and Glatthaar, Partners in Command

Richard McMurry has written an informative, interesting and highly readable book with a very misleading title, Two Great Rebel Armies. McMurry investigates the origins, leadership and circumstances surrounding the two principal armies of the Confederate States of America. His thesis is that one, which became the Army of Northern Virginia, through a convergence of factors, became among the best military formations ever formed. By contrast, the other, the Army of Tennessee, floundered from start to finish. McMurry speaks little of strategy and tactics except at the highest level. His book investigates relationships: relationships among men; the relationship between individual states and the central Confederate government; the relationship between opposing armies; and the relationship between geography and strategy. In each case, McMurry shows that the Army of Northern Virginia had significant advantages over its Western counterpart, which never really was a "great" army except in its size relative to other rebel formations.

Partners in Command, a new book by Joseph Glatthaar, also investigates a series of Civil War command relationships rather than strategy and tactics. However, like McMurry, Glatthaar clearly demonstrates that relationships among commanders had an important effect on tactics, but an even greater impact on strategy, particularly on the rebel side. Davis had an excellent relationship with Lee, but his lack of communications with and respect for his Western commanders clearly effected Southern strategy there. Key aspects for both books were the affairs between the Presidents of both countries and their important generals. Both point to the fact that when either President had trust and confidence in his principal general, that side had good success (at least initially,) but when the President did not have great confidence or a feeling of trust with the army commander, then failure followed.

Glatthaar explores six relationships: Robert E. Lee and Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson; Lincoln and McClellan; Jefferson Davis and Joseph Johnston; U.S. Grant and William Sherman; Grant, Sherman and Admiral David Porter; and Lincoln and Grant. Friendship and continuing respect led to success. However, in the two where the relationships were not good, where there were little or no communications, failure occurred; this despite the fact that Davis and Johnston started on an excellent note. Glatthaar, thus, corroborates McMurry's thesis about a commander's prerequisites to success - one being effective communications with and cooperation from the commander-in-chief.

McMurry demonstrates convincingly that factors conspired against the Army of Tennessee. From its militarily incompetent founders, the Governor of Tennessee and his appointed general, G.J. Pillow, to the geography which made rivers important navigational aids to the invading Union forces, to the lack of industry and transportation in the area, to the dearth of officers and men with previous military experience, to the exceptional quality of Union leadership it met early in the war, the Army of Tennessee never overcame the tremendous obstacles that it encountered. On the other hand, the Army of Northern Virginia benefited from almost the exact opposite situation. Virginia was far and away the most important Southern industrial state. Its railroad system was the best and most efficient found in the South. Virginia's militia were the most ably led, most well armed and most numerous of any seceding state. Virginia had a state military academy, Virginia Military Institute; she had numerous Federal munitions depots which fell to her forces early in 1861, and she had by far the most officers who resigned from the U.S. Army when secession occurred. Added to these significant advantages, Virginia's rivers formed a series of barriers to Northern invasion, while the proximity of the Confederate capital in Richmond ensured that military operations in northern Virginia received immediate attention.

Not to be discounted as a factor in the war, the Army of Northern Virginia (though fighting under the name "Army of the Potomac" at the time) won its initial engagements. The "cavalier" reputation of the Old Dominion gave her soldiers an important, and probably measurable, advantage over the "Yankees" from the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic States who formed their primary opposition. After their early successes, Virginians, fighting in and for their home state and reinforced by the best fighting units the South had to offer, appeared to both sides as better prepared and better led. Thus, psychological factors gave the Army of Northern Virginia confidence while simultaneously eroding the confidence of Union soldiers and even their generals, particularly McClellan.¹ On the contrary, Union soldiers in the West, who came from farms and light industry, had no feelings of inferiority and no lack of confidence, and they were facing Southerners whose background was very much like their own, not the cavalier Virginians. Thus, while Virginians had an initial and important psychological advantage over their foes, the Army of Tennessee did not.

