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WORK TITLE: Engineering Victory
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CITY: Vernon
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adjunct assistant professor of history at Quinebaug Valley Community College * http://authorsvoice.net/product/540/ * https://commonreader.wustl.edu/c/civil-war-success/ * https://chroniclevitae.com/people/466520-thomas-army/profile
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PERSONAL
Born 1954; married; wife’s name Virginia.
EDUCATION:Wesleyan University, bachelor’s and master’s degree; University of Massachusetts at Amherst, Ph.D., 2014.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Historian, educator, and writer. Quinebaug Valley Community College, Danielson, CT, adjunct professor of history, 2013—. Previously served nineteen years as headmaster of a New England boarding school.
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
Thomas F. Army, Jr., is an educator and historian who spent many years in education before returning to college to earn his doctorate in history. In his first book, Engineering Victory: How Technology Won the Civil War, Army looks at a relatively unexplored reason that the North ultimately won the Civil War. “The past 150 years have produced many carefully argued reasons for why the North won the Civil War, ranging from overwhelming resources to superior civilian, political, and military leadership, failed Confederate economic planning, a strong Union navy, emancipation, and according to Robert E. Lee, God’s will,” Army writes in the book’s introduction, adding: “This volume serves as a corrective.”
In Engineering Victory, Army presents his case that the North won primarily because of its advanced engineering capabilities. He points out the North had a head start on the South because, during the years leading up to the war, the North was an industrialized economy that educated its citizens to meet the growing needs of industry. As a result, mechanical and engineering skills, as well as imagination, were sought after and highly rewarded in the North. Meanwhile, the South was primarily an agrarian economy that placed little value in these skills and attributes.
According to Army, the South even went so far as to stifle both education for the lower classes and manufacturing opportunities in general. In terms of education, Army writes that the Southern elite feared an educated populace might become too radical and end up supporting progress, from abolition to women’s rights. As a result, writes Army, the Union soldiers were able to draw on scientific innovations and ingenuity much better than their Confederate counterparts. As the war progressed, the Union Army was able to construct and repair roads, railways, and bridges relatively quickly, giving the North a quick passageway into the South as the Confederate Army retreated.
Engineering Victory is divided into three parts, beginning with a discussion of the education and management gap between the North and South. Army shows how the North made numerous common school reforms and advanced science education, how this knowledge was transmitted, and how the building of railroads led to a modern management system in the North. The book’s second part examines the Civil War’s early years in terms of the North’s application of military engineering over the course of 1861-62. Looking forward, the North immediately began to seek volunteers from the ranks of engineering. This section goes on to discuss early engineering successes and failures and the development of the military railroad. In contrast, Army reveals the South’s largely ineffective approach to develop the engineering segment of its war effort.
The third part of Engineering Victory presents case studies of specific instances of applied engineering by the North, which were largely successful, and by the South, which were generally unsuccessful. Among these studies are the Gettysburg and Vicksburg battles and the Atlanta and Carolina campaigns. In addition to discussing construction projects involving roads, bridges, and canals, Army delves in depth into the importance of railroad/logistics management. “Army’s vignettes are well researched and well described but, most important, they very clearly and specifically link these engineering feats to the victorious outcomes of the campaigns,” wrote a Civil War Books and Authors website contributor.
Army concludes Engineering Victory with a synopsis of how the Union’s know-how led to victory. The book includes notes and an essay on sources, as well as an index. Army “provides essential scholarship on how logistics, management, and technology revolutionized both the economy and warfare in nineteenth-century America,” wrote Steven G. Collins in Journal of Southern History. Michael A. Flannery, writing for the Common Reader website, praised Army for “synthesizing under one cover the leading influences impacting the war’s logistical challenges and accomplishments,” calling the approach “a valuable contribution to Civil War literature.”
BIOCRIT
BOOKS
Army, Thomas F., Jr., Engineering Victory: How Technology Won the Civil War, Johns Hopkins University Press (Baltimore, MD), 2016.
PERIODICALS
Choice, October, 2016, M.J. Smith, Jr., review of Engineering Victory: How Technology Won the Civil War, p. 268.
Civil War History, September, 2017, Michael P. Irvin, review of Engineering Victory, p. 322.
