Civil War Battles

3 Key excerpts on "Civil War Battles"

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  Visions of Political Violence

  • Vincenzo Ruggiero(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  civitas , becoming the most destructive form of organized human violence. It could be objected, however, that the connotation ‘civil war’ is normally applied to unsuccessful rebellions or uprisings that defy established governments and states. We celebrate some such uprisings as exercises of people’s right to determine their political destiny, but we condemn others as illegal rebellions that deserve to be suppressed at all costs. By labelling a conflict ‘civil war’, commentators perhaps intend to deny any form of legitimacy to violent struggles, but were such struggles to prove successful they would not be termed civil wars at all. Large violent conflicts within national territories may start with riots and insurrections, then take the shape of a civil war whereby citizens take sides for one contender or the other, but if the challenging party triumphs, the new appellation becomes revolution. This is what happened in Russia after 1917 and in China in 1949. ‘Revolution possesses far more positive connotations than the more grubby and ambivalent civil war’ (Colley, 2017: 43).

  The horrors of civil warfare are narrated in holy books and often understood as forms of punishment inflicted on disbelievers and sinners. The violent clashes that killed over 20 million Chinese in the 1850s and 1860s, the so-called Taiping Rebellion, were also often interpreted as divine retribution for immoral, decadent or irreligious behaviour (Meyer-Fong, 2013). Carnage was rationalized in these terms, particularly by illiterate people, who could only turn to the gods to make sense of their suffering, find the way to moral values and evade divine condemnation.

  Wars within states appear to characterize the last 60 years of global history, an unprecedented shift in the pattern of violent human conflict for centuries. ‘According to one widely cited estimate, since 1945 there have been 259 conflicts around the world that have risen to the level of a war, and the vast majority of those were internal conflicts’ (Armitage, 2017: 7).

  Regarded as non-international in character, civil war can be defined as a conflict that erupts within a national territory where a faction aims to violently replace an established authority or secede from it. Arguably, civil wars last longer than conventional wars because combatants know that they will not survive defeat.

  According to a quantitative definition, civil war is ‘sustained military combat, primarily internal, resulting in at least 1000 battle deaths per year’ (ibid.: 217). Econometric studies use a coding rule based on battle deaths associated with internal conflicts. Designed to facilitate researchers in the creation of a usable dataset for analytical purposes, this quantitative definition does not consider the spatial and temporal aspects of large-scale violence. The former aspect refers to the participation of numerically large groups of citizens, while the latter to the duration of the violent conflict. These two variables give rise to a different interpretive model that looks at ‘regional war complexes’ rather than civil wars, the former being characterized by the participation of ‘foreigners’ (Gersovitz and Kriger, 2013). The focus, in this case, is on the individuals and groups who are neither inhabitants nor citizens of a country where large-scale violence is occurring, but may be directly involved in the conflict or limit their role to the provision of arms, bases or other forms of assistance. ‘A regional war complex has high foreign participation, and domestic participation inside at least one of the countries involved in the violent conflict must be high enough to challenge the government’s monopoly of force in that country’ (ibid.: 173).

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  War, Peace and International Relations

  An introduction to strategic history

  • Colin S. Gray(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  The Americas also registered a strategically lively century. The former Spanish colonies asserted and sustained their independence by force of arms, following which they expended much blood and treasure in fighting among themselves in assertion of contested territorial claims. To the north, the United States redefined itself by strategic action from 1861 to 1865, in what would be the bloodiest war in the country's history, before or since. The United States, North and South, suffered 620,000 fatalities in its civil war, approximately 204,000 of which were from battlefield causes. In proportion to its total population, American losses from 1861 to 1865 were far higher than those suffered by Britain from 1914 to 1918. The Civil War was not a minor strategic event. The historical casualty figure of 620,000 scales up for today's US population of 300 million into a number in the region of 2.5–3 million. The US census for 1860 recorded a grand population total – North and South, white and black – of 31,443,321. John Keegan is surely right when he claims, ‘[i]n many respects the Civil War was and remains America's Great War, in the way it is commemorated nationally and in so many towns and battlefield cemeteries and subjectively and collectively in the American consciousness’ (Keegan, 2009: 356; see also Weigley, 2000).

