H107RA The Days are Gone

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H107: The War for the Union: A “People’s Contest” in the Industrial Age Reading H107RA “The Days are Gone”: Helmuth von Moltke, William T. Sherman, and the Challenges of Command in Peace and War 0F * by Ethan S. Rafuse In the history of the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71 he published in the 1890s, Helmuth von Moltke, the great architect of the victories Prussian arms achieved in that conflict and the one with Austria that preceded it five years earlier, declared: The days are gone by when, for dynastical ends, small armies of professional soldiers went to war to conquer a city, or a province, and then sought winter quarters or made peace. The wars of the present day call whole nations to arms; there is scarcely a family that has not had to bewail lost ones. . . . Generally speaking, it is no longer the ambitions of monarchs which endangers peace; but the impulses of a nation. . . . [I]n the interests of humanity, it is to be hoped that wars will become the less frequent, as they become the more terrible. 1F 1 The man who had guided the Prussian army to victory at Königgrätz understood he had operated in an interesting—to say the least—time in the history of warfare due to political, social, and cultural forces that were dramatically reshaping the western world, its militaries, and their use. On the one hand, these changes—especially those associated with the profound transformation of economic life known as the Industrial Revolution—placed a premium on the technical and managerial expertise that professional soldiers could provide armies. Yet increasing popular participation in affairs of the state—including the waging of war, manifest in the use of conscription and concept of the citizen-soldier—and demands that their conduct be in accord with popular opinion made limiting war to professionally managed clashes of organized armies exceedingly difficult. The challenges these profound transformations of life in the western world posed to those tasked with managing armies in peace and war were evident not only in Moltke’s endeavors before, during, and after the Wars of German Unification, but those of William T. Sherman’s before, during, and after the American Civil War that ended barely one year before Königgrätz. This essay draws on the author’s experience teaching officers at the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College to offer a comparative study of the victor of Königgrätz and the conqueror of Georgia and the Carolinas that will illuminate the challenges they and other military men faced during the second half of the nineteenth century. In 1822, after three years as an officer in the Danish army, Helmuth von Moltke applied for a commission in the Prussian Army. At the time, western armies were endeavoring to digest the lessons of the Wars of the French Revolution and Napoleonic Era. In the course of these conflicts, the face of war had been transformed. “[A] force appeared that beggared all imagination,” the Prussian theorist Carl von Clausewitz observed, “Suddenly war again became the business of the people. . . . [T]he full weight of the nation was thrown into the balance. The resources and efforts now available for use surpassed all conventional limits; nothing now impeded the vigor with which war could be waged. . . . [T]his juggernaut of war, based on the strength of the entire people, began its pulverizing course through Europe. . . . War, untrammeled by any conventional restraints, had broken loose in all its elemental fury.” 2F 2 In the aftermath of Napoleon’s demise, conservative European statesmen made a concerted effort to stuff the nationalist genie back into the bottle and reconstruct their armies and politics along traditional lines. They sought to restore to dominance in their officer corps men who were of aristocratic background who would be reliably loyal to the monarchs who occupied the foremost position in the state and in sympathy with the conservative restoration exemplified by the Vienna Congress. The effort to break the connection between warfare and the people that had been a driving force in the war in North America that gave birth to the United States of America and the Wars of the French Revolution that produced the military colossus that was Napoleon Bonaparte was manifest in the popularity during the decades after 1815 of the writings of Clausewitz’s contemporary Antoine Henri de Jomini. In his emphasis on universal operational principles as the key to military success, Jomini provided, in the words of historian John Shy, “a skillful disconnecting of the political and social upheaval of the revolution from . . . Napoleonic military victories.” 3F 3

Yet, however much conservative elites may have wished to turn back the clock, the genie of nationalism could not be entirely stuffed back into the bottle. Challenges to the conservative restoration came in the 1820s in Spain, Italy, Russia, Greece, and Latin America. The 1830s saw the overthrow of the Bourbon regime in France, revolts in Poland and Italy, and Belgium gaining independence. Moreover, during this period economic and political liberalism grew in popularity and its adherents aggressively pushed their agenda, while even more radical ideas like communism and socialism emerged as competing ideologies. Then, of course, came 1848-49, in which revolutions swept across Europe that toppled the French monarchy, severely shook the Austrian Empire, and raised hopes among liberal nationalists for a unification of Germany. Although these hopes were dashed, they showed that the nationalist spirit and desire for greater popular participation in affairs of the state was anything but