With a Sword in One Hand and Jomini in the Other: The Problem of Military Thought in the Civil War North

With a Sword in one hand & Jomini in the other

With a Sword in one hand & Jomini in the other

The Problem of Military Thought in the Civil War North

Carol Reardon

University of North Carolina Press

Chapel Hill

THE STEVEN & JANICE BROSE LECTURES IN THE CIVIL WAR ERA WILLIAM A. BLAIR, EDITOR

© 2012 The University of North Carolina Press

All rights reserved

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Reardon, Carol.

With a sword in one hand and Jomini in the other : the problem

of military thought in the Civil War north / Carol Reardon.

p. cm. — (The Steven and Janice Brose lectures in the Civil War era)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-8078-3560-9 (cloth : alk. paper)

1. United States—History—Civil War, 1861–1865—Campaigns.

2. Jomini, Antoine Henri, baron de, 1779–1869—Influence.

3. Military art and science—United States—History—19th century. I. Title.

E470.R285 2012

973.7′3—dc23

2011044954

16 15 14 13 12 5 4 3 2 1

For Steven & Janice Brose,

with sincere thanks for their unfailing and generous support

of the scholarly endeavors of the

George and Ann Richards Civil War Era Center

at Penn State University

CONTENTS

Introduction

1

EXORCISING THE GHOST OF JOMINI

Debating Strategy in the Civil War North

2

WHO SHALL COMMAND

The Cult of Genius versus the Primacy of the Professional

3

LOST IN JOMINI’S SILENCE

The Human Factor in War

Epilogue

Acknowledgments

Notes

Bibliography

Index

With a Sword in one hand & Jomini in the other

INTRODUCTION

"It has been said with good reason that many a Civil War general went into battle with a sword in one hand and Jomini’s Summary of the Art of War in the other," wrote Marine Corps Brigadier General J. D. Hittle in 1947.¹ The subject of his observation, Swiss-born soldier and writer Antoine-Henri Jomini, enjoyed a lengthy literary career that spanned the first two-thirds of the nineteenth century. During that time, he became one of the most prolific and insightful chroniclers and analysts of the great campaigns of Frederick the Great, Napoleon Bonaparte, and other major military figures of the previous two centuries. He remains far more famous, however, for his efforts to formulate a scientific approach to the art of war through the deduction and application of immutable principles that guide an army’s conduct on campaign and in battle. Jomini’s substantial literary outpouring fully established him in European military circles as one of his generation’s foremost authorities on war. His legacy in the United States, however, rests more specifically on the linkage of his ideas to the military conduct of the great sectional conflict of 1861–65.

Antoine-Henri Jomini’s rise to prominence had not come easily.² Born on 5 March 1779 in the French-speaking Swiss canton of Vaud, he exhibited very early in life a passion for military affairs. His middle-class parents disapproved of his intention to make the army his career, so, after he briefly served in the Swiss armed forces, they sent him to Paris, where he obtained positions in banking and brokerage establishments. Attracted by Napoleon’s battlefield successes, however, Jomini sought a military position and accepted the only one that he—as a foreigner—could find: a logistics assignment. The routine of his duties did not fully occupy his time, his mind, or his dreams of glory, so Jomini immersed himself in the study of great campaigns and the most influential works of military literature produced over the previous two centuries. Inspired by the power of the ideas with which he engaged—and confident enough to believe that he could improve upon them—he soon took up his own pen. A Treatise on Grand Operations, published in 1804 with the benefit of the patronage of Marshal Michel Ney, centered on Frederick the Great’s campaigns in the Seven Years’ War. Highly impressed, Ney soon found a place for Jomini at his headquarters, until Napoleon Bonaparte himself promoted the young Swiss officer to the rank of colonel and attached him to his own staff. Jomini served closely with Napoleon during the Jena and Eylau campaigns of 1805. Soon enough, however, Jomini’s military career became quite complicated. Chafing at his continued inability to escape staff duties for a troop command, he considered the offer of a commission in the Russian service and, in time, accepted a generalship in the tsar’s army. (Since Jomini was a Swiss citizen, this course of action remained an acceptable option for him, although many of his French comrades-in-arms resented it.) When he tired of active service, he retired to Belgium and then to France to continue his writing. Until his death on 24 March 1869, Jomini continued to publish prolifically on the art of war, drawing upon Napoleonic campaigns as well as the broader sweep of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century European military history for inspiration and examples.