  Located midway between the Napoleonic Wars and World War I, America's great war can be regarded either as the first major modern war or the last old one. The former claim is the stronger, but the latter is defensible. The Confederate Robert E. Lee's military thinking was unmistakably Napoleonic in its quest for decisive battle; but in 1864–5 Ulysses S. Grant and William Tecumseh Sherman, for the Union, committed to an attritional style of what in the twentieth century would be called total war. The technology and tactics of the war were a thorough mixture of the old and the new. In truth, the many battlefields of the war looked more Napoleonic than they truly were. It was a story of ‘horse, foot and guns’, as it had been for centuries, but the second component of this trinity was dominant (at least for a while).

  The Civil War and its consequences completed the job of centralized state building that had begun with the War of Independence but remained decidedly incomplete as late as 1860–1. We cannot know for certain what the consequences would have been of a Confederate victory, but it is probable that the course of world politics in the twentieth century would have been profoundly different from that which did occur. The United States must have been a much less effective player on the world scene were she distracted by serious insecurity in North America, while a weak but surviving Confederate States of America would surely have been seriously interested in security partnerships of one sort or another with one or several European powers (to balance the otherwise much greater power of the Union).

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  A Savage War

  A Military History of the Civil War

  • Williamson Murray, Wayne Hsieh(Authors)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Princeton University Press

    (Publisher)

  On the other hand, substantial portions of the Northern population, at least before Sumter, preferred to see the Confederate states go in peace and were hardly willing to support a great war for the Union. As the war dragged on, violent outbreaks of Northern resistance—the most spectacular being the New York City draft riots of 1863—to intrusive military mobilization underlined the limits of Northern commitment. But perhaps most daunting of all was the fact that no one in the North at the war’s outbreak had a clue as to the difficulties that the translation of the North’s advantages in population and economic strength into military power would confront, much less the price that a successful war for the Union would demand. The political and strategic conduct of the war would require extraordinary leadership and therein lay the great imponderable on which success or failure in the Civil War, as in all conflicts, rested.

  Contingency and chance are the great determinants of history. Of all the uncertainties those twin sisters throw in the way of those who conduct war, the most important is that of leadership. The dominant themes among academic historians today are those of social and cultural history, and one of the leading mantras is that leaders matter little in the course of human affairs—a supposition that only those who have spent their lives comfortably ensconced in the gated communities of our colleges and universities could possibly hold. They are wrong. As in all great human trials, leaders, political and military, drove events and outcomes throughout the Civil War. Their strengths and weaknesses, their wisdom and incompetence, their vision or myopia, their understanding of their opponents, or their dogged unwillingness to adapt to war’s actual conditions, among a host of other attributes, determined the conflict’s outcome.

  The great historian of the war, James McPherson, notes four key turning points on which the war’s course depended, listing the Union victory at Antietam, the twin Union victories at Gettysburg and Vicksburg, and Atlanta as four moments when the Confederacy could have gained victory. However, we can also find additional important contingent decisions by leaders at a smaller but profoundly significant scale of human action. For example, it is entirely conceivable that in the first half of 1862 Henry Halleck, through either jealousy or dislike, might have removed Grant from the war’s chessboard, revealing the worst faults of the insular and personality-driven world of the antebellum Old Army. Indeed, Halleck treated Grant so badly in the post-Shiloh period that only Sherman’s intervention and Grant’s return to independent command after Corinth’s fall prevented the future leader of the victorious Union effort from packing up and leaving the army with consequences impossible to calculate. Grant’s absence from the chessboard might well have led to Confederate victory.

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