dead in the hearts and minds of Europeans. The events of 1848-49 also demonstrated the power of German nationalism and inspired Otto von Bismarck to take up the cause of German unification hoping he could seize direction of it and channel its energy it to conservative ends. In the United States, despite the rhetoric and spirit of the War for Independence, which identified consent of the governed as the source of government legitimacy, elite politics for the most part prevailed in the republic for the first three decades after independence was secured. During the 1820s, though, developments embodied in the emergence of Andrew Jackson and the Democratic Party transformed American political culture. Jackson’s rise destroyed the genteel political culture of the Early Republic and ushered in a new era in American life in which the common man was celebrated, expected a greater say in political action, and was catered to in their wishes by a new generation of political leaders. Despite evidence of the ultimate irrepressibility of liberal nationalism in the western world that might lead one to question Jomini’s effort to disconnect warfare from its larger political, economic, and social context, the events of the 1820s, 1830s, and 1840s did little to diminish the popularity of Jomini’s work among military men. This was in part due to the fact that they were a useful and important element in another fundamental transformation of Western military affairs that took place during Moltke’s lifetime— namely, the emergence of, in Shy’s words, “the modern military profession . . . with rationalized recruitment, education, promotion, retirement, staff systems—all the features of a separate, specialized priesthood of technicians.” 4F 4 The emergence of the notion of the military man as belonging to a profession that was separate from the rest of society and possessed specialized expertise in the management of military affairs, was part of a larger development during the first half of the nineteenth century—the Industrial Revolution and its emphasis on specialization of labor. It was in Prussia that the most significant early effort to foster professionalism in the army officer corps took place. In the aftermath of defeat in 1806, reformers like Clausewitz, Gerhard von Scharnhorst, and August Neidhardt von Gneisenau were able to push through fundamental reforms in the Prussian army. Although dominance of the aristocracy could never be entirely eliminated from the officer corps, Prussia’s reformers sought to follow the example of the French and shift from a small, professional army to a mass citizen army raised through conscription. They also sought to follow the French model of opening the officer corps to members of society that were outside the traditional landed aristocracy in order to tap the talents available in the middle class. In October 1810, Scharnhorst reestablished the Prussian War Academy, which was organized and structured to provide officers with a demanding three- year experience that would not only provide graduates with technical skills, but also foster a meritocratic, professional ethos in the army. Scharnhorst also reorganized the War Ministry in a way that paved the way for the general staff to emerge as the central institution in the Prussian army in the decades that followed. 5F 5 Moltke passed the rigorous entrance examination required for admittance into the War College, then headed by Clausewitz himself, in 1823. Three years later, he finished his studies and soon thereafter joined the general staff. While a member of the general staff, Moltke enjoyed a rich variety of experiences and won positive attention not only for the quality and professionalism of work, but for his manifest agreement with the conservative tone of the Prussian military and state as well. Consequently, in 1857, Moltke, despite his relatively limited experience actually serving with troops, received appointment as chief of the general staff in 1857. 6F 6

Seventeen years earlier, William Tecumseh Sherman had joined the officer corps of the U.S. Army when he graduated from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. Although the political and cultural dynamics of the American republic were different in many ways from those that distinguished Prussian politics and culture, by the time Sherman joined it, professionalism had clearly begun to take hold in the U.S. Army officer corps. The notion of a need for specialized expertise in the management of armed forces had gained particular force in the republic as a consequence of the problematic performance of U.S. land forces during much of the War of 1812. This was followed by a period of institutional reform in American military affairs that was designed to enhance the technical expertise and character of the officer corps. At the center of this was reform of the military academy during Sylvanus Thayer’s tenure as commandant between 1817-1833 that standardized the academy’s structure and curriculum, injecting rigor and discipline into both, and a gradual restricting of commissions in the army to its graduates of West Point. 