For over the nation’s first century, defense of America for various wars, stayed in the hands of state militias – War of 1812, Mexican War, Civil War, Spanish American War, World War 1 and even to a significant role in World War 2. The US Congress always remained desirous to maintain a small regular army during peacetime which could change in times of war with massive influx of militia brought in from the states. This led to a series of problems in each war America involved itself in. One of the major problems became that of leadership. Captains went from commanding company-sized groups – 100-250 men – to commanding generals leading armies of several thousands. On the job learning in warfare costs lives. Here, we will focus mainly on Civil War generals.
BASIC ARMY STRUCTURE
Before going on, a review of the basic building blocks of an army are in order. The basic block on which an army rests is a company. Again, a company consists of 100-250 men (further divided into three to seven platoons) under either most commonly a captain or a major.
Next comes a battalion – though sometimes this sized unit was bypassed in favor of the next layer – made of up to 1,000 soldiers from several companies. Command here sits a lieutenant colonel, though many majors can command battalions, as well. Battalions did exist before World War 2, but they formed usually as ad hoc groups thrown together temporarily.
the regiment
The regiment served as the next main building block above the company for most of the 19th century into and past World War 1. A regiment also consists of about 1,000 men, but the number can vary. Regiments tend to have long lives as opposed to battalions which live shorter life spans.
Regiments are commanded by colonels and they tended to recruit from specific geographical areas – especially in the case of the state militias – though in the case of the US Regular Army a true regimental system – a European idea – did not exist with regiments not having fixed home bases found in European armies. Each regiment consisted of 8 to 10 companies – these companies on a militia-level could also come from discrete geographical areas.
By the time of the Civil War, The US Regular Army consisted of ten regiments to which nine new regiments (11th through 19th) became added. By comparison, the Federal Army put in the field 2,125 Volunteer (militia) regiments of infantry, 266 Volunteer cavalry regiments (vs 6 Regular regiments) and 61 Volunteer artillery regiments (vs 5 Regular regiments). Regiments served as the main large units commanded by officers in the antebellum Army. The regiment normally formed the largest sized body of troops led by officers in peace time before the 20th century.
Army inflation
Wars inflated the Army as numbers and larger units became needed. Three regiments (sometimes more) comprised a brigade with a strength about 2,000 soldiers – regiments rarely contained their full allotment of troops. Two to six brigades made up a division. These units were the Army’s smallest “self-sufficient” groups with typical three infantry brigades – two brigades for cavalry divisions. Divisions were only temporary wartime forces. Only in 1916 did permanent divisional structures become authorized by Congress, changing the base element of the Army remaining so until the 21st century when the Army has switched to brigades and brigade combat teams. Over time, 128 separate divisions became raised by the Army. Divisions consisted of 15,000 to 20,000 men though during the Civil War divisions were smaller.
the corps
Two divisions or more comprised another wartime-only unit, the corps. Today, the corps is the highest level of force concerned with actual combat. Somewhat similar conditions existed even in the Civil War depending upon the specific army to which a corps belonged to. A corps during the Civil War contained about 25,000 soldiers.
Created by President Lincoln in March 1862 with the delay partly due to lack of experienced officers and political reasons. Corps gained numbers though there is no direct lineage between the 43 Union corps and similar corps of more recent years since the corps-level was not a permanent structure during peacetime until after World War 1 – today there are only four Army corps structures active as opposed to 25 during World War 2. US Army corps today consists of 40,000 to 80,000 men – two to five divisions.
Larger units came into being as wartime armies expanded – two to four corps became a field army often with 100,000 or more men serving. In the World Wars, two or more armies became an army group, and four or more army groups became a theater command – one million or more men serving. Regional and Combatant Command levels manage even larger geographical areas and potentially greater numbers but are inventions of World War 2 and beyond.
