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Which were most important battles?

October 14, 2006 12:50 am

READERS OF THIS column know that I am addicted to lists. I read somewhere that there were more than 10,000 battles, fights, skirmishes, engagements and general disagreements in the four years of the Civil War, and over the next several columns I am going to list them in the order I consider most crucial to the outcome of the war, and tell why I list them in a particular sequence.

Let's set Fort Sumter aside. It wasn't a real battle, just a bombardment. Its importance is that it was one of the few times shots had been fired on federal property, and is accepted as the start of the Civil War.

I mention this because there had been fighting in the 1850s in "bleeding Kansas," as Kansas, a sparsely populated state with strong Union leanings, fought with neighboring Missouri. More than 50 men were killed in border warfare about slavery. (Similarly in World War II, we had been at war with Nazi Germany in the Atlantic well before the Dec. 7, 1941, attack on Pearl Harbor. On Oct. 31, 1941, the U.S. Navy destroyer Reuben James was torpedoed and sunk by German submarines while on convoy duty in the North Atlantic. Killed were 115 U.S. Navy sailors.)

In addition, pre-Civil War blood had been shed in John Brown's raid on Harper's Ferry. In October 1859, he had seized the federal fort there, but had been captured by a company of Marines led by U.S. Army Col. Robert E. Lee. Brown, of course, was duly hanged for his actions.

What I am going to write is my list of the most important battles of the war, in the order of their importance. The basis for judgement will be how well or how poorly the single battle (or combination of battles) affected the strategy of the Anaconda Plan.

The Anaconda Plan for winning the Civil War for the Union was first proposed by General in Chief Winfield Scott. Old, tired, gouty, given to sleeping through meetings, he was not physically able to lead the war effort. But his mind worked as well in 1861 as it did in the War of 1812 and the Mexican War of 1846-48.

Scott's thesis was that the Confederacy, admittedly a gigantic chunk of geography, was an island. It was bounded on the east by the Atlantic; on the south by the Gulf of Mexico; on the west by the Mississippi River; and on the north by the Ohio River. This meant that anything outside these boundaries was essentially not critical to the war effort--and thus the war never would be won or lost in Texas or anyplace else west of the Mississippi. (In World War II, the fighting in the deserts of North Africa or the snows of Norway were essentially operations to drain the Axis powers; the war was never going to be won in North Africa or Norway, but the expenditure of supplies and assets as well as the loss of good soldiers through injury, death or capture was something the Axis could never overcome.)

Scott's strategy: a blockade on all four borders, combined with attacks until the Confederacy was split into several parts, each fighting for its own life and unable to help the others.

One more caveat: Because of my World War II background, I tend to think not of individual battles but of "campaigns." When we landed in Normandy on June 6, 1944, we began a campaign to retake France. Individual battles at Omaha Beach, Utah Beach, Sainte-Mere-Eglise, Cherbourg and Saint-Lô were part of the Normandy Campaign.

Within these parameters, what were the most important Civil War campaigns?

The July 4, 1863, weekend has to be considered the death knell of the Confederacy; thus, it was the most important battle period in the whole war. Gettysburg and Vicksburg were huge battles: 164,000 men were at Gettysburg; 109,000 fought at Vicksburg.

Consider the progress of the war to that point. Basically, the Confederacy had held its own against the more populous North. Southern victories at Bull Run and Fredericksburg, and "Stonewall" Jackson's brilliant campaign in the Shenandoah had given the South the illusion that maybe it would be able to achieve independence after all.

July 1863 ruined it all. With the loss of Vicksburg (and the Union capture of Port Hudson five days later) the Union now controlled the western border of the Confederacy, including the one rail line across the Mississippi; thus the Confederacy lost the ability to bring supplies and men from any area west of the river to aid the Southern war effort.

The defeat at Gettysburg was the last Southern invasion of the North. After Gettysburg, the South could no longer hope for foreign recognition (above all else, Great Britain recognized power), and the combined Confederate losses at Gettysburg and Vicksburg from casualties and prisoners, roughly 60,000 soldiers, cost the South the one asset it could least afford to lose, its manpower.

The twin losses caused Southern morale to plummet, and made doubt an ever-present element of Confederate thinking. President Jefferson Davis was near inconsolable. He felt himself to be "in the depths of gloom. We are now at the darkest hour of our political existence."

The same dark feelings came over the Confederate officer corps. Shelby Foote quotes Gen. James Longstreet: "This surrender [Vicksburg] taken in connection with the Gettysburg defeat, was, of course, very discouraging to our superior officers. For myself, I felt that our last hope was gone, and that it was now only a question of time with us."

On the home front, civilian morale became a factor. Southern soldiers on the battle lines began to receive letters describing hardships being faced by their families, and urging soldiers to come home to feed their children.

For these reasons (soldiers involved, Southern losses, geography, morale) I consider the battles at Vicksburg and Gettysburg the most important of the entire war.

I mentioned "campaigns" above, and here are some of the individual battles that made up these two major campaigns:

GETTYSBURG: Individual battles were fought at Brandy Station on June 9, 1863 (the largest cavalry action of the war); Winchester on June 14; Gen. J.E.B. Stuart's cavalry raid of June 25-July 2; action at Westminster, Md.; and actions after the main battle--all were part of the Gettysburg Campaign.

VICKSBURG: The fighting at Vicksburg actually started in December 1862, when Gen. Ulysses Grant tried to take the city from the north. Fighting at Holly Springs, Miss., in December 1862 was part of the campaign, and so was Gen. William T. Sherman's failed attack at Chickasaw Bluffs. Gen. John McClernand's campaign against Fort Hindman, Ark., in January 1863 was a meaningless part of the early Vicksburg Campaign.

In spring 1863, Grant crossed his army to the west side of the Mississippi, and marched it south to below Vicksburg; it was met there by a riverboat flotilla, commanded by Adm. David Dixon Porter; on April 16, 1863, Porter had run his boats south past Vicksburg's defenders in one of the most hazardous naval actions of the war. Once south of the city, Porter transported Grant's soldiers to the east bank of the Mississippi.

There were battles at Port Gibson on May 1, 1863; the capture of Jackson, the state capital, on May 14; and Grant's turn due west to fight battles at Champion's Hill on May 16 and another at Big Black River on the 17th. By May 18, 1863, Vicksburg was under siege. It had been a brilliant campaign.

NED HARRISON is a Greensboro, N.C., writer who specializes in military history. His columns about the Civil War appear regularly in North Carolina, Maryland and Virginia newspapers. He wants to hear your opinions about why the South lost the Civil War. Write Ned Harrison, News & Record/T&C, Box 20848, Greensboro, N.C. 27420. E-mail him at n-b-h @mindspring.com.