7F 7 Consequently, by the time Sherman graduated from West Point, he joined an officer corps where the ethos of professionalism had taken hold and its members considered themselves members of a distinct class in society that possessed a specialized expertise in the management of armies and the conduct of war. The fostering of professionalism in the officer corps in both Prussia and the United States that took place during the first half of the nineteenth century was received further impetus as a consequence of demands that changes in the larger economy and society that came to be known as the Industrial Revolution were placing on military institutions. New technologies like the telegraph, rifled weaponry, and the railroad were making warfare more complex and rendering obsolete the traditional idea that a state could improvise its way to victory. The need for planning and technical expertise to manage affairs in such a way that maximized the potential of these new technologies reinforced the sense among officers of the need for professional officers and a growing suspicion of outside influences on the conduct of war. Although conflicts took place during the 1840s and 1850s in Mexico, the Crimea, and northern Italy that gave some suggestions as to the impact of the Napoleonic and Industrial Revolutions on the conduct of war, it was not until the American Civil War that the western world truly saw, in the words of historian Mark Grimsley, “combined the mass politics and passions of the Wars of the French Revolution with the technology, productive capacity, and managerial style of the emerging Industrial Revolution.” 8F 8 Even though it gave him the opportunity to achieve international fame and was critical to his ascendance to the post of commanding general of the U.S. Army in 1869, the Civil War was not a conflict that Sherman wanted. Like Moltke, Sherman was a political conservative with, in the words of one biographer, “A Soldier’s Passion for Order.” 9F 9 Sherman’s perspective on matters was shaped in part by his membership in an officer corps where the ethos of professionalism were becoming dominant, an impulse that was only reinforced after he left the army in the early 1850s. 10F 10 As a conservative, Sherman was profoundly uncomfortable with mass democratic politics. Indeed, he placed much of the blame for the sectional conflict’s leading to war—and problems the Union war effort encountered—on politicians and the press. He believed both “embittered the feelings of the People” and complained throughout the war about the effect of the press, politicians, on public opinion. 11F 11 Sherman’s conservative disdain for politics combined with his belief in military professionalism to lead him to hope the military contest between the North and South could be resolved by conventional campaigns conducted by professional officers who were free to let objective military considerations, as opposed to subjective political impulses, dictate the organization of armies and conduct of operations. Of course, given the passions that fueled the sectional conflict and the character of American political culture —not to mention the reality that war is always an inherently political tool—this was profoundly unrealistic. Moreover, because both sides availed themselves of the new tools of war, conventional military operations tended to produce stalemate, as neither side could get an asymmetric advantage. Worse, it became evident during the war’s first twelve months that even if Union arms could achieve a decided tactical victory over their opponents, as it did at Shiloh, it faced a significant challenge establishing its authority over the residents of the regions that it gained possession of after battlefield success. This was a consequence of the fact that the Civil War, as the leaders on both sides exclaimed in the first year of the war, was (in Abraham Lincoln’s words) “essentially a People’s contest.” “[T]his war differs from European wars in this particular,” Sherman declared in December 1864, “We are not only

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fighting hostile armies, but a hostile people, and must make old and young, rich and poor, feel the hard hand of war.” 12F 12 The response of Sherman and other Union military authorities to this over the course of the war was to escalate its efforts in terms of mobilization of northern resources and targeting of southern civilian resources. During the last two years of the war, with Sherman’s operations in Mississippi, Georgia, and South Carolina being the most spectacular products, the North deliberately targeted the South’s civilian population to break popular resistance to Union authority. 13F 13 These efforts, and their effectiveness in breaking Confederate resistance, have understandably led a number of scholars to see in Sherman’s operations and rationale for them, the seeds for the “total wars” of the twentieth century in which not just armies but entire societies became legitimate targets in pursuit of victory. Yet, the 1866 Austro-Prussian War, the first major conflict in which Moltke exercised command, suggested that this need not be the case. Indeed, it offered hope to those who wanted to believe that the genie of popular warfare and industrial warfare could be tamed, decisive battlefield success could be achieved and translated into strategic victory quickly, and war need not be expanded to directly involve the mass of non-combatants. As a conservative, Moltke was not enthusiastic about a conflict with a state like monarchical Austria that shared his dislike for the nationalist and liberal impulses that drove the revolutions of 1848-49. Nonetheless, Moltke’s army, making better use of railroads and new weapons technologies thanks to the managerial skill and professionalism of its well-trained and well-educated officer corps, were able to decisively defeat the Austrian army in battle, with the great July 3, 1866, Battle of Königgrätz effectively deciding the outcome of the war. On August 23, the Austrian government signed the Peace of Prague conceding Prussian dominance of Northern German. 