RANKING OFFICERS
Commanders for the various units: Captain or Major for companies; Major or Lieutenant Colonel for battalions; Colonel for regiments; Brigadier General for brigades; Major General for divisions and in the Civil War they also commanded corps-sized units. Armies in the Civil War found themselves also commanded by Major Generals until the rank of Lieutenant General became authorized by Congress in early 1864 for Ulysses S. Grant. Lieutenant Generals were generally temporary wartime ranks by the close of World War 2.
Three and four-star ranks today can be temporary or indefinite assignments determined by the approval of the Senate. Four-star generals included only a few men from the Civil War – Grant, Sherman and Sheridan – the rank also titled General of the Army of the United States. The rank did not fill until World War 1 during which several men filled that rank and many more in World War 2. Five-star rank – General of the Army – became authorized near the end of 1944, first on a temporary basis, made permanent two years later. The rank was to give parity of rank to senior American commanders with British counterparts holding Field Marshal or Admiral of the Fleet commands.
five and six stars
Only five men from World War 2 era have attained a five-star rank in the Army: George Marshall, Douglas MacArthur, Dwight Eisenhower, Henry Arnold and Omar Bradley. Four men achieved the rank of Fleet Admiral, the Navy’s five-star equivalent – William Leahy, Ernest King, Chester Nimitz and William Halsey Jr. On a sidenote, the Navy did have one prior five-star recipient, George Dewey. He gained the rank authorized by Congress in 1903 with the stipulation that rank – Admiral of the Navy – ceased to exist with Dewey’s death -1917.
Six-star ranks have only been conferred three times – twice posthumously to George Washington in 1976 and U. S. Grant in 2024 as well as John J. Pershing in 1919 as thanks for his command of the American Expeditionary Force in World War 2.
CIVIL WAR REGULAR ARMY
Ath the onset of the American Civil War, the number of men within the US Regular Army numbered 16,403 officers and soldiers though on 14,658 men were present for duty. They arrayed themselves within 19 regiments – 10 infantry, 5 cavalry and four artillery. During the war, the Army was authorized to expand to 41,00 but there was never more than 26,000 serving at one time. The reason here, service in the Volunteers was preferable because discipline was less severe, length of service was not as long plus friends from an area could serve alongside other friends.
In the Regulars, that was not usually the case. Regular units also saw a lot of frontline service becoming depleted to the point of needing to be withdrawn by 1864. In total, however, the Regular Army made up only about 3% of the total Federal force during the war. Most regular officers remained with their regular units instead of serving as possible nodes of experience for volunteer units. That said, many regular officers did join volunteer units usually in positions of considerably more rank than they enjoyed in their Regular units.
changes wrought by war
Armies began the war with regiments of 1,000 men though before long disease, battles, court martials, and physical disabilities could easily half their strength or more. Union divisions maintained between 1,500 and 4,000 soldiers while Confederate divisions were a bit larger, 5 to 6,000 strong. The Federal corps averaged 9 to 12,000 with Confederates again with greater numbers, maybe 20,000 per corps. Two or more corps made up an army – there were 16 Federal armies and 23 Confederate.
At the start of the war, many senior officers of the Regular Army – in which only three officers began the Civil War as generals – went South. For lower ranking officers, state governors appointed colonels to command their volunteer regiments. At the company levels, the men themselves elected their officers. West Pointers would dominate senior leadership positions on both sides, but in both cases, few had ever commanded units larger than companies or batteries prior to the war. On the job learning cost many thousands of lives with leadership approaching “professional stage” only in 1863 by General William Sherman’s thinking.
GENERAL TACTICS
Tactics were identical on each side derived from European traditions. On the battlefield, tactics meant bringing the men forward in columns, then shifting into lines where volley fire could occur before a possible bayonet charge to take an enemy position. Cavalry scouted for the enemy and protected the flanks of the army from attack. Artillery was there to support attacks and defend positions. The tactics used came from drill manuals with both sides using manuals very much the same.