Journal of American History, September, 2017, Bruce W. Eelman, review of Engineering Victory, pp. 501-502.
Journal of Southern History, August, 2017, Steven G. Collins, review of Engineering Victory, p. 703.
History: Reviews of New Books, July, 2017, Michael F. Conlin, review of Engineering Victory, p. 89.
ONLINE
Author’s Voice, http://authorsvoice.net/ (January 6, 2017), brief author profile.
Civil War Books and Authors, https://cwba.blogspot.com/ (June 22, 2016), review of Engineering Victory.
Common Reader, https://commonreader.wustl.edu/ (July 17, 2017), Michael A. Flannery, “Civil War Success: Thomas F. Army Synthesizes Factors That Brought Victory to the North,” review of Engineering Victory.
Thomas F. Army, Jr., After graduating from Wesleyan with both a bachelors and masters degree, Army began a distinguished career in education that included nineteen years as headmaster of a New England boarding school. He went back to school and earned his PhD in history from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst in 2014. This is his first book. He lives in Vernon, Connecticut with his wife, Virginia.
Engineering Victory: How Technology Won the Civil War
Steven G. Collins
83.3 (Aug. 2017): p703+.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 Southern Historical Association
http://www.uga.edu/~sha
Engineering Victory: How Technology Won the Civil War. By Thomas F. Army Jr. Johns Hopkins Studies in the History of Technology. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016. Pp. xiv, 369. $49.95. ISBN 978-1 4214-1937-4.)
As William Tecumseh Sherman's army began its march from Atlanta to the sea, Confederate general Joseph E. Johnston observed, "If his army goes to hell, it will corduroy the road" (p. 264). In this important book, Thomas F. Army Jr. does a masterful job of proving Johnston's assessment correct. Indeed, Army shows that northern victory depended on engineering prowess to overcome swamps, mud, mountains, rivers, and trench warfare, as well as Confederate cavalry raids, advantages in interior lines, and a deteriorating southern railroad system.
Army's central thesis is that the antebellum North embraced education, technology, and progress, therefore creating a culture that encouraged common schools, mechanics' institutes, and agricultural reform. He makes a solid case that northern attitudes played a significant role in giving the Union the "masters and mechanics" with the educational and technical background to meet the engineering demands that radically transformed and modernized the Union army (p. 1). He also avers that the antebellum South rejected these same ideas, and that southern resistance toward progress and technological change were driven by a commitment to slavery. Although this thesis is familiar, some historians, especially those who study the antebellum southern economy, will find much of Army's argument on the southern economy less persuasive.
By far, the strongest sections of Army's study involve how the Union war effort evolved over time and how military commanders came to understand that engineering was the key to victory. Beginning with Ulysses S. Grant's use of engineers to try to circumvent Vicksburg by changing the course of the Mississippi River, Army gives a compelling account of how Union engineers overcame remarkable obstacles through innovation, organization, and Yankee can-do-ism. Army also explains the managerial revolution associated with railroads, notably how military leaders and civilian railroad managers coordinated their actions with the creation of the United States Military Railroad. In contrast, the Confederacy never centralized its railroad system, whose management remained chaotic throughout the war. Army contends that historians have overplayed the role, in this resistance to national control, of ideology and a belief in states' rights, while not giving enough credence to the South's hostility toward technology and change as a factor. Although Army strives to provide a balance in his analysis, it is heavily weighted toward the Union army's engineering efforts.
Overall, Army has made a major contribution to the understanding of how engineering and technology played a vital role in Union victory. Every scholar interested in the Civil War, the Union war effort, and the history of technology should grapple with his arguments and their implications. Southern historians may be disappointed in Army's analysis of the South, but it shows that more research needs to be done on the role of technology in the South. Along with Mark R. Wilson's The Business of Civil War: Military Mobilization and the State, 1861-1865 (Baltimore, 2006), Army's Engineering Victory: How
Technology Won the Civil War provides essential scholarship on how logistics, management, and technology revolutionized both the economy and warfare in nineteenth-century America.