Jomini’s literary roots ran deep into the intellectual movement that historian John A. Lynn has termed the period of the Military Enlightenment.³ Between the seventeenth and mid-nineteenth centuries, each major European nation developed its own military institutions and professional military culture. As part of that evolution, a significant number of learned soldiers—and some civilians, as well—created substantial bodies of military literature that viewed war as a complex social institution, one best understood and perhaps even controlled through the agency of reason. During this period of great intellectual and literary vibrancy, writers attempted to create rigid systems of rules that comprised the foundation of a science of war. Others described immutable guiding principles, the situationally derived application of which became the art of war. Military writers of the era used the terms science and art interchangeably at times, borrowed freely (and often silently) from those with whom they agreed, critiqued their greatest rivals savagely, and revised and reissued their own works to refute the criticisms of others. No individual writer remained the unchallenged intellectual authority on war for very long.

The dynamic nature of these exchanges—which regularly crossed national and imperial boundaries—accurately describes the established intellectual milieu into which Jomini entered. He participated fully in the dialogue. Early on, he found himself drawn to the work of French military writer Jacques Antoine Hippolyte Comte de Guibert (1743–90), whose Essai général de tactique offered what historian Azar Gat has described as an early effort to describe a definitive system of tactics, finally creating a science of war. While Guibert never completed the system he hoped to construct, he considered mobility, celerity, and boldness in active maneuver to be essential elements of an effective theoretical concept.⁴ Jomini became intrigued by Guibert’s unsuccessful quest, but he concluded that the Frenchman had overreached. As Jomini wrote in his first major work, A Treatise on Grand Military Operations, in 1804, a simple theory . . . without giving absolute systems will supply all the guidance an able commander requires to formulate the combinations that win victories.⁵ He determined to identify the immutable principles that comprised that theory.

Jomini also found inspiration in the important work of Welshman Henry Humphrey Evans Lloyd (1718–83), a veteran of the Austrian army who authored a remarkable study on Frederick the Great’s campaigns during the Seven Years’ War. Lloyd, who trained as an engineer, viewed the army as a great machine, and he heavily endowed his work with a mechanistic approach to war. Indeed, Lloyd believed that an army must operate on a similar principle as a machine, concentrating its energy and force toward the completion of its specific task. As he wrote: That general, who, by the facility of his motions, or by artifice, can bring most men into action at the same time, and at the same point, must, if the troops are equally good, necessarily prevail.⁶ Jomini—and many other military writers of his era—also embraced Lloyd’s concept of lines of operation that linked an army in the field with its bases in a secure rear area. This specific notion took on even greater importance in Jomini’s writing after he familiarized himself with the works of Prussian Adam Heinrich Dietrich von Bülow (1757–1807), whose geometrical diagrams explaining the relationship between bases and lines of operation exceeded in complexity even those of Lloyd.⁷

Lloyd and Bülow had differed from their peers in one particularly important way that greatly appealed to Jomini: both had shown a strong preference for studying the conduct of active military campaigns rather than adhere to the traditional emphasis of earlier writers on army organization and the design of battle formations. Jomini readily adopted their endorsement of skillful maneuver to concentrate combat power against important enemy positions—usually geographical points—while protecting the security of one’s own bases and lines of supply and communication. The logical extension of their arguments—the selection of an appropriate objective, detailed planning, and striking hard only after maneuver had set up the conditions for decisive victories without unduly high losses—also sat well with Jomini, who admitted on many occasions during his career that he cringed at the cost of even Napoleon’s greatest victories. Although Jomini openly criticized some elements of Bülow’s and Lloyd’s works, the themes they advanced informed the entire body of his professional writings. At least partly for this reason, his modern critics recently have tended to view Jomini less as the herald of a new Napoleonic way of war and more as an intellectual reactionary who set military thought back into the eighteenth century, where he felt comfortable and safe.⁸

Jomini surely would have resented any such suggestion. Throughout his long literary career, he gave way to no critic, responding to the most serious challenges to his ideas with revised and updated editions of previous works in which he attacked his rival directly and, at the same time, incorporated without attribution any new ideas that appealed to him. When Austrian Archduke Charles published his Grundsätze der Strategie in 1814—after which some Europeans began to tout him as equal to, or even superior to, Jomini—the Swiss officer published a third edition of his Treatise on the Art of War, in which he greatly expanded and sharpened his discussion about the identification of enemy key points, their designation as military objectives, and the concentration of force against them—his new emphasis echoing major points the archduke had stressed.⁹

In like manner, Jomini’s most famous work, his Summary of the Art of War (1838), stemmed in part from his desire to respond to the criticisms of both Archduke Charles and an influential Prussian rival, Carl von Clausewitz, whose own major study, On War, Jomini dismissed as simply a declamation against all theory of war.¹⁰ The Summary of the Art of War, the work that General Hittle had praised so highly, derived much of its enduring importance from Jomini’s commitment both to define and refine the principles influencing the era’s newest and most intellectually challenging concept: strategy. While nearly every major nation—including the United States—prepared a wide variety of drill manuals to instruct soldiers in the use of their weapons and tactics manuals to train them to deploy and fight as companies and regiments on the field of battle, comparatively few military thinkers addressed the planning and conduct of a comprehensive military effort in support of national policy goals.