14F 14 It was and is difficult not to be impressed by the contrast between the difficulties the U.S. Army had winning its war and the speed and seeming ease with which the Prussians won theirs in the 1860s, especially those endeavoring to understand the character of late nineteenth-century warfare. The most obvious question for military men then and historians today to wrestle with is, of course, why the Prussians were able to achieve decisive military success and translate it into achievement of their strategic goals so quickly in the 1860s, when Americans could not. One factor that, not surprisingly given the enduring fixation on technological developments that characterized western armies, immediately attracted attention was the advantage Prussian forces enjoyed in small arms technology due to the needle-gun. Another factor was the managerial and operational skill demonstrated by Moltke and the general staff, which enabled Prussian armies to seize the initiative from the beginning of the war and shape the operational situation in Bohemia in their favor, which contrasted conspicuously with the poor performance of their Austrian counterparts. 15F 15 In contrast, during the American Civil War neither side really possessed an asymmetric advantage in the quality of weaponry, while the officer corps in both armies were dominated by men who were products of a common antebellum army experience. Consequently, they shared common merits and flaws to such an extent that neither side was able to achieve enough of an advantage organizationally or operationally to make any single campaign truly decisive. Of course, the most important reason for the contrast in the ability of Sherman’s and Moltke’s armies to achieve a quick decision was the profound difference in the political and social contexts within which the wars took place. In contrast to the Civil War, where the stakes were great—creation or destruction of the Confederate nation and the institutions that defined and underpinned Southern society—the Austro- Prussian War was fought for relatively limited stakes. The existence of neither the Austrian nor Prussian state were at stake nor were the mass of their civil populations—aside from those in the armed forces— directly engaged in the conflict. This facilitated Bismarck’s ability to shut the conflict down quickly once a decisive battlefield victory was achieved. Because Bismarck’s goals were limited to the elimination of Austrian influence in North German affairs and the extent of popular engagement was relatively limited, it was possible to convince the Austrians that acceptance of Bismarck’s terms were preferable to continuation of the contest or escalation of their efforts. Bismarck’s framing of the contest made it possible for him, once a decisive battlefield victory had been won, to shut down the conflict before it could escalate in ends, ways, and means to the level the American Civil War reached in these areas.

Moltke, of course, against Bismarck’s wishes, wanted to march on Vienna after Königgrätz. However satisfying this might have been, this would have escalated the stakes for the Austrians and greatly complicated the task of making a quick peace. Bismarck, though, with the assistance of the Crown Prince was able to persuade King William I to accept an armistice and relatively lenient terms toward Austria. 16F 16 Moltke would, though, receive a powerful lesson regarding the danger of stirring up popular passions in the 1870-71 war with France. In that conflict, after achieving victories that were, if anything more impressive and more decisive than those achieved five years earlier, Moltke found the task of persuading the French to cease resistance a decidedly difficult one. Instead of submitting to German terms when their armies were defeated in the field, the French spirit of resistance was aroused and Moltke, “appalled by improvised armies, irregular elements, and appeals to popular passion” found himself dealing with problems that Sherman would have eminently recognized. 17F 17 The Prussian army was able to repeatedly defeat French armies and, in Moltke’s words, “embrace . . . the Sacred Capital in arms of iron,” but the French people would not quit. “Will this unhappy country discern at last,” a dismayed Moltke exclaimed in a letter as the war dragged on, “that it is conquered, that its condition is worse every day?” He was astonished in November 1870 that, “Now, when the whole French army has migrated, as prisoners, to Germany, there are more men under arms in France than at the beginning of the war.” “[W]e hope to prove that the rising of the nation, even with inexhaustible resources and patriotism, cannot hold its own against a brave and disciplined army,” he declared and added in words that echoed Sherman, “But only merciless severity will enable us to gain our ends.” 18F 18 Bismarck was finally able in early 1871 to negotiate a settlement that ended French resistance and enabled the unification of Germany under Kaiser Wilhelm I. However, the experience had a profound impact on Moltke, rendering him pessimistic about the future in a world where the empowerment of the masses politically would make it futile to hope that war could be confined to contests between conventional armies. When peace returned to their nations, Moltke and Sherman both confronted the task of wrestling with the implications of mass politics and the ongoing industrial revolution for the future of warfare as leaders of their armies. Moltke remained chief of the German general staff until the 1890s, while Sherman ascended to the office of commanding general of the U.S. Army in 1869 and held that office until 1883. To the end of his days, Moltke worked to maintain the high quality of the Imperial German Army, convinced that the security of the German state could not “be attained by weak forces, nor with volunteer armies.” “We must not allow,” he was certain, “a weakening of the inner efficiency of the army; otherwise we will have a militia. Wars carried