Regiments were the primary unit of maneuver on the battlefield in the first year of the war, but as the armies grew in size, that role became the purpose of the brigade. Some historians have said that rifles with a much longer range of fire – 500 yards – than muskets 100 yards – for which the tactics manuals had been written for – made linear tactics obsolete, however in lieu of soldiers identifying the curved trajectory of rifled muskets, the powder smoke obscuring the battlefield and a general lack of target practice, most combat took place at ranges close to the range of the older smoothbore muskets.
Beginning battles
About 18,000 on each side engaged – out of about 32-35,00 for each – at the Battle of First Manassas 21 July 1861. Those numbers increased dramatically with time. Shiloh – 6-7 April 1862 – featured two Federal armies of almost 67,000 fighting against almost 45,000 Confederates. During the Seven Days Battles, the culmination of George McClellan’s Peninsula campaign, saw armies of over 100,000 on each side going at it, though in the ensuing battles, commanders on both sides rarely could bring more than half of their forces into the separate battles.
Confederate command was a thrown-together combination of whatever troops were available to defend Richmond. The poor coordination of army command led to Robert Lee’s ability to achieve more than a marginal victory. McClellan was simply a poor battlefield commander. Prewar, he had come from the cavalry but had never commanded. A good administrator in camp, he proved a poor commander on the battlefield whether due to sickness – chronic malaria became a main problem he faced in the Peninsula – or a lack of presence on the field. His other major battle, Antietam, McClellan placed himself far from the action with little influence over the events. He let the separate corps leaders fight their battles for him instead of providing overall guidance.
CEO OR LEAD BY EXAMPLE
Lack of large unit training
As the units and the armies expanded quickly during the Civil War, the lack of experienced leadership – generals – became only too noticeable. Soldiers are by nature conservative. Civil War officers also generally did not learn much beyond the basics found within the tactical manuals teaching traditional tactics. Training for staff members was non-existent, leading to poor communication between officers on the battlefield.
Leaders executed the Napoleonic concepts they quickly learned poorly while failing to create anything new. There were certainly exceptions.
exceptions to the rule
The ex-Prussian officer August Willich. Willich believed that more emphasis needed to rest with the skirmish lines. He expanded the skirmish line to a battalion for a regiment and then with multiple regiments on a brigade scale. His training in Europe gave him a unique ability to adapt to changing conditions while employing a broader repertoire of tactical maneuvers than his West Point counterparts. He thought of America’s professional officers bore “the lurid intellect of a regular corporal or the scraps picked up from a half-digested compendium of a military school.”
Another tactic he introduced – either borrowing from Europe or “inventing” as he claimed – was “advance firing”. Willich doubled up his two battle lines into four. The first line fires and the next line comes forward along with the following two. Then the second line gives off a volley and the lines behind come forward again. As the succeeding lines come forward to deliver their volleys, the lines which have fired are reloading. This gave a more continuous wall of fire. Advance firing was available as a tactic used going forward or in retreat.
others
There were other generals who changed or created new tactics as the Civil War went on. One couple good example is the use of horses and mules to move more rapidly on the battlefield and to use repeating breechloader rifles by Colonel James Wilder’s “Lightning Brigade”. They proved themselves during the Tullahoma campaign and in the subsequent battle of Chickamauga.
Interestingly, both Wilder and Willich commanded troops in the Army of the Cumberland. This army in turn was commanded by Major General William Rosecrans who showed himself open to new ideas. After his relief by George Thomas, Willich found himself ordered to return to the standard tactics from the drill manuals. Another well-known example is the storming formation used by Emory Upton when he attacked the “Mule Shoe” at Spotsylvania. Upton would rewrite the drill books after the war.
Command Problems on the Battlefield
The largest unit during the Civil War, which commanding generals could see from atop their horse on a battlefield, was probably a brigade. That meant the four regiments laid out in a field, woods, hills all could seriously limit that vision. Moving beyond the regiment and brigade – for which training manuals already existed – the ability to maintain command control began to suffer. In early battles, combat control quickly unraveled when commanders above the brigade and regimental level tried to influence matters.