Jomini, however, had tackled the issue with enthusiasm. As he considered it, strategy remained almost exclusively in the realm of military affairs, and he most succinctly defined it as the art of making war upon the map. By its very nature—at least as Jomini observed Napoleon’s execution of the concept—the strongest form of military strategy exploited the power of the offensive to defeat its rival. A strategic plan embraced the selection of a theater of war; it determined the decisive points within that theater; it selected from among those points the objectives most useful to achieving the army’s—and its political leadership’s—goals; it determined the location of bases and lines of operation and retreat to support army movements; it made plans for marches and maneuvers to reach and reduce decisive points; and it addressed a variety of other important matters, including the establishment of a reserve, decisions about diversions, and other activities exclusive of battle itself.¹¹

While Jomini explained what a general needed to ponder and decide before launching major military campaigns, he did not explain in detail how to do any of them. He always believed that the unique circumstances of a situation and the commanding general’s genius and skill would determine the most appropriate response. He noted only that whatever decisions the general made, he had to respect a small number of fundamental principles . . . which could not be deviated from without danger. Jomini offered only four such principles. First, maneuver the mass of one’s own army against decisive points in the theater of war, especially by threatening the enemy’s line of communication while protecting one’s own. To this end, he expanded upon Lloyd’s and Bülow’s concepts of lines of operation to describe interior and exterior lines of operation, establishing interior lines as the preferred choice. Second, when closing on the enemy, maneuver in such a way that one pits the mass of one’s force against fractions of the enemy army. Third, on the battlefield, focus one’s primary effort on the most critical point of the enemy line. Finally, when all was in readiness, engage at the proper times and with energy.¹² The complex set of ideas articulated here, more than anything else, has secured Jomini’s prominence in the development of the first generation of strategic thought. These ideas also provided the foundation for General Hittle’s claim for Jomini’s influence during the American Civil War.

Unquestionably, Hittle merits credit for the boldness of his assertion, but the claim presents Civil War historians with an evidentiary problem. During the eight decades between the start of the war and Hittle’s observation, Jomini’s name—let alone any detailed analyses of the principles he espoused—rarely appeared in any genre of Civil War literature. Indeed, Jomini accounts for only three citations in the index to the original 128-volume War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies. In the profusion of postwar veterans’ literature, Jomini’s name appears only two times in the index to the fifty-two-volume Southern Historical Society Papers, not at all in the indexes to the full run of Confederate Veteran or the Battles and Leaders of the Civil War series, and only twice in the sixty-volume run of the Military Order of the Loyal Legion (MOLLUS) Papers. In most of these cases, eulogists used the Swiss writer’s name chiefly as a bit of literary shorthand to confirm a deceased soldier’s reputation for an above-average knowledge of military affairs. Jomini plays no major role in the military memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant, George McClellan, and most other Civil War generals.

Perhaps this helps to explain why, even after General Hittle’s assertion, Jomini still remained outside mainstream Civil War scholarship until the mid-1950s. Then, within five years, he and his work became the starting point for two scholars who reached very different conclusions. First, historian David Herbert Donald drew upon Jomini and his ideas as a way to rescue Civil War history from personal partisanship and provide common ground on which the profession’s Lincoln, Grant, and McClellan factions could discuss the Union war effort. To understand why the commanders behaved as they did and to relate the military events of the conflict to broader economic and social patterns in American life, Donald determined to look at the war as an expression of specific social and cultural imperatives. That required, he argued, an exploration of the theory of warfare behind the fighting. In the end, his findings presented him with an interesting conundrum. First, he determined that Jomini’s writings about the art of war genuinely did present a number of quite useful concepts to explain military operations during the Civil War, and he cited as evidence the seeming influence of Jomini’s works in the West Point curriculum. However, while factoring in important elements of the broader cultural landscape of antebellum America—the nation’s strong antimilitary and antielitist sentiments as well as the restricted opportunities for many occupations to secure intellectual authority for their field of expertise—Donald ultimately concluded that Jomini’s actual influence may well have been quite limited, suggesting that it could be contended [that] most Union and Confederate army officers had no theoretical ideas about warfare at all.¹³

