THE FEDERAL NAVY AND THE SOUTH
By FRENCH E.
CHADWICK, Rear-Admiral, United States Navy
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Who
shall estimate the value to the United States of the services of its
navy which thus isolated the Confederacy, cut it off from communication
with the outside world, and at the same time compelled it to guard every
point against a raid like that which had destroyed the Capitol of the
United States in 1814? Had the Confederacy instead of the United States
been able to exercise dominion over the sea; had it been able to keep
open its means of communication with the countries of the Old World, to
send its cotton abroad and to bring back the supplies of which it stood
so much in need; had it been able to blockade Portland, Boston, Newport,
New York, the mouth of the Delaware, and the entrance of Chesapeake Bay;
had it possessed the sea power to prevent the United States from
dispatching by water into Virginia its armies and their supplies, it is
not too much to say that such a reversal of conditions would have
reversed the outcome of the Civil War.*
*
Hilary A. Herbert, Colonel 8th Alabama Volunteers, C.S.A.,
ex-Secretary of the Navy, in an address, "The Sea and Sea Power as a
Factor in the History of the United States," delivered at the Naval
War College, August 10, 1896.
NOW that time has passed since the Civil
War, we have come to a point where we can deal calmly with the
philosophy of the great contest without too great disturbance of the
feeling which came near to wrecking our nationality. The actualities of
the struggle will be dealt with in the photographic history. Meanwhile
it is not amiss in these pages to look into the causes of the South's
failure to set up a nation and thus justify Gladstone's surety of
Southern success in his Newcastle speech in 1862.
Confederates Lacked Adequate Supplies and Equipment
It has been, as a rule, taken for granted
that the South was worsted in a fair fight in the field. This is so in a
moderate degree only; for the fight was not wholly a fair one.
Difference of forces in the field may be set aside, as the fight being
on the ground of the weaker, any disproportion in numbers was largely
annulled. But the army of the North was lavishly equipped; there was no
want of arms, food, raiment, ammunition, or medical care. Everything an
army could have the Federal forces had to overflowing. On the other hand
the Southern army was starved of all necessaries, not to speak of the
luxuries which the abounding North poured forth for its men in the
field. The South was in want of many of these necessaries even in the
beginning of the war; toward the end it was in want of all. It was
because of this want that it had to yield. General Joseph E. Johnston,
writing General Beauregard in 1868, said truly: "We, without the means
of purchasing supplies of any kind, or procuring or repairing arms,
could continue this war only as robbers or guerillas." The Southern army
finally melted away and gave up the fight because it had arrived at the
limit of human endurance through the suffering which came of the
absolute want brought by the blockade.
Some few historians have recognized and
made clear this fact, notably General Charles Francis Adams, himself a
valiant soldier of the war. Another is Mr. John Christopher Schwab,
professor of political economy in Yale University. The former, analyzing
six reasons for the South's failure, given by a British sympathizer in
Blackwood's Magazine for July, 1866, says: "We are . . . through
elimination brought down to one factor, the blockade, as the controlling
condition of Union success. In other words that success was made
possible by the undisputed naval and maritime superiority of the North.
Cut off from the outer world, and all exterior sources of supply,
reduced to a state of inanition by the blockade, the Confederacy was
pounded to death." The "pounding" was mainly done by the army; the
conditions which permitted it to be effectively done were mainly
established by the navy. "The blockade," says Mr. Schwab in his "
Financial and Industrial History of the South during the Civil War,"
"constituted the most powerful tool at the command of the Federal
Government in its efforts to subdue the South. The relentless and almost
uniformly successful operations of the navy have been minimized in
importance by the at times more brilliant achievements of the army; but
we lean to ascribing to the navy the larger share in undermining the
power of resistance on the part of the South. It was the blockade rather
than the ravages of the army that sapped the industrial strength of the
Confederacy."
The South was thus beaten by want; and
not merely by force of arms. A nation of well on to 6,000,000 could
never have been conquered on its own ground by even the great forces the
North brought against it but for this failure of resources which made it
impossible to bring its full fighting strength into the field.
We know that there was a total of 2,841,906 enlistments and
reenlistments in the army and navy of the North, representing some
1,600,000 three-year enlistments; we shall, however, never know the
actual forces of the South on account of the unfortunate destruction of
the Southern records of enlistments and levies. That some 1,100,000 men
were available is, of course, patent from the fact that the white
population of the seceding states was 5,600,000, and to these were added
125,000 men, who, as sympathizers, joined the Southern army. The South
fought as men have rarely fought. Its spirit was the equal of that of
any race or time, and if the 325,000 Boers in South Africa could put
80,000 men into the field, the 5,600,000 of the South would have
furnished an equal proportion had there been arms, clothing, food, and
the rest of the many accessories which, besides men, go to make an army.
