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The Transformation of Federal Policy Toward Southern Civilians and Property, 1861-1865 Copyright 1993, 1996 by Mark Grimsley
A. problem of moral judgment in war. Useful to examine judgments made at the time (as opposed to ex post facto judgments). Valuable lens into culture, perceived nature of conflict. B. American Civil War often seen as birth of total war--erosion of noncombatant immunity. Not true in any straightforward sense. 1. substantial continuities with previous European practice. 2. destructiveness tended to be measured, proportional--a "directed severity." C. In my departmental talk I'll discuss these issues directly. For now I would like to talk in some detail about other aspects of the evolution of Federal policy. II. Roots of a Policy A. Nature of the Rebellion 1. perception of Unionist sentiment in South. Very strong in 1861. Never really abandoned, although by January 1863 many soldiers would have agreed with this colonel: "I fancy that union sentiment is just enough a myth to make the search for it interesting but finding the reality exceedingly doubtful."(1) 2. Continued even after the war. Republicans long believed it might be possible to create a viable party in the South composed of "ironclad" Unionists and reluctant secessionists. 3. In context of war, this perception meant that one had a real prospect of wooing Southerners to their former allegiance. B. Legal Prescription 1. Status of rebellion--long debated in Congress. Overall policy was a hybrid of sorts. War sometimes regarded as an insurrection, sometimes as similar to an international conflict. a. Gov't willing to permit confiscation of Southern property under plea of immediate military necessity, but never to seize property permanently without due process. Second Confiscation Act (passed in July 1862) had to operate through courts; only a few hundred thousand dollars in property taken in this way (aside from slaves); and Lincoln insisted on a proviso that confiscation could not work beyond natural life of convicted person. Proscription in Constitution against "corruption of blood." b. Indeed, Constitutionalism operated as a substantial brake on wartime policy; even more so in Reconstruction. Not surprising--long tradition of limited gov't. In early 1861 Buchanan had said secession was unconstitutional but that under constitution gov't could do nothing. In heat of war many Northerners willing to "bend" Constitution--but many weren't (Dems not just "Copperheads") After war "grasp of war" idea became increasingly uncomfortable; sense of too great and prolonged an extension of federal power. (1) another reason to admire Lincoln--few presidents could have pulled it off. 2. In immediate zone of hostilities, law of war prevailed. Vattel, Halleck--destruction of property okay but unenlightened; should be last resort. a. Vattel esp. wrote in period in which foraging understood but regular resupply becoming the norm. (1) emph. goodwill that flowed from moderate conduct. C. Historical Experience 1. Americans did not regard their conflict as in any way similar to warfare against Native Americans. I have never yet seen a suggestion that such methods should be adopted, and the contrast bet. Civil War and suppression of Sioux Uprising, etc. interesting. 2. Americans looked to three historical experiences chiefly: a. AmRev - conventional effort (Saratoga, Yorktown) b. Wars of Napoleon (decisive battle) c. MexWar (Scott's policy) III. Three Phases A. Conciliation B. Pragmatism C. Hard War IV. Intrawar Escalation A. How does a war overwhelm the constraints that originally limit it? Because of the specter of nuclear destruction, this is a question that has stirred persons in the second half twentieth century far more than their counterparts in other eras. For most of western history, by contrast, limiting the violence of war was a problem that mainly concerned the theologian and the philosopher. It did not greatly disturb men of power. On the contrary, the rulers of Europe generally displayed little reluctance to unleash as much destruction as seemed necessary to achieve their ends. Only occasionally did they fail to exploit all the violent potential at their command, and even the exceptional case did not seem particularly enlightened. Confronted by the Dutch Revolt, for example, Philip II of Spain balked at opening the dikes and drowning his insurgent subjects wholesale. That, he believed, would be wasteful since the flooded lands could never be reclaimed. Instead His Most Catholic Majesty was content to let his armies starve out besieged cities, execute rebels by the hundred, and terrorize the general population.(2) B. By the eighteenth century the ready resort to la guerre à outrance had abated somewhat, tempered both by the excesses of the Wars of Religion, a renewed drive for order in European politics and society, and the counsels of reason and restraint offered by the Enlightenment. But this new moderation, never well-developed to begin with, was soon strained by the revolutionary explosion that transformed European politics during the 1790s and sparked a chronic cycle of wars that continued until 1815. Afterward, a resurgent though much-modified old regime once again attempted to limit the role of warfare in the pursuit and maintenance of power. Even so, the promethean forces of ideology and mass political participation constantly roiled beneath the surface of the Victorian Age. C. In the United States, that unique experiment in republican government, those same forces erupted into civil war, historically the most terrifying and unrestrained form of conflict. To be sure, the fact that the South comprised a geographically and politically coherent state helped mitigate the worst aspects of internecine