A Visit To A Civil War Battlefield

In the last week, I’ve been to five different US states – that’s like ten percent of the total!

One of the new experiences was visiting a Civil War battlefield for the first time – specifically Chickamauga in northern Georgia.

I had never visited a Civil War battlefield before, so it was an interesting experience. And it caused me to indulge in sober reflection! You get to read about it below. 🙂

The American Civil War was big, complicated, frequently confusing, both to later historians and people who actively participated in it, and very bloody. The United States has been involved in a lot of wars, and more Americans died in the Civil War than in all those other wars combined. People have worked out that there were about 10,500 total “battles” or armed confrontations during the war, and of those 50 of them were major battles that moved the course of the war and 100 more of them were highly significant.

The war had different character in different places. In Pennsylvania and Virginia, it was like a Napoleonic-era war of maneuver and pitched battles, though by the end it was an early precursor of World War I trench warfare. In Georgia, it was a precursor of the modern concept of “total war” against a civilian population. In Missouri, the Civil War was a lot like Iraq post 2003, with armed vigilante and commando gangs making war and committing atrocities on each other. Horsemen were a major component of both armies, like in medieval and ancient times – but railroads and factories were more important.

A common alternative history scenario is positing what would happen if the Confederacy won the Civil War. That makes for interesting reading, but it seems that the blunt fact is that the South started out in a bad position that rapidly got worse. The Union had two and a half times the population and way more factories, railroads, and raw materials, while the Confederacy’s economy was mostly agrarian. Very few people grasped that the Civil War would be the first major industrial war, but the North was in a much, much better position to wage industrial war than the South. In fact, one of the common arguments among abolitionists was the slavery was an obsolete, archaic, and inefficient institution that inhibited the progress of the South. Since the North basically outproduced the South into the ground, there may have been some merit to that argument.

The South’s overall strategy during the war relied on two factors – 1.) breaking the Union’s will to fight (the Confederacy never had a realistic hope of conquering the North), and 2.) convincing Britain and France to recognize the Confederacy by using cotton exports as a bargaining chip. Southern newspapers frequently liked to boast about the powers of “King Cotton”, and argued that the hardier agrarian people of the South would make for better soldiers than the weaker city-dwellers of the North.

But as events showed, this was a bad strategy. While it came close a few times, the Confederacy never achieved the first objective of breaking the Union will to fight, and Britain eventually decided their interests were best served by staying out of the Civil War (British public opinion was against the Confederacy, and the British government was more worried about the Prussians anyway), and France used the distraction of the Civil War to conquer Mexico, which didn’t end all that great for the French.

In fact, in a letter to a friend in 1860, William T. Sherman more or less exactly predicted how the Civil War would play out. Sherman wrote:

“You people of the South don’t know what you are doing. This country will be drenched in blood, and God only knows how it will end. It is all folly, madness, a crime against civilization! You people speak so lightly of war; you don’t know what you’re talking about. War is a terrible thing! You mistake, too, the people of the North. They are a peaceable people but an earnest people, and they will fight, too. They are not going to let this country be destroyed without a mighty effort to save it… Besides, where are your men and appliances of war to contend against them? The North can make a steam engine, locomotive, or railway car; hardly a yard of cloth or pair of shoes can you make. You are rushing into war with one of the most powerful, ingeniously mechanical, and determined people on Earth—right at your doors. You are bound to fail. Only in your spirit and determination are you prepared for war. In all else you are totally unprepared, with a bad cause to start with. At first you will make headway, but as your limited resources begin to fail, shut out from the markets of Europe as you will be, your cause will begin to wane. If your people will but stop and think, they must see in the end that you will surely fail.”

Granted, Sherman did quite a lot to make that come true, so perhaps it was a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Was there a way to end slavery and resolve the succession question in a way that didn’t get 600,000 people killed, wreck half the country, and create permanent festering social problems? Maybe, but maybe it was inevitable. War is one of the curses of mankind that we are never quite clever enough to escape. More specifically, the Mexican-American War in the 1840s was probably the point of no return and the final catalyst for the Civil War. The rivalry between the free states and the slave states had mostly reached resentful equilibrium at that point, but the US took a big chunk of Mexico at the end of the 1840s. That territory was in many ways a poisoned chalice – the question of whether or not the new land would become slave states or free states dominated US politics in the 1850s and pushed things over the brink. (Ulysses Grant himself wrote that he thought that the Mexican-American War had a been a mistake and the Civil War was the result.)

Many people tried very, very hard to find a compromise or a political solution, and when they all failed, force settled the question.

Which is a sobering reality, isn’t it? In the realm of politics, when all the moral and rational arguments fail, when the less savory (but usually less violent & bloody) tactics of coercion and bribery prove useless, it’s might that makes right. Of course, the choice to use force is inherently a double-edged sword or a cast of the dice. Or, to quote another proverb, the enemy gets a vote. Sometimes, the enemy gets more votes than you anticipated. Throughout human history a lot of very smart people have launched wars that didn’t go at all the way they expected.

Anyway! Enough historical ruminating.

I got to visit the battlefield at Chickamauga. The battle took place in September 1863, and it was more or less the last significant Confederate victory of the war. However, the victory did no good for the Confederacy. The Union army withdrew mostly intact and dug in at Chattanooga in Tennessee to the north, and the Confederate commander Braxton Bragg wasted the next two months laying siege to the city. This gave the Union time to reorganize and send reinforces, and in November of 1863 the Union pushed Bragg’s army out of Chattanooga and back into Georgia. That marked the end of any realistic Confederate control of Tennessee, and opened the way for Sherman’s March to the Sea through Georgia.

The battlefield has an excellent museum with a good introductory movie, and then a driving tour through the significant locations of the battlefield. You can call a number to listen to a description that particular site on the battlefield, or get the same thing through the National Parks app. Since one of the notable features of northern Georgia is the heat, driving around the battlefield with air conditioning is much more enjoyable than walking.

I recommend a visit if you find yourself in the area and have a few hours to spare. It is an educational experience, and you might write a 1,300 word blog post reflecting on the visit. 🙂

-JM