Leadership, however, was the primary factor in the success of Lee's army - leadership at every level of command. Armies run on discipline bred from leadership, and, as Union General Joe Hooker testified, the Army of Northern Virginia had discipline.² McMurry thoroughly documents the depth and breadth of experience and military training found in the Virginia army. When compared to units in the West, the leadership factor alone could persuasively be shown as the primary discriminator between each unit's performance. At every level of command, and especially at the general officer level, the Army of Northern Virginia had important advantages. Robert E. Lee was the only successful Southern field commander who met the four-part test that McMurry sets forth as prerequisites to command success.³

By contrast, The Army of Tennessee's first commander was Albert S. Johnston, at 58 the oldest of the major field commanders on either side, but a man who never grew into his responsibility. A.S. Johnston looked into local details, but never properly organized his forces on a regional basis. After Johnston's death at Shiloh, P.G.T. Beauregard took command. Although the hero of Ft. Sumter and First Manassas, by the time he took command Beauregard was among the bitterest foes of Jefferson Davis. He was quickly replaced by Braxton Bragg, arguably the least competent of the field commanders in the West. While Bragg may have enjoyed the confidence of his Commander-in-Chief, most his subordinate general officers hated him. Under Bragg, leadership became an even more negative factor; corps and division commanders became factionalized into those camps who trusted (at least outwardly) Bragg and those who dispised him. In such an environment, there was little likelihood of success, and the Army of Tennessee had very few. Unable to follow-up his victory at Chickamauga, Bragg was defeated resoundingly at Missionary Ridge.

To rebuild the army, Davis turned to Joe Johnston, a man whose deeds on the battlefield never matched his military reputation. Johnston was respected by many, ranging from Lee and Longstreet to Winfield Scott. But as commander in the West, many of his officers regarded him as overly timid and unduly cautious; more importantly, he also had serious, ongoing disagreements with the Confederate President. Following months of retreats, Davis turned the army over to John Bell Hood, a most aggressive, overly confident officer who promptly wasted thousands of Southern infantry in ill-conceived offensives against one of the Union's best defensive generals, George Thomas. It was left to Joe Johnston to gather the remnants and try to resist Sherman's march through the heart of the South, an effort which ended with his surrender at Bennett's Farm. Thus, through its four-year history the Army of Tennessee never once benefited from a commander who met even three of McMurry's four-part test, much less all four.

Glatthaar reinforces the tragic notion (for the South) that affairs between Jefferson Davis and Joseph Johnston doomed the Army of Tennessee. Johnston never took charge of the entire region as Davis wanted, and expected him, to do. Yet Johnston, in keeping with the precedent set by his predecessors, never communicated clearly to Richmond and Davis the severity of the military situation in the West. Indeed, Davis' relationship with Johnston was characterized by a complete lack of cooperation and basic communications between the two. Davis' poorly conceived defensive strategy, which in 1863 failed to foresee Union offensives in more than one region, and his reliance on an outmoded departmental organization, when combined with Johnston's unwillingness to actually "take command," crippled Southern efforts in the West. Johnston is one of the real enigmas in the Southern leadership. Prior to the war, his reputation as an aggressive leader placed him in the first rank of senior U.S. Army officers. But as a Southern general, beginning with his performance in Virginia, he grew into an overly sensitive, bitter, cautious and resentful officer more concerned with personal seniority than taking responsibility for an army.

While both authors applaud Union leadership in the West, particularly the team of U.S. Grant and William Sherman, Glatthaar points out how much a contribution Admiral David Porter also made. By showing that the Naval officer become best of friends with Sherman, while also having great respect for Grant, Glatthaar explains the basis for the highly effective, joint Army-Navy operations which characterized Union campaigns in the West. Without the personal relationship that developed among the three officers, the success of the Vicksburg campaign may well have been undermined, since the first common commander above Grant and Porter was Lincoln! The Union had not yet progressed to the modern concept of a single, joint commander; personal relationships overcame this shortcoming.

McMurry and Glatthaar provide insights into factors other than strategy and tactics, yet these very factors - personalities, relationships, geography, history of the state militias, and background and experience of generals and other officers, had to have a significant influence on both strategy and tactics. Having men like Pillow as general officers must have limited the options open to an army commander, certainly insofar as the brigades and divisions that such men commanded. Alternatively, when capable leaders have great personal trust in each other, as characterized the Grant, Sherman, Porter triumvirate, creative tactics and joint operations are not only possible, but also they have a great likelihood of success. McMurry, especially, provides an entirely different perspective on the South's problems fighting the war; this reader found his presentation more complete than Vandiver or McWhiney.