warfare. So did the fact that it fought to defend its independence rather than to overthrow the Federal government. Both realities encouraged the belligerents to wage the conflict largely with conventional military forces. Without that saving development, it is hard to see how the American Civil War could have avoided assuming the shape of many others; that is to say, a savage struggle, prosecuted largely by insurgent raids, punitive reprisals and firing squads, which would have generated massive civilian casualties almost at once. D. Even so, the North's objective of forced reunification obviously required the complete eradication of the Confederate nation-state. In that sense, the war was a total contest from the outset, involving the creation and deployment of armed forces on a scale far greater than anything yet seen in the Western Hemisphere. But although determined to employ "all indispensable measures" required to win victory, President Abraham Lincoln nevertheless hoped that it might be possible to avoid a "violent and remorseless, revolutionary struggle."(3) So did many others, and with good reason. After all, the Southerners who composed the Confederacy had been, only a few years before, widely content with their place in the Union. It might be possible to conduct the war in such a way as to moderate the destruction on both sides, particularly the South. Indeed, without a sustained effort to do so it seemed likely that the resulting bitterness might make it impossible to repair the Union, and enduring mutual hatred might seal the work begun by secession. E. As we now know, of course, the war eventually transcended the limits originally set for it. Even so, it remained channeled along lines that continued to emphasize the conventional military contest. Large-scale destruction of civilian property occurred, but civilian deaths (at least as a direct result of enemy action) were comparatively rare.(4) Although strained, the principle of noncombatant immunity emerged from the war intact. Historians interested in this aspect of the Civil War face two main questions. Why did the conflict increase in severity? And why, once the increase occurred, did the violence of the struggle not result in the widespread civilian deaths that would characterize warfare in the century that followed? Two critical concepts, escalation and restraint, provide the intellectual framework in which to address these questions. F. The most useful study of intra-war escalation is War: Controlling Escalation, by political scientist Richard Smoke.(5) Smoke conceived his work as an elaboration of the already-classic conflict theory devised by Thomas C. Schelling, a major figure among the strategy intellectuals who emerged in the early years of the Cold War. Schelling regarded warfare (or for that matter, attempts of any kind to influence others through violence or its threat) as a phenomenon with two dimensions. The first was simply a belligerent's straightforward attempts to parry, weaken or disarm its enemy. The second, more subtle dimension was the use of force to coerce the enemy in a desired direction. "The power to hurt," Schelling wrote, "is bargaining power. To exploit it is diplomacy--vicious diplomacy, but diplomacy."(6) G. Interestingly, Schelling used the Civil War to illustrate this dual conception. For the most part, he thought, the conflict was "a military engagement with each side's military force pitted against the others" in which the primary purpose was "[t]o seek out and to destroy the enemy's military force, to achieve a crushing defeat over enemy armies. . . . Military action was seen as an alternative to bargaining, not a process of bargaining."(7) William T. Sherman's march through Georgia, however, displayed "a conscious and articulate use of violence" expressly designed to make the war so unendurable for Southern civilians that, rather than suffer more of it, they would choose to make peace instead.(8) H. Smoke adapted this concept of bargaining to the problem of escalation in war. As Smoke pointed out, the term "escalation" had a variety of often contradictory meanings. Used loosely, it might express a purely incremental increase in the military force committed to a given conflict: the decision, for example, to throw an extra division into already extensive fighting. But often it signified the crossing of some previously observed boundary. That boundary could be geographical, like a river or a national border; qualitative, like the decision to employ a major weapon system previously forborne; or other things. The important criterion was that the boundary be understood by both sides and that its breaching should imply a change in the nature and intensity of the struggle. I. The critical question revolved around how and why these boundaries were crossed. Some commentators argued that it occurred through step-by-step increases in the tempo of a given war, usually seen as the deliberate choices of the policymakers involved. Smoke called this the "actor image" of escalation and noted that its adherents tended to emphasize the controllability of armed conflict. The "phenomenal image," on the other hand, viewed escalation as "a process that seems to get started and keep going on its own, partly outside the control of any participant."(9) Wars, according to this image, "naturally" tend to expand. Both images, Smoke believed, contributed genuine insight into the escalation dynamic. They described different aspects of the same problem. Policymakers could choose to intensify or expand a given conflict, but they could not always predict or control the outcome if they did so. J. Smoke also explored two other images of escalation: "stepped" and "homogenous." "Does escalation," he inquired, "proceed gradually and homogeneously, or in steps? And if in steps, how big a step must one take to be really escalating?"