By Iain MacGregor

IN JANUARY of 1861, the U.S. Army numbered 17,000 men. These troops were primarily
spread across the new western territories. A small number of federal forts and arsenals were
sprinkled throughout the country and in the key ports and cities. Within weeks, the newly
elected president, Abraham Lincoln, would preside over a transformation of this small
professional military into a mass army ready to fight a total war. His efforts would be
mirrored to a degree by the secessionist Southern Confederacy of 11 states, against which the Federal forces would soon do battle.

Both sides would raise huge armies – over three million men under arms – to conduct small
skirmishes, intense pitched battles and months-long campaigns. The contest would see
technological advancements in weaponry (over 19,000 patents would be granted by the U.S.
government) that would create staggering numbers of casualties. Advancements in
transportation were also seen as armies went to war on new railroads. The recent breakthrough of the telegraph would transform military communications and bring news of
the war to an anxious public on both sides.

The United States would never be the same again and in many ways, it still has yet to recover
from the various consequences of such terrible slaughter. The war would end more than
600,000 lives. A large percentage of the casualties would not die in combat but from diseases that were rife in all army camps.

In writing my latest book, The U.S. Civil War Battle by Battle, I was faced with the task of attempting to give a new reader a taste of the conflict through the prism of 30 battles that
would outline not only the progress of the war, but describe the actual fighting, the leaders
and men who fought one another, their weaponry, and how the various clashes fit into the
bigger picture of the struggle. It was a challenge, but one I hope students of the subject will find enjoyable.

I was fortunate that I could build the spine of the book with some battles that are cornerstones of the war, and which give plenty of scope, even with 750 words per battle, to tell a good story. It is from this final list I have chosen three that in hindsight (always a great thing for a historian) I argue could have swung the war one way or the other and perhaps even ended it far quicker than it would last. This is the beauty of such books: They are there to ferment debate and make people think. I am sure readers of this article will have their own opinions, too.

1861 – The Great Skedaddle

We will begin with the first major battle of the Civil War, which many on both sides during
that first summer of 1861 believed would decide the conflict, perhaps in a single day.

It was fought on July 21 at Manassas Junction (near Bull Run Creek) in Northern Virginia
– only a short ride from Washington D.C. – by two hastily assembled citizen (and
largely amateur) armies, led by officers who had only recently been comrades in the regular
army.

Though equally matched in terms of manpower (32,000 Rebels faced 35,000 Federal troops)
the Confederate forces’ superior discipline and ability to make use of the nearby rail network to quickly bring in reinforcements turned the day in their favour. Though the Union army seemed to have gained the day by attacking and then turning the Confederate flank, the ferocious defence put up by one brigade of Virginians led by Brigadier General Thomas J. Jackson held the line and their counterattack, complete with their ‘rebel yell’ caused consternation amongst the retreating enemy.

Within a few hours the Union army had been driven from the field in what was coined by a
jubilant southern press as the ‘Great Skedaddle.” Washington’s citizenry who had gathered to watch the excitement witnessed a flood of bedraggled and terrified Federal troops stream
back into the capital. Here was a major chance lost. Could the triumphant Confederate forces, commanded by Brigadier General P.G.T. Beauregard have focused, realigned their depleted forces and advanced upon the capital to seize it? It seemed so.

President Lincoln’s administration was still massing a contingent of volunteers that had rushed to the country’s aid a few months earlier. These tens of thousands of civilians were not on hand at that time to defend the capital and were yet to be formed into what would become the Army of the Potomac.

Alas, Beauregard’s army was no more than a militia, and though his victorious men held the field, the rebel general was some way from his main base of supply for an advance on the seat of Federal power. Also, Richmond also needed to be fortified. The war in the west was just beginning, too. Beauregard pulled back to lick his wounds and await fresh orders; Washingtonians breathed a sigh of relief.

1862 – The Bloodiest Day

By the late summer of 1862, the war had taken on a bloodier scale. Both sides were now in
possession of highly trained and armed field armies that were inflicting enormous losses on
one another across a thousand miles of frontlines stretching from Virginia in the east to the
boundaries of the great Mississippi and Tennessee rivers. The economies of both sides were
now fully attuned to conducting full-scale war, though the economic power and superiority in
manpower of the North was handicapped by incompetent generalship. The eastern theatre of operations was seen as the battleground that would decide the future of the Confederacy and their battle-hardened Army of Northern Virginia was led by General Robert E.
Lee.

With a string of major victories now behind him in 1862, Lee’s army marched from their fortifications in their home state north to take the battle into Maryland. Richmond hoped that another stunning victory might compel Britain or France to force President Lincoln to the negotiating table for a compromised peace that would stabilize transatlantic trade.

