All for the Regiment: The Army of the Ohio, 1861-1862
280
All for the Regiment: The Army of the Ohio, 1861-1862
280Paperback(1)
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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781469615059 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | The University of North Carolina Press |
| Publication date: | 03/01/2014 |
| Series: | Civil War America |
| Edition description: | 1 |
| Pages: | 280 |
| Product dimensions: | 9.00(w) x 6.10(h) x 0.90(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Introduction
In July 1862 at St. Clairsville, Ohio, a group of young men answered Abraham Lincoln's call for three hundred thousand more Union soldiers by joining Company B of the 98th Ohio Volunteer Infantry Regiment. One of them, John Patton, recalled the month of his enlistment as one of "the dark hours of the Civil War," a time when Northerners were discouraged by the failure of the Peninsula campaign in the East and disappointed by the inactivity that had followed the costly victory at Shiloh in the West. The government urgently needed new blood to reinvigorate its war effort and halt the tide of Southern success, especially after rebel forces went on the offensive in Kentucky and Maryland. Regiments like the raw 98th Ohio were rushed to the front after receiving no more than a week or two of training. On August 29, 1862, Patton and his comrades found themselves near Richmond, Kentucky, listening to the sound of enemy artillery for the first time. The guns were being fired by veteran Confederate troops led by Edmund Kirby Smith, who on the following day attacked two brigades of newly raised Yankee regiments and routed them.
The 98th Ohio, which had remained in reserve during the battle, was ordered to cover the retreat of the demoralized Union army. As he stumbled north through the drought-parched Kentucky countryside, Patton saw men so thirsty that "some of them drank of the thick muddy water [that] ran along the turnpike gutter" and others so tired that they fell asleep by the roadside "but a few feet from the passing wagon wheels." The morale of the Federal troops fell still further as they approached Lexington, where citizens flew Confederate flags in celebration of the recent Union defeat. At one point the men of the 98th Ohio were ordered into battle formation to hold off the pursuing rebels, who were expected to catch up at any moment. When the teamsters who were driving the regiment's wagons saw the troops preparing for a fight, they fled in terror. "They come rushing on us like panic stricken cattle," Patton wrote, and broke through a stone wall before disappearing into the distance, headed for Louisville or perhaps Cincinnati. But no rebels came, and eventually Patton and his tired comrades made beds for themselves on the ground, where they spent an uneasy night.[1]
The retreat resumed the next day. During a brief halt, the men of Company B discovered that they had inadvertently left their unit's flag behind. Captain Mitchell, the company's commander, called for volunteers to retrieve the standard, and two came forward. When they retraced their steps to the place where the company had slept the previous night, however, they found the area occupied by enemy soldiers. Rather than abandon their quest, they boldly walked into the camp, unchallenged by sentries, and began to look for the flag. They found it just where it had been left, picked it up, and completed their daring mission by bringing the treasured banner back to the regiment before nightfall. The retreat continued.
This book is a history of the field army in which John Patton served, the first Army of the Ohio, from its origins in the early months of the war through its final battle at Perryville in October 1862.[2] It tells the story of the creation of the army and how it fared in several critical campaigns,[3] a story that amid the recent flood of Civil War scholarship has somehow escaped the telling. No general history of the army has been written since the nineteenth century, an omission that has become all the more glaring as students of the war have increasingly appreciated the importance of events west of the Appalachians.[4]
More important, the history of the Army of the Ohio illustrates how that institution developed certain social and organizational characteristics that were typical of all Civil War armies, characteristics that made those armies incapable of destroying one another on the battlefield. In most of the war's major engagements, the forces of both sides emerged bloodied and temporarily disorganized (the victor little less so than the vanquished) but still able to function, confounding the participants' widely held expectation that their battles would be as short, intense, and decisive as Napoleon's defeat at Waterloo in 1815. With the exception of John Bell Hood's ill-fed, outnumbered, outgeneraled Army of Tennessee, which disintegrated after the Battle of Nashville in 1864, no Civil War field army suffered a truly decisive battlefield defeat.
Many Civil War historians have found it difficult to abandon the paradigm of Waterloo and have spilled enormous quantities of ink to explain why battle after battle deviated from the supposed norm of Napoleonic decisiveness.[5] Beginning with the writings of veterans in the years immediately following the war and continuing through the middle of the twentieth century, most military narratives employed the "drum and trumpet" style, portraying battles as competitions between individual generals who clenched cigars in their teeth as they leaned over lantern-lit maps in their tents on the eve of the contest, then bravely led their troops to victory, waving their swords heroically while riding on foaming steeds through the bloody fray. Rank-and-file soldiers rarely appear as individuals in these accounts; instead, anthropomorphized regiments and brigades collectively display human qualities like bravery, patriotism, and fear, sharing the stage with their leaders as the main characters of the story. The outcomes of battles in these stories are typically attributed to some combination of the shortcomings of the losing general (who unaccountably fails to seize the opportunity just as decisive victory lies within his grasp) and the tenacity of the winning side's regiments, which again and again rally miraculously at the last possible moment to stave off defeat. For the war's veterans, these narratives helped them come to terms with their experiences by recasting their memories of the chaos of battle into forms that seemed more rational and controlled. Since the passing of the veterans, such stories have provided vicarious thrills to generations of Civil War buffs.
