Civil War Supply and Strategy: Feeding Men and Moving Armies by Earl J. Hess

Abstract

Reviewed by: Civil War Supply and Strategy: Feeding Men and Moving Armies by Earl J. Hess Mitchell G. Klingenberg Civil War Supply and Strategy: Feeding Men and Moving Armies. By Earl J. Hess. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2020. Pp. 448. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index.) Civil War Supply and Strategy by Earl J. Hess is the heir to his Civil War Logistics: A Study of Military Transportation (Louisiana State University Press, 2017) and examines how supplies were distributed to field armies after their procurement and transportation along national and regional networks. It continues the author’s line of thematic histories, which are essential to an understanding of war. Hess argues that federal commissaries and quartermasters demonstrated greater skill in supplying field armies [End Page 316] than their insurrectionist counterparts, who did not want for resources to attain strategic success, but whose commissary and quartermaster departments “lacked the protean quality of the Union system” (361). Sustained Federal penetration of the Deep South was a signal military success, and not one that Northern advantages in resources necessarily foretold. It took the Federals three years to learn how best to funnel supplies from bases to depots and then to field armies, thus empowering commanders with sufficient mobility to smash the lower South. This story of Federal success in logistics and supply is an instructive case study of change over time, and one that transpired on the cusp of a seismic shift in how industrial and corporatist societies organized for war. Federal successes varied by theater and along the north-south axis in the upper and lower South. Difficult terrain complicated federal efforts to supply field armies in the Mississippi River Valley, although General Ulysses S. Grant built an elaborate overland system of supply that enabled his successful campaign against Vicksburg even as the Confederates failed to stockpile food to withstand a siege. In the Appalachian highlands the Federals encountered supreme difficulties in supplying troops. In the Deep South, Federals labored to build, maintain, and protect railroads among an inhospitable people and often broke away from lines of communication and supply. Readers of the Southwestern Historical Quarterly will note chapter nine with interest, which demonstrates that it was especially difficult to sustain armies in the Trans-Mississippi Theater. By comparison, Federal forces in the Eastern Theater operated within a smaller sphere of military activity and entirely in the upper South, and possessed better roads, railways, and waterways by which to draw supplies. No matter the theater, the ability of U.S. commissaries and quartermasters to supply armies fundamentally shaped federal strategy. Supply—and the skill of Federal officers (as well as civilians) in organizing and expediting it—determined which military options were available to commanders, shaped the course of the conflict, and postured armies for success or failure. Those who lament the prevalence of Civil War command studies—or those who associate military history with eccentric armchair tacticians at Thanksgiving dinner—ought to read this book, because it demonstrates that military genius takes several forms. A mastery of grand and minor tactics was insufficient without the means to sustain a campaign. In William Sherman and Ulysses Grant, the Federals claimed indispensable commanders, but they needed men of competence like Herman Haupt, Rufus Ingalls, Montgomery Meigs, and Daniel McCallum, officers whose capacious minds grasped the material demands of war. Sherman and Grant knew how to synchronize supply efforts with commissaries and quartermasters. Others, like William Rosecrans, did not. Hess does not posit a fatalistic view of military supply: the weight of numbers does not always translate to success in war, and the farther Federals [End Page 317] made incursions into the Deep South, the more acute their supply difficulties became. Another virtue of Civil War Supply and Strategy is how, like Civil War Logistics, it places the unprecedented federal effort of procurement and distribution in global context and in the wider chronological sweep of warfare. Channeling earlier conclusions, Hess notes that while in logistics and supply the Civil War foreshadowed the industrial conflicts of the twentieth century, it was more consistent in character with European and North American conflicts of the nineteenth century. Historians, warns Hess, ought not to “conclude that the Civil War...