Trailing in the Confederates’ wake and licking its wounds from the beating they had taken
weeks before at Second Bull Run, came the Army of the Potomac led by General George B.
McClellan, or ‘Little Mac’ as his men called him. A superb administrator who had forged a
highly disciplined army from the wreck of First Bull Run, supplied it with everything it could
possibly require to wage war and then refused to use it. What skills McClellan had in terms
of organization he lacked in generalship. Lee had his number.

However, the resulting battle that came on Sept. 17, 1862, was one that could have destroyed
Lee’s army, enabled McClellan to then march south on Richmond unmolested and end the
war in the east. Alas, events overtook him, and his own inertia gave Lee’s army, which had
split up to scavenge the countryside for food and supplies, time to pull itself together and face the coming blue onslaught. Lee’s headquarters staff had mislaid a crucial instruction –
Special order 191 – detailing his army’s dispositions, which fell into McClellan’s hands.
With the instrument to finally destroy the Army of Northern Virginia, the Union commander
procrastinated, while his senior officers squabbled amongst themselves.

The Battle of Antietam, outside of the town of Sharpsburg, Maryland, would be the bloodiest day in American military history. Never more was it so obvious that technology had
surpassed tactics than at Antietam. A field of blue marched in perfect order, bayonets
glistening in the autumn sun, towards Lee’s entrenched and vastly outnumbered troops from
6 a.m. through to the evening. All along the three-mile line of battle, thousands fell, some
units still in parade formation, as they marched into the rapid fire that a line of men
discharging modern rifled muskets could deliver in deadly repetition.

It wasn’t a one-way slaughter. The Confederates took bloody losses, too. But at each fateful moment in the day-long battle, McClellan spurned the opportunity to finish Lee’s outnumbered forces off. It was a missed opportunity, one wasted by inept leadership. For Lee, the moment represented an example of perfect crisis management. The battered Rebel army slowly made its way south to the safety of Richmond’s defences and the war would drag on for over two more years and hundreds of thousands of deaths.

1863 – The High Water Mark

Finally, while the Northern press lauded the brilliant and hard-fought victory at Gettysburg,
near to the sleepy southern Pennsylvanian town in the first week of July 1863, a Union
victory won out in the West proved pivotal to the strategic picture across the whole country.
The cotton-trading fortress of Vicksburg – the ‘Gibraltar of the Confederacy’ – was the
cornerstone in the South’s plan to maintain its hold on the Mississippi and Tennessee rivers
and thus keep the Confederacy’s economic strength viable to wage war. Surrounded and
protected by miles of boggy swamps on its land side, Vicksburg dominated river traffic that would head south to the Gulf of Mexico, which brought in supplies and men from one
theatre of operations to the other. Federal commanders were determined to blockade the river, take the city and thus split the Confederacy in two so as to subjugate the South state by state with its superior manpower and armaments.

In May 1863, Ulysses S. Grant would lead his Army of the Tennessee to overcome terrible terrain, sporadic supply lines and fears of being cut off in the wilderness of the swamps to achieve a quite remarkable engineering feat of arms.

His army suddenly appeared on the Confederate 33,000-man garrison’s landward side, dug a formidable cordon of siege works and then together with the blockading Union navy,
relentlessly bombarded the fort.

Every day from May 20 until July 3 (the day of the victory at Gettysburg) Grant’s 200 artillery pieces sent shells crashing into Vicksburg. Perhaps if they had been led by a more aggressive or determined commander such as James Longstreet, or the deceased ‘Stonewall’ Jackson, the South might have held the fortress. One could argue that such was Vicksburg’s importance to the Rebellion’s ability to wage war that any sacrifice there would have been worth it. Alas, no. Vicksburg’s defeat coincided with Robert E. Lee’s crushing defeat on the third day of battle in Pennsylvania. The two represented a double blow from which the South would not recover. Gettysburg is seen as the highwater mark of the Confederacy one could argue Vicksburg was the real nail in the south’s coffin.

It would make the reputation of Grant, paving the way for his rise to supreme commander of
the Union Army and final victory.

Iain MacGregor is the author of U.S. Civil War – Battle by Battle (Osprey Publishing). He has
almost three decades of working in non-fiction publishing, having begun his editorial career with Osprey Publishing. He has edited books on various American Civil War campaigns, including Shiloh, Chancellorsville, Fredericksburg and Gettysburg. Iain has since gone on to publish books with major historians such as David McCullough, Simon Schama, Max Hastings, Michael Wood, David Grann, and Professor Richard Overy. He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society.