Even as time went along, battles were more influenced at brigade or regimental levels. Upper-level commanders seemed to be a lack of concentration when it came to attack. Regiments and brigades were often fed into battle individually instead of altogether. There was also case after case where local successes were not followed because reinforcements failed to be inserted. Divisional and corps-level command seemed to work before engagements in getting the various brigades and regiments onto the field, but control over units by Civil War generals would fail in the heat, noise and smoke of battle.
The problem with large unit control was shared on both sides. Neither side had experience controlling such large forces before the war. With the outset of the war, many commanders attended functions later in the war played out by staff. Again, the development of staff for commanders was a process taking years to perfect.
slow improvements
As the Civil War went on, depending upon the army, control by the generals did improve. Here, we are talking mainly about the Army of the Potomac later in the Overland Campaign and later in the Petersburg Campaign. By the summer of 1864, brigades and regiments were fairly comfortable with the mechanics of the battlefield. Division and corps commanders did not need to micromanage as many tried to in earlier campaigns. A big reason for more control becoming layered over the lower units was the development of a staff system taking a lot of the work off the shoulders of the commanders. Of course, commanders improved with time or found themselves exchanged for others who could learn the nuances of upper-level command.
problems in the attack
Offensive actions suffered more from the problems of command control. At times when division or corps commanders massed enough men for a multi-brigade action, it was not common for the units to become confused to the point control evaporated. Good examples of confusion on the part of the generals include many of the large battles of the Civil War – Shiloh, Seven Days Campaign, Second Manassas, Antietam, Stones River, Chancellorsville, Chickamauga, Wilderness, and many others. The main problem with each of these was that attacks were simply uncoordinated with smaller unit control lost due to several factors depending upon the battle. In several of the cases, initial successes should have led to more decisive victories.
A common problem arose from the spacing between brigades. In the confusion of battle, various regiments of various brigades kept getting mixed together during an attack. Another common problem arose with the nature of the terrain. Difficult terrain made it hard for a commander to understand ongoing events and which actions needed used by the division or corps level leaders. Initial successes were often squandered by generals who failed to follow up and here there were several reasons again depending upon the army or leaders in question.
Upper-Level Army Command
If it was difficult to command a division or a corps, then an army-sized unit represented another problem entirely. The development of the corps was an invention by Napoleon. Armies had to the point where the commander simply could not oversee everything. Napoleon instituted the corps to allow generals who he trusted have independence in their actions so they could respond to events quicker especially with the slow state of communication on the battlefield.
Federal corps
With the Civil War, the corps, again, instituted by Lincoln in March 1862 on the Federal side. The corps did not gain authorization in the South until September 1862 though informal corps or “wings” in the case of Robert E. Lee’s combined force in front of Richmond, Virginia during the June 1862 Seven Days Campaign. Lee would first try two corps before settling upon a three-corps system within his Army of Northern Virginia after Chancellorsville. He would add a fourth corps in the fall of 1864 though after much of the corps was destroyed at Sailor’s Creek 6 April 1865 it was combined with the Second Corps for the last three days of the life of the army.
Corps commanders in the Civil War Federal armies were major generals as were the commanders of the armies themselves. The only three-star general on the Federal side for the entire war was Grant, but by the time of his promotion, he was made overall commander of all Federal armies – Meade continued to command the Army of the Potomac through 1864 and 1865 as a major general. Corps commanders – after September 1862 – on the Confederate side were slated to be lieutenant generals though on occasion leadership would slip to a major general.
Southern “Corps” Exception
In the West, Albert Sidney Johnston organized his Army of Mississippi into four corps before leading it into battle at Shiloh. His corps were much smaller than a normal corps. Only two of his corps featured two divisions while the third and reserve corps had only three brigades each. Part of the reason for four corps was to make the Federals think his army was larger than the 44,699 present – remember a corps normally boasts of around 20,000 men. After Shiloh and the First Battle of Corinth, his army split into the Army of Tennessee and the Army of Mississippi. The second army used divisions since it was never as large as the force Johnston had commanded. The Army of Tennessee under Braxton Bragg featured two corps though a third would be added in time.