(10) Here Schelling's ideas about "bargaining" in war provided welcome insight. Schelling had argued that the collaborative nature of bargaining made it a crude form of negotiation in which the two sides, by limiting their coercive efforts to some actions but not others, in effect "bargained" with one another over the nature of the conflict, including the rules by which to conduct it. What they were really trying to do, Schelling maintained, was to find certain mutually agreeable limits within which to resolve the conflict. With emotions high, mutual distrust rampant, and opportunities for direct communication greatly curtailed, the bargaining had to be tacit and unsubtle. The two sides tried to find objective and easily recognizable elements in the situation which might serve as a definite boundary. "The proposals have to be simple," wrote Schelling; "they must form a recognizable pattern; they must rely on conspicuous landmarks; and they must take advantage of whatever distinctions are known to appeal to both sides."(11) Once discovered and mutually recognized and observed, such elements became what Schelling called "salients," thresholds that defined and limited the size and intensity of the fighting. Escalation, then, represented the breaching of a salient. In Smoke's formulation, it was an act that had "consequences and meaning for the overall pattern or nature of the ongoing war: its ground rules or limits."(12) K. Naturally, a salient might be blurred by incremental encroachments that engendered doubt concerning its character as a real boundary and perhaps even pierced it altogether in a series of small steps. Because of that, some might argue against the validity of saliencies and assert a model of "infinite gradations;" i.e., the "homogenous" image. But Smoke insisted that such objections missed the point. Some small steps always seemed more significant and thus more interesting than others: The infinite-gradations image in itself contains nothing that can distinguish between interesting cases of blurring and many other cases of insignificant, imperceptible steps. . . . It seems to be the fact that a saliency is being blurred that makes the case interesting. Not just any blur is. Saliency, then, is still a criterion that distinguishes the important cases from the unimportant ones.(13) L. Thus Smoke arrived at a working theoretical model of escalation. It presented escalation as consisting in the crossing of saliencies, and assumed that "war by its nature favors escalation" because of six sources of inherent upward bias he elsewhere identified. Escalation, then, was "an ever-present `pressure' or temptation or likelihood" that required more conscious effort to stop than to start, although it was neither inevitable nor an easily-triggered, automatic, uncontrollable process.(14)
N. In one sense, the slavery question formed a clearcut qualitative boundary or salient, and it is not difficult to argue that Federal policymakers intended their initial refusal to attack slavery as a signal of the sort of war they intended to wage: they would fight Confederate armies in the field, to destroy the military power of the rebel government, but they would not touch the basic socio-economic fabric of Southern society. The decisiveness with which Lincoln resisted any attempt by Union commanders and policymakers to interfere with slavery is consistent with this interpretation. Even so, one must acknowledge that by the summer of 1862 slavery had also become a blurred saliency because of many incremental intrusions upon it--the First and Second Confiscation Acts, the new article of war prohibiting Union forces from enforcing the Fugitive Slave Law, the liberally-interpreted "contraband" doctrine, and the unauthorized but widespread attempts by Northern soldiers to encourage slaves to abandon their masters. Because of this, it is unlikely that the Southern people ever really understood the message of forbearance that Lincoln and other Northern moderates were trying to communicate. O. The resort to "hard war" forms a more problematic example of saliency. Indeed, it may not even qualify. If defined as actions that subjected the Southern civilians and property to the direct pressures of war, "hard war" was present, on a small scale, from the outset of the conflict. And although the magnitude of those operations by 1864-1865 was much greater than in 1861-1862, it is difficult to select an obvious turning point. Southern railroads and factories became targets early in the war. Southern homes (and sometimes even entire towns) began to burn before the first snows of 1861. Southern crops and livestock began to feed Union soldiers, on a significant scale, by the spring of 1862. The process was incremental. Thus, here the "infinite gradations" image would seem appropriate. Yet despite this, both contemporary observers and historians of the Civil War have always regarded the latter years of the struggle as an impressive, highly significant departure from the sort of war waged at the outset. That suggests the presence of a salient after all, albeit a highly blurred one whose exact characteristics are difficult to determine. P. The most obvious characteristic was the scale on which Union forces attacked Southern property. Until the spring of 1863, destructive operations occurred on a relatively modest scale, involving at most a few hundred men. With the advent of Grant's operations against Vicksburg, however--and particularly with the two raids on Jackson, Mississippi, in May and July--the number of troops committed to such operations skyrocketed. The frequency of these operations also increased, as did the thoroughness with which they were conducted. By Sherman's Meridian expedition in