Steven G. Collins
St. Louis Community College at Meramec
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Collins, Steven G. "Engineering Victory: How Technology Won the Civil War." Journal of Southern History, vol. 83, no. 3, 2017, p. 703+. General OneFile, link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A501078153/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=d905ca84. Accessed 7 Dec. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A501078153
Wednesday, June 22, 2016
Army, Jr.: "ENGINEERING VICTORY: How Technology Won the Civil War"
[Engineering Victory: How Technology Won the Civil War by Thomas F. Army, Jr. (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016). Hardcover, maps, photos, illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. Pages main/total:320/383. ISBN:978-1-4214-1937-4. $49.95]
No one would deny that the field engineering skills displayed by the Union Army during the Civil War, both by specialized units and by skilled officers and men of regular volunteer regiments, materially contributed to victory in countless campaigns, but Thomas Army takes this argument a step further in his book Engineering Victory: How Technology Won the Civil War. Given the Confederacy's supposed advantages in strategic imperative, terrain, and sheer land mass1 along with the similarities in training, tactical doctrine, and weaponry between contending sides, Army argues that the engineering prowess of the Union fighting man (combined with the engineering deficiencies of the Confederate Army) served as the key component of military victory.
Army divides the book into three parts. Part I documents the knowledge and education gap between North and South as it specifically pertained to engineering, project/business management, and labor culture. The book looks at common school systems in the sections and concludes that northern reforms and financial support far outstripped those of the South. Northern states recognized early on that their burgeoning industrial economies required a supporting system of mechanical education in order to the provide the skilled labor pool needed, and Army perceptively points toward northern initiatives aimed at expanding the reach of knowledge transmission by way of not only university programs but also agricultural fairs, lyceums, and mechanics's institutes. While the slave system was a closed, top-down arrangement with little input (or personal motivation to increase productivity) from the workers themselves, Northern free labor fostered innovation at all levels, with many laborers striking out on their own after a time and applying improved methods (learned through experience along with trial and error) to new commercial concerns. The explosion of railroads in the North would also lead to the creation a large pool of skilled managers, engineers, mechanics, and artificiers, all of whom could be harnessed by the Union war effort.
While Army's contention that great sectional disparities in mechanical, engineering, and scientific education existed in the antebellum U.S. is surely true, his widely shared view of a southern upper class actively suppressing access to public education has been somewhat contested by recent scholarship, among the most interesting being Sarah Hyde's work (to be published in book form later this year2) on public schooling in antebellum Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama. Still, for the purposes of Army's engineering arguments, the fact remains that the South's public school system was aimed primarily at a classical education, with a science and technology emphasis greatly dissimilar in scale and breadth to the North's.
Part II of Engineering Victory looks at the earliest Civil War applications of military engineering, during the 1861-62 campaigns in the eastern and western theaters. A major theme here is the forward looking recognition that the Union army's immense growth required a similar expansion in engineering capability, and meeting this challenge would require volunteer units staffed with civilian engineers and skilled laborers. The book documents the initial resistance of the army's professional engineers and their gradual (but never total) acceptance within their specialized field of the presence of volunteers. Army also selectively, yet effectively, contrasts the Union's early aggressive engineering efforts with the Confederacy's muddled ones. The author persuasively argues that, by the end of the 1862 Peninsula Campaign, the "the inability to establish an engineering bureau in Richmond, poor maps, few soldiers willing to labor on engineering projects, and no engineer battalion or regiment in any of the armies in the field" (pg. 129) hampered the effectiveness of Confederate armies during the first half of the war and beyond.
More specific, and greatly more detailed, examples are the order of the day in Part III. In this section, Army astutely constructs case studies highlighting the prominent role military engineering played in the Vicksburg, Gettysburg, Chattanooga, Red River, Petersburg, Atlanta, and Carolinas campaigns. Most often centering around Union bridge construction, road building, canal construction, and railroad/logistics management (along with some siege techniques), Army's vignettes are well researched and well described but, mostly important, they very clearly and specifically link these engineering feats to the victorious outcomes of the campaigns (the Red River disaster being the salient exception).