Politics
On both sides, much of the history of the Civil War involves the political maneuvers between army generals and disaffected corps commanders, especially with the Army of the Potomac until after Gettysburg, but also even more significantly with the Army of Tennessee. Here was a carnival of hatred which seriously affected the army’s performance. The character of army commander Braxton Bragg was such that his corps commanders were always plotting against him and he trying to find fault with them. President Jefferson Davis was forced to commit more than once to Bragg over the complaints of his subordinates.
the young napoleon
Lincoln had lots of problems on his side with army and corps commanders, especially with the Army of the Potomac. That army had been organized by George McClellan in the days following the summertime defeat at First Manassas. Corps commanders were not selected by the commanding general but by the President who most of the time went by the order of seniority, at least early in the war.
Many men in the army supported McClellan, but McClellan finally wore out his welcome after Antietam, a battle which he probably should have Punished Lee’s army much more seriously. His successor, Ambrose Burnside, was never sure of himself as commander and with cause. His mismanagement of events at Fredericksburg and the ensuing Mud March led to his corps commanders going behind his back. Joseph Hooker came out on top, but the other corps commanders were never on his side in the events following.
Hooker, McClellan, Burnside, Bragg, Joseph Johnston, John Hood, William Rosecrans and many others were all wonderful examples of generals and politics, for at the corps and especially army levels of the conflict, politics played a large level in the affairs of the army.
Hands-Off
Be that as it may be, corps and especially army commanders normally set themselves back from the immediate action. Beyond preparing an army for combat during the Civil War, generals of an army set about creating plans and then giving orders to set the plans into action. They could impose ideas upon actions once they started, but often those ideas failed to happen as desired. Communication and staff details continued to be a problem above the level of the brigade.
Commanding generals could fall into two categories. First were the hands-off leaders. They watched their creations from afar and did not interact with events on the field. A perfect example here would be McClellan who might well have been absent entirely on several occasions during his Peninsula-Seven Days Campaign. He then followed up with a very poor performance at Antietam and in the days following.
The hands-off approach could apply to other generals, as well. William Sherman was a dogged commander but maybe not a great tactician. At Tunnel Hill at Chattanooga, he wasted time getting his attack going on the right flank of Missionary Ridge. His attack was seen by Grant as the attack which would drive Bragg into retreat. Sherman ended up capturing the wrong hill one day and then attacking piece meal on the next with little to show for the efforts of his Army of the Tennessee except for a long casualty list.
Trust Issues
Sometimes Civil War generals held their plans too close to their vests. McClellan is a perfect example. Then there is Joseph Hooker. He started out the Chancellorsville Campaign in fine fashion. He maneuvered around Lee’s army atop the heights west of Fredericksburg but then failed to push his divided forces together to take advantage.
Hooker’s plans were to bring about a climactic battle where he defended instead of attacked, but his corps commanders did not know of his intentions. They became frustrated, especially when Hooker failed to get his whole army into the battle. The battle went askew when Lee countered sending Stonewall Jackson’s corps around the Federal right where corps commander O. O. Howard, oblivious to the threat – which Hooker had pointed out to him earlier – suffered for his error with the rout of his corps.
The battle still not lost, went down the drain for Hooker when he was concussed by a near miss from an artillery shell. Next in command, Darius Couch – who was not an admirer of Hooker – then followed up by not taking command and following orders of a by-now wounded and not all there Hooker, taking the Army of the Potomac back to where they had started from.
micromanagers
On the other end of the spectrum might be someone like John Pope or William Rosecrans. Both men have been criticized as micromanaging – Pope at Second Manassas and Rosecrans at Chickamauga (The same could be said at Stones River, but in that case, the micromanaging was probably needed in the desperate straits the Army of the Cumberland found itself in).