the winter of 1864, a new pattern of warfare had emerged (actually a reversion to older seventeenth century patterns): thousands of troops were now routinely used to strip the countryside of crops and war resources, their officers making sure that the work was done carefully and completely. Moreover, such operations were designed, in part, to communicate to Southern civilians that their cause was hopeless, their government helpless to protect them. This new message marked the return of a strategic dimension to Union military policy toward Southern civilians. Under conciliation, Federal commanders had sought to undermine Southern support for the Confederacy through respect and magnanimity. Under the "hard war" policies of Grant, Sherman and others, they sought to undermine that support through demoralization and fear. Q. In between conciliation and "hard war", of course, lay the pragmatic policy. And using Smoke's theory of escalation it is appropriate to identify that policy as the "blur" in Smoke's conception of a "blurred saliency." The pragmatic policy, after all, contained elements of both conciliation and "hard war." In common with the latter, it permitted the seizure or destruction of Southern property. But as with conciliation, it assumed a war that must be fought, and won, exclusively against Confederate armies in the field. It did not see the Southern people as a target so much as a nuisance that must be kept quiescent while the purely military contest was decided. R. While Smoke's theory of escalation forms a useful lens through which to examine the Civil War's transition from a limited to total war, it has one shortcoming which must be buttressed by additional perspectives. Smoke constructed his model explicitly as a way to help policymakers make better-informed decisions on issues that concerned escalation. He therefore concentrated on aspects of escalation susceptible to the top leadership's control and tended to slight or ignore elements that were not. As a corollary, he tended to assume a centralized command structure in which the armed forces were highly responsive to direction from above. This assumption would be dangerous if applied to the Union war machine, which in many respects was an improvised, ramshackle affair. Moreover, the nature of the Northern armed forces--and for that matter those of the Confederacy--made them susceptible to other influences besides those emanating from the War Department or White House. The Civil War was pre-eminently what Lincoln called a "people's contest," in which popular attitudes and pressures played a critical role. Some historians have claimed that these popular elements decisively influenced the transformation of the conflict.(15) Any theoretical model must therefore address this possibility. S. For help in this, one may turn to a figure who casts a lengthy shadow in the halls of strategic discourse: Carl von Clausewitz. Clausewitz's central insight was that war was "not a mere act of policy but a true political instrument, a continuation of political activity by other means."(16) But he also insisted that warfare could not be seen merely as a surgical instrument of realpolitik. Although policymakers might try to control and direct the armed struggle, other forces shaped it as well: T. Indeed, if Clausewitz's "trinity of war" conception is applied to the question of escalation and restraint in war, one might assume that, of the three elements, only its character as an instrument of policy would tend to encourage limits on the conduct of war. The others seemingly would operate to escalate the conflict. "Violence, hatred and enmity" would obviously tend to drive the struggle to its ultimate pitch. The "interplay of chance and probability," for its part, might support a limited war, but only if the military gifts of one side could capitalize on this interplay so as to gain a fairly rapid victory at modest cost. Otherwise, the most likely effect of this interplay would also be to foster greater severity. Thwarted in its attempt to gain a quick decision, one side or both would soon be tempted to employ harsher measures. It would try to gain with a cudgel what could not be achieved with a rapier. U. But perhaps a better way to look at the trinity is through Clausewitz's attempt to make it concrete, by identifying enmity with the people, chance and probability with the generals, and policy with the statesmen. Of these equations, the latter two are the most obvious and least problematic. The leaders of a given polity normally decide both when war is necessary and what the desired objective shall be. The military employ the means used to achieve the objective in a dynamic environment permeated with chance--unexpected counter-moves by the enemy, to be sure, but also unexpected failures in one's own men and equipment. V. These two aspects of the trinity seem straightforward enough. Clausewitz's identification of the people with hatred, enmity and violence, however, gives one greater pause. After all, people are by no means restricted to these primal emotions; indeed, they normally display a deep respect for the claims of morality in their personal and public relations. But Clausewitz has never been alone in believing that, once aroused, the passions of the masses get the better of them. When that happens, their conceptions of morality, which usually display a healthy sense of nuance and balance, often degenerate into a Manichaean depiction of their own side as holy and their enemy's as the epitome of evil. Then howls for vengeance and just retribution mount; they overwhelm the policymakers' studied appraisals of what is really necessary. The British historian A.J.P. Taylor once crystallized this perspective in a famous aphorism: "Bismarck fought `necessary' wars and killed thousands; the idealists of the twentieth century fight `just' wars and kill millions."