The Confederate side is not ignored in this part of the book, but it is very much pushed into the background. Army also frequently matches the Union at its best with the Confederacy at its worst, which might in some places serve to unnecessarily exaggerate disparities in engineering capability. The book rightly points to serious Confederate deficiencies in the areas of railroad management, reluctance to take troops out of the line in order to form engineer units, labor inefficiency, and other factors, but often seems overly critical of actual achievements. The author offers only grudging praise of Confederate combat engineering during the Atlanta, Overland, and Petersburg campaigns and is less than impressed with their efforts at Vicksburg. Additionally, the book's overall negligence of naval affairs in favor of land campaigns means the conversation misses out on Confederate technological innovations in the areas of heavy ordnance, ironclad warships, submarines, and torpedoes (nautical mines).
Even for the campaigns mentioned, the author often fails to counter Union achievements with corresponding mention of important moments in Confederate engineering. A striking example relates to the 1864 Red River Campaign. Army rightly credits the wing dam system created by Union engineers with saving the fleet from being trapped above the falls at Alexandria, but he neglects to mention that the river's precipitous fall was largely the result of an ingenious feat of hydro-engineering on the part of the Confederates3. Nevertheless, the book makes a powerful case overall that the North out-engineered the South, even after taking into account vast differences between the sides in available finances, material resources, industry, and pools of skilled manpower.
Engineering Victory documents in fine fashion the role of the mechanical arts and their skilled management in the Union triumph over the Confederacy. But was engineering really the singular tipping point in Union military victory that author Thomas Army believes it to have been (after all, engineering was one of many tools often wielded by federal forces to asymmetrical advantage during the war)? Those that grasp warfare's myriad of complexities are generally suspicious of such reductionist claims (and if they are not, they should be), but one can still appreciate the value of various well formulated arguments underlying a central theme while rejecting the headline conclusion4. A thoughtful treatise on an important subject related to war, culture, and society, Engineering Victory is highly recommended reading.
Notes:
1 - While these factors are often construed as advantageous to the Confederacy, they could also be serious liabilities. Defending an immense land mass with most key cities (and many industries) located along the periphery meant that it was politically necessary that all these widely separated strategic points be protected at all times. Union leaders, on the other hand, could pick and choose where to attack, and the South's poorly maintained railroads seriously diminished the traditional advantage of interior lines. This geography also created a related strategic conundrum. That the Confederacy did not have to win a war of conquest, but only survive a defensive war on its home ground (which additionally consisted of a land mass great enough to afford the ability to trade space for time), seems advantageous on paper, but the reality was that the very outer areas yielded early in the war contained critically important cities and irreplaceable industrial capacity. Terrain is also often cited as a benefit to the Confederacy, but major rivers, especially in the west, were all too often less useful as defensive barriers to key strategic points and more useful as unbreakable all-weather Union invasion and logistical support avenues. They also served to divide vast contested areas into manageable sectors of Union occupation.
2 - Schooling in the Antebellum South: The Rise of Public and Private Education in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama (LSU Press, Fall 2016).
3 - This aspect of the campaign remains little known among more general readers, but it has been prominently featured in the recent literature, most notably by historian Gary Joiner in his 2006 book Through the Howling Wilderness: The 1864 Red River Campaign and Union Failure in the West (University of Tennessee Press).
4 - Other examples might include Daniel Sutherland's book on the "decisive role" of guerrillas (A Savage Conflict, 2009) and Marc Egnal's study (Clash of Extremes, 2009) lending economic factors primacy in discussing the Civil War's origins.
Civil War Success
Thomas F. Army synthesizes factors that brought victory to the North.
Michael A. Flannery
JULY 17, 2017 PAGE BY PAGE: BOOK REVIEWS
Engineering Victory: How Technology Won the Civil War
By Thomas F. Army, Jr
(2016, Johns Hopkins University Press) 369 pages including illustrations, bibliographical references and index
Educator-turned-historian, Thomas F. Army, Jr., has provided an important account of how the engineering capacity of the North defeated a determined but ill-prepared and ill-equipped Confederacy in its bid for independence. He does this in thirteen engaging chapters divided into three sections: the first on education, business and industry in mid-19th-century America; the second covering the requisite skills necessary to support the logistical infrastructure of a massive war machine; and the third offers applied examples of U.S. Army engineering prowess and how that translated into Union victory.