The situation which prevented an accomplishment of such results as those
in South Africa, and it was impossible in the circumstances that they
could be, was the result of the blockade of the Southern coast, a force
the South was powerless to resist.
What has been said shows how clear was
the role of the navy. The strategic situation was of the simplest; to
deprive the South of its intercourse with Europe and in addition to cut
the Confederacy in twain through the control of the Mississippi. The
latter, gained largely by the battles of
Farragut, Porter, Foote, and Davis, was but a part of the great
scheme of blockade, as it cut off the supply of food from Texas and the
shipments of material which entered that State by way of Matamoras. The
question of the military control of Texas could be left aside so long as
its communications were cut, for in any case the State would finally
have to yield with the rest of the Confederacy. The many thousand troops
which would have been an invaluable reinforcement to the Southern armies
in the East were to remain west of the Mississippi and were to have no
influence in the future events.
The determination to attempt by force to
reinstate the Federal authority over a vast territory, eight hundred
miles from north to south and seventeen hundred from east to west,
defended by such forces as mentioned, was truly a gigantic proposition,
to be measured somewhat by the effort put forth by Great Britain to
subdue the comparatively very small forces of the South African
republic. It was as far from Washington to Atlanta (which may be
considered as the heart of the Confederacy) as from London to Vienna.
The frontier of the Confederacy, along which operations were to begin,
was fifteen hundred miles in length. Within the Confederacy were
railways which connected Chattanooga with Lynchburg in Virginia, on the
east and with Memphis, on the Mississippi, on the west; two north and
south lines ran, the one to New Orleans, the other to Mobile; Atlanta
connected with Chattanooga; Mobile and Savannah were in touch with
Richmond through the coast line which passed through Wilmington and
Charleston. No part of the South, east of the Mississippi, was very
distant from railway transportation, which for a long period the South
carried on excepting in that portion which ran from Lynch-burg to
Chattanooga through the eastern part of Tennessee, where the population
was in the main sympathetic with the Union.
Thus the South had the great advantage,
which it held for several years, of holding and operating on interior
lines. Its communications were held intact, whereas those of the
Federals, as in the case of Grant's advance by way of the Wilderness,
were often in danger. It was not until Sherman made his great march to
the sea across Georgia, a march which Colonel Henderson, the noted
English writer on strategy, says " would have been impossible had not a
Federal fleet been ready to receive him when he reached the Atlantic,"
that the South felt its communications hopelessly involved.
To say that at the outset there was any
broad and well-considered strategic plan at Washington for army action,
would be an error. There was no such thing as a general staff, no
central organization to do the planning of campaigns, such as now
exists. The commanders of Eastern and Western armies often went their
own gait without any effective coordination. It was not until Grant
practically came to supreme military command that complete coordination
was possible.
Four Unionist objectives, however, were
clear. The greatly disaffected border states which had not joined the
Confederacy must be secured and the loyal parts of Virginia and
Tennessee defended; the southern ports blockaded; the great river which
divided the Confederacy into an east and west brought under Federal
control, and the army which defended Richmond overcome. At the end of
two years all but the last of these objectives had been secured, but it
was nearly two years more before the gallant Army of Northern Virginia
succumbed through the general misery wrought in the Confederacy by the
sealing of its ports and the consequent inability of the Southerners to
hold their own against the ever increasing, well-fed and well-supplied
forces of the North. To quote again the able Englishman just mentioned,
" Judicious indeed was the policy which, at the very outset of the war,
brought the tremendous pressure of the sea power to bear against the
South, and had her statesmen possessed the knowledge of what that
pressure meant, they must have realized that
Abraham Lincoln was no ordinary foe. In forcing the Confederates to
become the aggressors, and to fire on the national ensign, he had
created a united North; in establishing a blockade of their coasts he
brought into play a force which, like the mills of God, 'grinds slowly,
but grinds exceedingly small.' " It was the command of the sea which
finally told and made certain the success of the army and the reuniting
of the States.
[To
the discussion presented above by Admiral Chadwick may be added the
following expression of opinion by one of the foremost military
students of modern Europe : "The cooperation of the United States
navy with their army in producing a decisive effect upon the whole
character of the military operations is akin to what happens with us
in nearly every war in which we engage. An English general has
almost always to make his calculations strictly in accordance with
what the navy can do for him. The operations by which the Federal
navy, in conjunction with the army, split the Confederacy in two and
severed the East from the West, must always, therefore, have for him
a profound interest and 'importance. The great strategical results
obtained by this concentration of military and naval power, which
were as remarkable as the circumstances under which the successes
were gained, deserve our closest study."—Field-Marshal, the Right
Honorable Viscount Wolseley.—EDITORS.]
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