Robert E. Lee knew he had to trust his corps commanders to carry out his wishes. That trust was abused on several occasions from the Seven Days Campaign through the rest of the war. Luckily, he faced a federal foe who had already beaten himself – McClellan. The Army of the Potomac successors proved not much better until later in the war.
Solid Exception
On the other hand, George Thomas – a better manager – and the Army of the Cumberland succeeded against Bragg when a “demonstration” against the Confederate outposts below Missionary Ridge turned into a full-scale frontal assault of the ridgeline itself. Grant and Thomas were atop Orchard Knob watching the events in Chattanooga on 25 November 1863. Grant ordered – through Thomas – to send the three divisions of Gordon Granger to capture the line of rifle pits which Bragg’s men occupied at the foot of Missionary Ridge. The endpoint of the attack was to be right there. Communication problems led many regimental and brigadiers not knowing their task only consisted of stopping at the foot of the ridge. Brigade commander August Willich when asked by one officer where he was supposed to stop, replied “I don’t know. At Hell, I expect.”
The attack quickly overran the rifle pits. With the Confederate defenders in full retreat up the hill, the Federal troops continued to pursue them. Seeing the troops not stop where he wanted them to, Grant asked Thomas – who asked his nearby corps commander, Granger – who had given orders for them to push upward. Both Thomas and Granger denied responsibility though Granger added, “When those fellows get started, all hell can’t stop them.”
From the Front
Albert Sidney Johnston liked to get up front close to the action. The actual attack plan at Shiloh became drawn up by Pierre Beauregard as his responsibility as commander of the Army of Mississippi though he drew up his plan according to the general theme given to him by Johnston – to concentrate on the Federal left flank thus cutting them off from the Tennessee River and potential reinforcements. Johnston was the commander of the entire western Civil War theater for the South, much like the situation with Grant accompanying the Army of the Potomac in 1864 until the war’s end, leaving Gordon Meade to continue to command that Army.
At Shiloh, Beauregard, staying behind the Confederate forces feeding them into the battle as it progressed as best as he could control. Johnston went forward to exhort and move troops about more like the expectations of a commander lower down the chain of command such as a division commander. He, of course, paid the price by dying on the afternoon of the first day of battle at Shiloh exhorting his right wing to continue to sweep north.
Johnston felt he needed to be out front because his troops were still very inexperienced seeing battle for the most part for the first time. After he fell, Beauregarde’s ability to control the actions of his troops suffered. Instead of staying with Johnston’s plan, the army congregated, units thoroughly mixed up with each other, around the Hornet’s Nest. They finally reduced the Federal resistance there, but the time it took wasted the opportunity to capture Pittsburg Landing which would have really put the Federals in a world of trouble.
Other Frontline Commanders
There are plenty of other Civil War generals who liked to perform from the front. Nathaniel Lyon was one of the first army commanders to fall leading a counterattack at Wilson’s Creek in Missouri on 10 August 1861. In all, 67 Federal generals and 73 Confederate generals would die in the war. The Confederates lost A.S. Johnston at Shiloh; three corps commanders and seven division commanders. The Federals lost one other army commander, James McPherson leading the Army of the Tennessee at Atlanta; three corps commanders and fourteen division commanders (Another 35 general officers died from disease). Down the chain of command, many more brigade commanders on both sides fell in action as their command positions were frontline.
John B. Hood was an excellent example of a Confederate general who liked to get up close to the action. He lost the use of an arm (not amputated but not useful thereafter) at Gettysburg. At Chickamauga, he lost a leg.
Thomas Stonewall Jackson suffered a mortal wound while scouting avenues by which his corps could follow up their successful flank attack over the Federal XI Corps.
For corps and army commanders, there was always a fine line between getting too close and sitting far back without a clue. As the war dragged on, with the help of improvement in staff personnel, commanders became better at their jobs.