Army notes that little attention has been paid to this topic. General Grant barely mentions it in his memoirs; Lee ascribed his defeat largely to being overwhelmed by larger economies of human and industrial resources. In one succinct paragraph, the author proposes his central thesis:
“This volume serves as a corrective [to these earlier approaches]. The Union’s critical advantage over the Confederacy was its ability to engineer victory. The North won because, in the decades before the war, Northerners invested in educational systems that served an industrialized economy. Furthermore, the labor system in the North rewarded mechanical ability, ingenuity, and imagination. The labor system in the South failed to reward these skills. Plantation slavery generated fabulous wealth for a slim percentage of the Southern white population. It fostered a particular style of agriculture and scientific farming that limited land use. It curtailed manufacturing opportunities, and it stifled educational opportunities for the middle and lower classes because those in political power feared that an educated yeomanry would be filled with radical ideas such as women’s equality, temperance, and worst all, abolition.”
There can be no argument with any of this. The laissez-faire capitalism of the North fostered all of these things, especially the growth of education as embodied in the mechanic’s institutes increasingly dotting the landscape of cities burgeoning above the Mason-Dixon Line. It also encouraged a paper investment economy often several times removed from immediate liquidity which tightened the industrial grasp of so-called “robber barons” that, despite their rapacity and ruthlessness, helped establish one of the most fruitful socio-economic systems on earth. Southern planters’ investment in land and slaves simply did not prompt a society based upon broad education, fierce competition, and dynamic internal growth.
Thus when war came the Confederacy was at a distinct disadvantage, and Army explains how this revealed itself most clearly in a lack of technical proficiency in engineering. Three examples will suffice. First, of all the technologies impacting the war effort, none were as of more immediate importance than the railroad. Army points out that by 1861 there were 31,500 miles of track in the United States, 22,000 of which (nearly 70 percent) were in the North. The establishment of the United States Military Railroad (USMR) in 1862 gave the rail a coordinated network of national character that would have a telling logistical effect on moving troops, goods, and rations. The South had nothing comparable. By the time the Confederate Congress attempted to coordinate the management of its rail, steamboat, and canal systems on February 19, 1865, it was too little too late. A second example is the poorly constructed Fort Henry on the banks of the Tennessee River. With the site selected by Colonel Bushrod Johnson, an “engineer” by proclamation rather than practice, with the approval of planter-turned-general Daniel Smith Donelson, the fort gave little evidence of expertise in military engineering. It was constructed so close to the eastern bank of the Tennessee River that the five-sided earthen structure was prone to flooding, while its awkward position exposed three sides to enfilading canon fire. The coordinated efforts of Ulysses S. Grant and Flag Officer Andrew H. Foote in February 1862 made the fort an easy capture. The fall of Fort Henry would ultimately pave the way for the seizure of Nashville, leaving the Confederate interior vulnerable to invasion under the relentless march of William Tecumseh Sherman. This would culminate in Army’s final example of how engineering won Union victory, namely, the surrender of Atlanta on September 2, 1864. This singular achievement of logistical management helped assure Lincoln’s victory over McClellan in the coming election less than a month later. With this, the hope of an armistice and a political victory for Confederate independence ended.
The establishment of the United States Military Railroad (USMR) in 1862 gave the rail a coordinated network of national character that would have a telling logistical effect on moving troops, goods, and rations. The South had nothing comparable. By the time the Confederate Congress attempted to coordinate the management of its rail, steamboat, and canal systems on February 19, 1865, it was too little too late.
Each of Army’s examples (there are others) support his central theme that engineering made an appreciable difference in the outcome of the war. Robin Tatu has called it “the Union Army’s silver bullet.”[1] This, however, raises two questions. First, how balanced is the author’s coverage? Second, to what extent may engineering alone be considered the essential factor in Union victory?
With regard to the first question, there seem to be curious omissions in Army’s analysis. It is surprising, for example, to see no mention of Lemuel Grant (no relation to the Union general). Grant, Captain of the Confederate Engineering Bureau, was the senior engineer in charge of Atlanta’s defenses, and he built an elaborate system of fortifications, many of which can still be seen today.[2] The complete absence of Captain Grant in Army’s discussion of the siege of Atlanta is all the more surprising given his admission that “the fortifications surrounding the city of Atlanta … posed a formidable obstacle to Sherman’s three armies.” Another curious omission, especially given Army’s emphasis on the siege and eventual capture of Vicksburg, is the absence of another book of the same title, Justin S. Solonick’s Engineering Victory: The Union Siege of Vicksburg (Southern Illinois University Press, 2015). Solonick carefully points out that the siege was more important in signaling a transition to a new kind of warfare and an end to old trench style siege works instituted by French military engineer Sébastien Le Prestre de Vauban nearly 200 years before. Instead, Army gives bare mention of Vauban and fails to place this in a larger historical context.