(17) W. For this reason, wars are held more likely to escalate when popular passions are aroused. Conversely, the possibility of waging a truly limited war is enhanced to the extent that such passions can be minimized. In Europe, the "cabinet wars" of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries marked the closest approach to this solution, while in the nuclear environment of the post-1945 era--when American policymakers had the highest possible incentive to keep wars limited--they deliberately refrained from mobilizing the civilian population in support of the Korean and Vietnam Wars. This policy, however, proved costly during the Korean experience; during the Vietnam era it was an outright disaster. Put simply, it worked too well. Unaroused--and often unconvinced of the purposes for which the war was being fought--the American people grew increasingly disenchanted and non-supportive. The resultant alienation generated a substantial anti-war movement and applied enormous pressure on the government to disengage from the conflict.(18) X. Among the policy-making community, the Vietnam experience has served as a powerful reminder of the risks involved when public sentiment is not harnessed in support of the war. But it also illustrates the fact that the role of "the people" in warfare is not simply to fan the flames of "violence, hatred and enmity." Their essential contribution might better be expressed as the exercise of moral judgment. Those judgments may be deeply flawed, poorly informed by the facts, seduced by propaganda and driven by passion, but they represent a factor which policymakers cannot ignore. In the case of Vietnam, many Americans found their country's conduct of the war morally dubious and therefore deeply disturbing. The issue is not whether they were right or wrong, humane or fatuous, to do so. Either way, it is surely evident that the anti-war movement gained strength from widespread doubts about the justice of the war's basic legitimacy and the measures used to prosecute it. V. Conclusion A. A more enlightened perspective on Clausewitz's "trinity of war," then, suggests that all three of its elements may operate in favor of restraint as well as escalation. For the political element, force is an agent of policy, and sound policy may dictate restraint. For the military element, force is the tool of the trade, but one used, as Michael Howard has pointed out, "with great deliberation." Military activity, he writes, "carries an intrinsic imperative towards control; an imperative derived from the need to maintain order and discipline, to conserve both moral and material forces and ensure that these are responsive to direction."(19) Thus, wartime armies often restrain themselves, albeit for reasons unrelated to the claims of morality. B. Moral claims usually find their fullest expression within the element of the people, including people temporarily in uniform; i.e., the citizen-soldier. Even the heat of combat cannot eradicate the moral codes with which most human beings have grown up and by which they live their everyday lives, a factor illustrated by those common occurrences in which soldiers offer rations, medical aid, or other assistance to the enemy civilians in their path. It is true that atrocities can and do happen, but the very fact that they are recognized and condemned as atrocities--and draw cries of shame and outrage upon the belligerent whose troops have committed them--is strong evidence of the persistence of morality even in the cauldron of war. C. That persistence of morality, more than anything else, accounts for the continued restraint of Federal soldiers even while conducting massive "hard war" operations. Without it, the number of private homes destroyed would have been much greater, the amount of mayhem correspondingly high, and the death toll among Southern civilians would have soared.
NOTES
2. Geoffrey Parker, The Army of Flanders and the Spanish Road, 1567-1659 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972), 134-135. 3. Basler (ed.), Collected Works of Lincoln 5:49. 4. However, as James M. McPherson points out, "the civilian death toll in the South as an indirect result of the disruption, chaos, destruction of resources and transport facilities, physical dislocation of hundreds of thousands of people causing exposure, malnutrition, etc. brought about more civilian deaths than anyone has been able to calculate--running into the tens, probably scores of thousands." McPherson to the author, 26 May 1992. Elsewhere McPherson has estimated the civilian death toll at 50,000. See McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom, 619n. 5. Richard Smoke, War: Controlling Escalation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Belknap Press, 1977). 6. Thomas C. Schelling, Arms and Influence (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1966), 2. 9. Smoke, Controlling Escalation, 21. 11. Schelling, Arms and Influence, 137. 12. Smoke, Controlling Escalation, 32. 15. The pre-eminent example of this perspective is Charles Royster's The Destructive War, but many other works suggest it as well. 17. A.J.P. Taylor, From Napoleon to Lenin: Historical Essays (Paperback ed., New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1966 [1952]), 85. 18. One of the strongest statements of this perspective is Harry G. Summers, Jr., On Strategy: A Critical Analysis of the Vietnam War (Paperback ed.; New York: Dell, 1984 [1982]), 33-44. 19. Michael Howard, "Temperamenta Belli: Can War Be Controlled?," in Howard (ed.), Restraints on War: Studies in the Limitation of Armed Conflict (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), 3-4.
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