As satisfying as it may be to blame defeat on the extraordinary incompetence of Joseph Hooker or Braxton Bragg, or to praise the Stonewall Brigade or the 20th Maine for exceptional gallantry, the use of such remarkable phenomena to explain recurring results is unpersuasive as analysis. Extraordinary events that occur again and again are, by definition, no longer extraordinary. Recognizing this, historians seeking to explain the pattern of indecisive battle between 1861 and 1865 have for the last fifty years generally attributed it to changes in technology and doctrine. Since the end of World War II (a war in which technological developments played a dominant role), historians have focused on the impact of the rifled musket, the standard infantry weapon of the Civil War. The rifled musket had a range several times greater than that of the smoothbore musket of Napoleon's day, which meant that a defender could load and fire many times, instead of only once or twice, in the time it took an enemy to charge through his field of fire. It was this capability, the argument goes, that rendered the mass infantry assault and the mounted cavalry charge obsolete, making it impossible for an attacking army to achieve decisive battlefield success.[6]
There are, however, several problems with this explanation. First, the fact that most major battles did not have decisive results conceals that within each battle there were numerous local actions in which attacking forces won clear, tactically decisive victories over defending troops, driving them from their positions and inflicting substantial losses. In many of the war's smaller battles, the victorious force retained enough cohesion to pursue and harass the defeated enemy, as the Confederates did to John Patton's regiment after the battle at Richmond, Kentucky. Inconclusive results were not characteristic of all Civil War battles, only those that swelled to encompass whole armies. Second, smoothbore muskets remained more common than rifles until late 1862, at least in the western theater. Third, where rifles were available, the heavy woods and rolling terrain found on most battlefields restricted the troops' ability to employ their weapons at long distances, so that much of the fighting took place at close ranges that made the new technology irrelevant. Finally, if long-range muzzle-loading rifles made decisive battle impossible, how did the Prussian army of the 1860s and 1870s manage to inflict devastating battlefield defeats on a series of enemies armed with weapons that were as good or better than those of the Union and the Confederacy?
The reason that the Army of the Ohio (and by extension other Civil War armies) fought as it did in 1861-62 was not because of the will of its leaders or the capabilities of its weaponry, but because of the way in which it was recruited, trained, and organized. Assembled out of a collection of independent and fiercely clannish companies and regiments, the Army of the Ohio resembled a strong but ponderous beast whose component units could absorb enormous punishment on the battlefield without breaking, but which lacked the agility to execute the maneuvers necessary to destroy its enemies.
The story of John Patton's company flag makes the case in miniature. The men of the 98th Ohio lacked training and experience in August 1862, and it is unlikely that many of them were even aware of the name of the field army to which they had just been assigned (which was at that moment the Army of Kentucky, a short-lived organization that was absorbed into the larger Army of the Ohio six days after its inception). But they had already developed such powerful bonds within their company and regiment that the men of Company B were willing to put their lives at extreme risk rather than lose the symbol of their solidarity, the company flag. Stories like this, of soldiers risking and often losing their lives in trying to save their company or regimental flags, are common in the history of the war, and they offer a significant insight into how the war was fought.
The soldiers' loyalty centered on the smallest units to which they belonged, the company and especially the regiment. Consider that most people belong to many organizations at any given moment. If in 1860 one of the men who was to serve in the Army of the Ohio had been asked, "What are you?" he might have answered "a Democrat," "a Hoosier," "a Methodist," "a McGillicudy," "a Mason," "a farmer," "ein Turner," and so on. By his answer, he would have indicated that he primarily identified himself with his family, political party, church, social club, commercial enterprise, or other organization. When that same person volunteered to fight in 1861, he became part of a new set of organizations. He was a member of the infantry, cavalry, or artillery. He belonged to the Army of the Ohio, the Army of the Potomac, or one of several other field armies. Within his army, he belonged to a particular corps, division, brigade, regiment, and company. Of all those options, if simply asked to name the unit to which he belonged, the typical soldier would name his regiment. The regiment, more than any other unit, was a self-aware community, held together by bonds based on common geographic, social, cultural, or economic identities, strengthened by months of training and campaigning as a unit. Organizational loyalty and cohesion at the regimental level was thus extraordinarily strong.[7]
In contrast, bonds of organizational identification and loyalty rarely extended throughout larger units. Frequent reorganization and sheer size meant that brigades, divisions, corps, and armies did not have the permanence or human scale that might have allowed such bonds to develop. The complexity of these larger units made battlefield management difficult for the few professionally trained soldiers available and almost impossible for the many volunteer officers on whom the armies relied. Unlike their component regiments, larger units were readily disrupted by combat and almost incapable of performing complex offensive maneuvers.