I would not be the first to point out Army’s over-emphasis upon Union engineering efforts. Andrew J. Wagenhoffer has observed that:
“Army … frequently matches the Union at its best with the Confederacy at its worst, which might in some places serve to unnecessarily exaggerate disparities in engineering capability. The book rightly points to serious Confederate deficiencies in the areas of railroad management, reluctance to take troops out of the line in order to form engineer units, labor inefficiency, and other factors, but often seems overly critical of actual achievements. The author offers only grudging praise of Confederate combat engineering during the Atlanta, Overland, and Petersburg campaigns and is less than impressed with their efforts at Vicksburg. Additionally, the book’s overall negligence of naval affairs in favor of land campaigns means the conversation misses out on Confederate technological innovations in the areas of heavy ordnance, ironclad warships, submarines, and torpedoes (nautical mines).”
Wagenhoffer’s assessment is revealingly honest. Army commits the one-sided fallacy, an imbalance of evidence that may not invalidate his argument, but surely makes it at the least incomplete and at most suspect.
This leads to a second nagging question. Was it really, as Tatu says, the Union’s “magic bullet”? With a topic as well covered as the American Civil War, this really becomes an issue of historiography. Army is right to suggest the preeminence of the Union’s rail system over the Confederacy, an observation that is hardly new. Historian of the South, Charles W. Ramsdell, said as much a century ago.[3] Others such as Robert C. Black, III’s The Railroads of the Confederacy (1952) and George Edgar Turner’s Victory Rode the Rails: The Strategic Place of Railroads in the Civil War (1953) made significant additions to Ramsdell’s analysis that are now more than 60 years old.
If the slave-based economy kept the South from achieving the same progressive successes as the North, a point well made in Engineering Victory, then the continuation of Jim Crow in the South cannot be overlooked as a factor extending these regional imbalances. The point is, much more than conventional engineering was going on in mid-19th-century America—significant socio-economic “engineering” was in play as well.
There is also a sense in which ascribing so much to Union engineering is important but too limited a view to give it “silver bullet” status. Many things lay at the heart of the Union victory. While the social and economic features of the rapidly industrializing North are correctly explained by Army as the source of this engineering effort, this too is not new. Historians have long chronicled the socio-economic differences that drove the disparities between North and South.[4] More importantly, the Beard-Hacker thesis, developed in the first half of the 20th century by historians Charles and Mary Beard (1927) and Louis M. Hacker (1940), pointed to the socio-economic forces of industrial capitalism in establishing a “second American revolution.” Richard Franklin Bensel’s Yankee Leviathan: The Origins of Central State Authority in America, 1859-1877 (1991) essentially agreed with the Beard-Hacker thesis but added that far from establishing a revitalized South the war only served to further marginalize it into a colonial economy serving the interests of Northern business and industry.[5] If the slave-based economy kept the South from achieving the same progressive successes as the North, a point well made in Engineering Victory, then the continuation of Jim Crow in the South cannot be overlooked as a factor extending these regional imbalances. The point is, much more than conventional engineering was going on in mid-19th-century America—significant socio-economic “engineering” was in play as well.
Army’s argument for the importance of engineering in part relies upon the assumption that the Confederacy actually had a chance to win the war, but it allegedly hinged upon the South’s prolonging the war and the election of Lincoln’s opponent, George B. McClellan. The surrender of Atlanta to Union forces on September 2, 1864, prevented this by providing the timely victory needed to ensure Lincoln’s re-election on November 8. This scenario is speculative since McClellan himself repeatedly denied that he would sue for peace; McClellan “the peace-maker,” an oft-repeated Republican charge encouraged by the South’s wishful thinking, still lodged itself permanently in the collective memory as fact. A more realistic assessment came from Shelby Foote in episode seven, “Most Hallowed Ground,” of Ken Burns’ PBS Television series, The Civil War:
“I think that the North fought that war with one hand behind its back. At the same time the war was going on the Homestead Act was being passed, all these marvelous inventions were going on, and in the Spring of ’64 the Harvard/Yale boat races were going on and not a man in either crew ever volunteered for the army or the navy. They didn’t need them. I think that if there had been more Southern successes, and a lot more, the North simply would have brought that other arm out from behind its back. I don’t think the South ever had a chance to win that war.”