on by militia armies have the peculiarity of lasting much longer . . . [and] cost more in sacrifices of money and blood than all other wars.” Moltke’s preference for and commitment to a professional army were reinforced by study of the “American War of Secession, conducted by both sides with militia armies. No one desires to transplant the horrors of that war to European soil.” 19F 19 Nonetheless, the seeming inexorable injection of popular passions into war that he had witnessed in 1870- 71 left Moltke profoundly pessimistic about the future of war, which was manifest in his famous 1890 warning to the Reichstag (where he represented Memel-Heydekrug, part of modern Lithuania, from 1867 to his death in 1891) that: The days of Cabinet wars are past—now we have only the People’s War, and to conjure up a war as this, with all its incalculable consequences, cannot be resolved upon by any prudent Government, except with the greatest reluctance. . . . Gentlemen, if war, which has now for more than ten years been hanging like a sword of Damocles over our heads—if war breaks out, one cannot foresee how long it will last or how it will end. It is the Great Powers of Europe which, armed as they never were before, are now entering the arena against each other. There is not one of these that can be so completely overcome in one, or even in two campaigns that it will be forced to declare itself vanquished or to conclude an onerous peace; not one that will be unable to rise again. . . . Gentlemen, it may be a Seven Years’ War, it may be a Thirty Years’ War; and woe be to him who sets Europe in flames, who first casts the match into the powder-barrel. For his part, Sherman wrestled not only with the tasks associated with preparing the U.S. Army for future war, but also found himself overseeing its conduct of constabulary operations in the American South in support of the effort to rebuild and reincorporate into the Union the southern states known as

Reconstruction, and overseeing the final campaigns in the West against the Native American tribes. The challenges the latter two missions entailed reinforced Sherman’s appreciation of the difficulties using conventional military forces to deal with an aroused populace entailed and were sources of tremendous Arden Bucholz, Moltke and the German Wars, 1864-1871 (New York: Palgrave, 2001), 25-49; Hajo Holborn, “The Prusso-German School: Moltke and the Rise of the General Staff,” in Paret, ed., Makers of Modern Strategy , 284-85. “The masses are blind,” Moltke declared in a letter to his brother shortly after the Seven Weeks War, “and woe to the State and society, where they obtain supremacy.” Moltke to his frustration for Sherman and the army. Sherman also found his efforts complicated by a Congress that responded to public opinion by criticizing the army and denying it resources. Nonetheless, by the time he left office as commanding general, though it fell far short of achieving the full, needed reconstruction of the South’s economic and political order, the white South was reconciled to the Union. In addition, the power of the Native American people had been effectively broken by the efforts of American commanders in the West and application of what had proven necessary to break the rebellion; namely, the explicit targeting of non-combatants and the economic foundations of Native American society. At the same time, Sherman devoted considerable energy to improving the army institutionally with an eye on the next major war, inspired in part by reports from Philip Sheridan on the Franco-Prussian War and an eleven-month personal trip to Europe that began in late 1872. He supported Emory Upton’s study of German military institutions and arguments for integrating elements of them into the U.S. military. In addition, near the end of Sherman’s tenure in office, the Army established School of Application for Infantry and Cavalry at Fort Leavenworth, which evolved into the Command and General Staff College— the American version of the War Academy. 21F 21 When the Great War came, Europe’s failure to heed Moltke’s warnings regarding the consequences of setting Europe ablaze in an age of popular government and industrialization produced a grueling four-year ordeal that profoundly shook European civilization in ways that continue to impact world affairs. It also saw American and German armies battle each other for the first time. In their response to the challenges of the twentieth-century battlefield, Moltke’s descendants in the German officer corps would maintain their reputation for operational and tactical virtuosity. This proved insufficient, though, to achieve victory over enemies who had greater industrial resources and the popular will to employ them until Germany was defeated. This was in part the case because the success Moltke achieved in 1866 and 1870-71 spawned imitation and “within twenty-five years,” in the words of historian Dennis Showalter, “all other European great powers except Britain . . . adopted its chief technological and organizational features and had nullified any asymmetric German advantage.” 22F 22 Despite its efforts to emulate aspects of the system Moltke had helped foster and guide to victory, Sherman’s army would do less well on the battlefield than their German counterparts in World War I, turning in a less-than impressive tactical performance. 23F 23 Products of the Fort Leavenworth school would, though, provide the managerial skill the American Army needed to effectively harness the seemingly inexhaustible military resources the American people put at its disposal and give them the direction that enabled the United States to claim a prominent place among the war’s victors.

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