Students of Civil War battles have long recognized the primary place of the regiment in the hearts and minds of Civil War soldiers. E. B. Long wrote in 1971, "Perhaps in no other war was the `esprit' of the regiment more vital or apparent than in the Civil War."[8] The significance of this phenomenon has not been fully developed, however; a poorly organized, amateur-led army that consisted of many dozens of highly cohesive regiments was like a dinosaur, a killing machine with powerful muscles and a tiny brain. It was capable of inflicting and enduring great violence, but the lack of a highly developed central nervous system limited it to administering straight-ahead blows and prevented it from coordinating its sinews to strike at its opponents' vulnerable flanks. At the same time, the absence of a powerful brain made such an organization almost impossible to kill, since its parts could survive and function independently. When Napoleon left the field at Waterloo, the French army disintegrated in panic; in contrast, Civil War battles were full of instances where units fought successfully after the "brain" of the army departed, the stand of Thomas's corps at Chickamauga after Rosecrans's departure being the best-known example.
Since individual regiments possessed such strong internal cohesion, they usually remained intact as organizations, even after suffering casualties that would have shattered contemporary European military units. Losses of 37 percent made the Charge of the Light Brigade at Balaclava in 1854 seem disastrous, but there were at least sixty Union regiments that suffered casualties of more than 50 percent in a single engagement, many of which continued to fight. After a battle, whether won or lost, the survival of most of their regiments as functioning units made it relatively easy for Civil War armies to reassemble themselves, much more so than if they had disintegrated into mobs of panic-stricken individuals. The decentralization of loyalty and the concentration of unit identification at the regimental level made these armies so elastic that they could not be broken, yet it also made them into awkward weapons that their leaders could not wield with decisive effect.
The history of the Army of the Ohio reflects this combination of resilience and clumsiness. From its organization in 1861 to its moment of decision at Perryville in October 1862, the Army of the Ohio was characterized by regimental cohesion that was extraordinarily strong and by a "brain" (defined as its entire command and control system, not just the ability of its commanding officer) that was unusually dim. The army's regiments displayed great bravery and, in small engagements like Rowlett's Station or Mill Springs, showed considerable tactical finesse. At the army's major battles, Shiloh and Perryville, the leaders of its higher echelons of command were unable to perform their assigned functions, but the army nonetheless survived because its individual regiments maintained their organizational integrity. In each case, it was not technology or generalship but the regiment-based culture of the army, developed in the processes of recruitment, organization, and training, that determined how well or poorly the Army of the Ohio fought. Whether the same statement can be applied to other Civil War armies (as I believe it can) is a question that invites the participation of other scholars, to confirm or reject this thesis, in either case advancing the study not just of the Civil War, but of the nature of human conflict.
Table of Contents
| Acknowledgments | xi | |
| Introduction | 1 | |
| Chapter 1 | Genesis of an Army, May to November 1861 | 7 |
| Chapter 2 | From Civilians into Soldiers, November 1861 to January 1862 | 35 |
| Chapter 3 | The First Campaign: Logan's Cross Roads, January 1862 | 62 |
| Chapter 4 | The Army in Action: The Shiloh Campaign, January to April 1862 | 83 |
| Chapter 5 | Promise Unfulfilled: The Corinth and Chattanooga Campaigns, May to July 1862 | 113 |
| Chapter 6 | The Invasion of Kentucky, August to September 1862 | 136 |
| Chapter 7 | Crisis of Leadership: The Perryville Campaign, October 1862 | 159 |
| Epilogue | 185 | |
| Notes | 191 | |
| Bibliography | 243 | |
| Index | 255 |
What People are Saying About This
A superb and insightful study. . . . Well worth reading and owning, especially by those interested in military leadership, cohesion, and fighting power in the Civil War.—Military History
An insightful, ground-breaking study of that army's organization, training, and institutional culture. . . . This is an interesting addition to Civil War scholarship and opens the door for much additional study.—Blue & Gray Magazine
All for the Regiment provides every student of the Civil War with an engaging examination into the nature of applied violence and human behavior.—Gulf South Historical Review
[Prokopowicz's] study is valuable and should provoke further inquiry.—Choice
The first history of the Army of the Ohio published since the nineteenth century. . . . [Prokopowicz] provides a window to understanding the Civil War in a new light. . . . Prokopowicz is to be commended. . . . [He] challenges Civil War scholars to advance the study of Civil War armies.—Journal of Southern History
An insightful and incisive analysis of Civil War military culture, of the disorganization of Civil War armies—the key to their sloppy, indecisive, and deadly performances. This is an excellent anti-romance, original and unusual in approach and refreshingly honest.—Michael Fellman, author of The Making of Robert E. Lee
This book fills an important niche in the history of Civil War armies. Lucid and lively, All for the Regiment shows how recruitment, training, and combat forged the bonds of comradeship that sustained morale and fighting power. It is a book that students of the Civil War will want to read.—James M. McPherson, Princeton University