A second perspective on Jomini, first advanced by historian T. Harry Williams, harbored no such doubts. Williams argued in his influential 1960 essay The Military Leadership of North and South that the influence of Jomini on the Civil War was, in a word, profound. Every graduate of West Point had been exposed to Jomini’s ideas, either directly, by reading Jomini’s writings or abridgments or expositions of them; or indirectly, by hearing them in the classroom or perusing the works of Jomini’s American disciples. This latter group included Dennis Hart Mahan, who from 1831 until his death in 1871 served as professor of military and civil engineering at West Point, and captain-turned-military-author Henry Wager Halleck.¹⁴ For at least a generation, the Williams thesis held sway. Jomini’s interpretation of Napoleon, wrote Russell F. Weigley in 1977, became the foundation of the teaching of strategy at West Point.¹⁵ In a similar vein, historian Joseph Harsh asserted in a 1974 essay that West Point indoctrinated its students in Jominian ideas for many years.¹⁶ Indeed, Civil War military historians seem to have granted Jomini a status he sought but never achieved in his lifetime: acceptance as the undisputed intellectual master of early nineteenth-century military thought.

Over the years, the initial conclusions reached by Donald and especially Williams unfortunately have become justifications to oversimplify quite complex intellectual processes. As it happened, neither Donald nor Williams considered Jomini against the broader context of the European military and intellectual history of his era. Indeed, few American military historians have given more than a nod to Jomini’s intellectual debts and interactions with his own contemporaries; Archer Jones, John I. Alger, and John F. Marszalek rank high among the most prominent exceptions.¹⁷ Thus, his role as an inheritor, refiner, and critic of ideas advanced by earlier generations of military thinkers has been obscured in favor of an image that touts an originality and a uniqueness that he never quite possessed. Most of the notions that Civil War historians have denoted as Jominian—such as concentration, a preference for maneuver over battle, and other concepts—existed in some form and appeared in European military literature well before Jomini began to write. Similarly, the adjective Jominian has become an all-encompassing term applied somewhat casually to the common language shared by all military professionals of that era. Therefore, a reevaluation of Jomini and his impact on the Civil War requires restoring him to his proper place, one in which he represents a single—though admittedly strong—voice among a mass of military authors whose ideas became available to the Civil War generation. This contextualized approach largely precludes the use of the sharp Jomini-Clausewitz dichotomy that has colored some recent Civil War scholarship, since Clausewitz’s work had not yet been translated into English for popular distribution in the United States.¹⁸ Similarly, it displaces twentieth-century military theorists popular with American historians in the post–World War II era, including British writers J. F. C. Fuller and Sir B. H. Liddell Hart, both of whom Donald and Williams, among others, drew upon to make a case for recognizing the Civil War as the first modern or total war.¹⁹ Jomini deserves to be considered the way he always functioned: as a part of, and not apart from, the vibrant and crowded intellectual environment that produced him.

This volume expands upon presentations delivered at Penn State University in March 2009 for the Steven and Janice Brose Lectures on the Era of the Civil War and explores several important questions relating to the influence of military theory during the conflict of 1861–65. It builds upon a growing body of scholarship that already has begun to loosen Jomini’s powerful grip on the subject, and it establishes the existence of a previously unexamined public and professional dialogue among soldiers and civilians about major issues relating to the conduct of the war. To emphasize the dimensions of this intellectual exchange, this work will focus exclusively on the Northern war effort.

Simply put, the Jomini whom Donald and Williams placed on a pedestal has not survived scholarly scrutiny unscathed. As James L. Morrison’s detailed analysis of West Point’s antebellum curriculum has shown, for instance, cadets studied military strategy for only eight class periods during the spring semester of first-class (senior) year, and, until at least 1854, they read only extracts of Jomini’s work.²⁰ No cadet had the opportunity, as Donald once suggested, to make Jomini’s works his Bible.²¹ Moreover, the effectiveness of influential West Point professor Dennis Hart Mahan to inculcate a lasting appreciation of Jominian ideas into the minds of his cadets or the junior officers in his Napoleon Club has not been conclusively established.²²

The evidence does not end there. By the late 1850s, the perceived staleness and potential inapplicability of the traditional grand principles of war after a period of rapid technological change raised concerns among thoughtful soldiers throughout the American officer corps. In 1859