THE WAR LECTURES 1861-1865

The principles of war have been around for as long as man has fought in any organized or sizable manner. Xenophon’s records indicate that he either consciously or unconsciously understood the principles as did Alexander III (recall his oblique maneuver against Darius at Gaugamela in September, 331) in the fourth century BC.  Sun Tzu alludes to the principles in the fifth century BC in his teachings of The Art of War.  It is reasonable to suggest that we can even push the origins of the Principles back before the beginning of recorded history. But it was not until the sixteenth century that western historical literature and war theory recognized the principles in written form. Niccolo Machiavelli provided discourses on the strategic principles in both of his works The Prince and The Art of War in the sixteenth century.  Henri Jomini, a Swiss citizen who first commanded forces under Napoleon Bonaparte and later served as a general for the Czar of Russia, made the first attempt in the Nineteenth Century to bridge the centuries from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries and commit war principles to modern writing.  Most historians today, however, give the major credit to Carl Von Clausewitz who served as a senior staff officer in the Prussian army as the one who authored the principles for use in the western world. The principles are complex on the strategic level, but less so at the lower tactical stratum.  They are essentially common sense below the strategic plane, if one stops to think about it.  I like to use Nathan Bedford Forrest as an example of this common sense.  Forrest was a person of very limited formal education.  He couldn’t read or write except on a very elementary level, but he learned and understood “The Principles” to the extent that he rose from private to lieutenant general and was one of the most successful leaders during the American Civil War.  He basically said it all in a few brief, simple sentences; “War means fighting and fighting means killing” or “Victory goes to the side that does the most killing”.  “Fifteen minutes of bulge is worth a week of tactics”.  “Hit ‘em on the end”, were his words for a flanking movement.  “The time to whip the enemy is when they are running” verbalized Forrest’s understanding the value of pursuit.  And finally, the answer to the question “How did you win so many battles?”  His reply, “I got there first with the most men!”

Now that we have some intellectual tools in our kit it is time to apply them to war scenarios to understand the complexities of this body of knowledge.  Arguably, the American Civil War is the first of the modern wars.  I think it is safe to say that it is the first United States conflict where masses of people became involved and strategies were required to bring the war to conclusion.  This war was huge!  There were literally hundreds of encounters from major battles to fleeting skirmishes.  There were major campaigns that moved thousands of soldiers hundreds of miles from one battlefield to another.  The casualties were staggering.  Over 624,000 soldiers died or were killed in action and over 500,000 were wounded during this war.  As a note of fact, more soldiers were killed in this war than all other United States wars combined until the Vietnam KIA list was added to the total at the of that war in 1975.  Technology made a quantum leap in the period 1861-1865.  To list only a few innovations that were first used or first used extensively were the railroad, rifled muskets, revolvers, rifled cannon, breach loading rifles, repeating rifles, scope sights, rapid-fire machine guns (Gatling Gun) and pontoon bridging to name just a few.  The narrative scope of this war is beyond the confines of this lecture series.  There are thousands of narration’s regarding this period of conflict.  For those of you who may be interested in reading about the specifics of this war, such historians as Freeman, Foote, McPherson and Catton have eloquently recorded the actions, the victories, the defeats and the tragedies of this second revolution of the United States.  For this lecture series the purpose is to apply the theories to the battles to see if we, as students of war, can satisfactorily analyze the rudimentary factors that the theorists have presented to history.