While diminishing Army’s single cause for Union victory, Foote’s comments actually underscore much of Army’s argument. The Homestead Act of 1862 encouraged free soil expansion in the American West, and Foote might well have added the Morrill Act passed that same year would establish the national, federally-funded network of land grant colleges. It was the antebellum mechanic’s institute on steroids. Foote even acknowledges all those “marvelous inventions,” a product of Yankee ingenuity and industry (in both senses of that word). So long as immigrants could fill the ranks, America’s elites—those boys in the 1864 Harvard/Yale boat races—could stay out and did. Foote merely recounts as a historian what Texas Governor Sam Houston predicted. Houston refused to join the Confederacy not because he opposed states’ rights but because he thought the war unwinnable. “You may,” he warned his fellow Texans, “… as a bare possibility, win Southern independence, if God be not against you, but I doubt it. I tell you that, while I believe with you in the doctrine of State rights, the North is determined to preserve this Union.”[6] The North’s resolve remained unshaken through four bloody years of conflict, but its minimalist approach could be seen in Lincoln’s initial belief that the rebellion could be quelled with 90-day volunteers, and in the halting efforts of its generals that would follow until “fighting generals” such as Ulysses S. Grant and William Tecumseh Sherman were found. Truth is, both sides underestimated one another, but for the South it was fatal.
Having said all this, Army is correct in highlighting the role of engineering in winning the war, but it is just one aspect of a very complex concatenation of factors leading to Union victory. Engineering Victory is as much about wartime logistics—the movement, supply, and support of forces—as it is actual engineering. While Army’s book may not provide much that is new, its synthesizing under one cover the leading influences impacting the war’s logistical challenges and accomplishments is a valuable contribution to Civil War literature. Brian Holden Reid has recently commented that “the study of Civil War logistics is still an untilled field; a great deal of work remains to be completed on matters great and small.”[7] Here Army has “tilled” a good deal of valuable historical soil related to this crucial topic. Army’s efforts may at times be incomplete, it may suffer from Union-centered myopia, but overall this is an extremely useful book. It is thoughtfully written and easily accessible. Its deficits notwithstanding, every academic library and Civil War specialist—scholar and enthusiast—should have it on their shelves.
[1]See Robin Tatu, “The Union Army’s Silver Bullet,” review of Engineering Victory, by Thomas F. Army, Jr., ASEE [American Society for Engineering Education] Prism, v. 26., no. 4 (Dec. 2016): 40.
[2]Lawrence Krumenaker, Walking the Line: Rediscovering and Touring the Civil War Defenses on Modern Atlanta’s Landscape (Marietta, GA: Hermograph Press, 2014).
[3]Charles W. Ramsdell, “The Confederate Government and the Railroads,” The American Historical Review, v. 22, no. 4 (July 1917): 794-810.
[4]See, for example, Dictionary of American History, ed. James Truslow Adams, “South, Civilization of the Old,” s.v., vol. 5 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1940); and chapter 6, “Social Patterns North and South” in Peter N. Carroll and David W. Noble, The Free and the Unfree: A New History of the United States, 2nd ed. (New York: Penguin Books, 1988), 145-162.
[5]For a complete examination, see Phillip Shaw Paludin, “What Did the Winners Win? The Social and Economic History of the North during the Civil War,” in Writing the Civil War: The Quest to Understand, edited by James M. McPherson and William J. Cooper, Jr. (Columbia, SC: The University of South Carolina Press, 1998), 174-200.
[6]Quoted in George S. Bryan, Sam Houston (New York: Macmillan, 1917), 172.
[7]Brian Holden Reid, “Logistics,” in A Companion to the U.S. Civil War, edited by Aaron Sheehan-Dean, 2 vols. (Malden, MA: Wiley Blackwell, 2014) I: 74-94.
Quotes from introduction (no page numbers)