 Good day. I'm Colonel Jerry Morlock, the Director of the Combat Studies Institute. You're about to use a video series which our instructors have prepared for the sole purpose of improving your presentation of M610, the Evolution of Modern Warfare. We've taken care to make the course that you teach as similar to the one taught at Fort Leavenworth as possible and choose to add these tapes to your libraries in order to give you every advantage as you prepare to teach this new course. These tapes are similar to the weekly train-up sessions which we utilize to prepare our instructors here at Fort Leavenworth. My intent for the tape sessions was to provide you insights and tips on ways to approach the lessons of M610 that were not available in the instructor notes. I've drawn various instructors, military and civilian into the sessions based upon their specific expertise and historical background. They were asked to just talk to the lesson structure and content, giving you some additional information on the historical context and differing views on how to approach the lessons. These tapes will provide you a wealth of knowledge and direction that will significantly improve your readiness to teach our new history course. One word of caution regarding how to use these training tapes. They are not designed to be substituted for your instruction during the individual lessons of the course. As instructor preparation tapes train the training material, if you will, they are inappropriate for direct instruction to students and are not intended for that purpose. Our intent with these tapes is to improve your ability to lead the student seminars by sharing tips and advice from some highly qualified experts. The Combat Studies Institute stands ready to provide whatever additional expertise or assistance that you may require, and we've included the institute's phone, mail, and email contact information on the tape if you should need it. Good luck with the evolution of modern warfare course. Have a good time. Hi, I'm Lieutenant Colonel Jim Martin from the Combat Studies Institute, and we're here today to talk about lesson five in the non-resident course, the American military experience, 1815 to 1862. Here with me today to go through this session is Dr. Chris Gable from the Combat Studies Institute and Lieutenant Colonel Jeff Shatner. What we're going to do today is deal with the lesson as you're going to teach it and try to deal with some ways that we approach this particular lesson. The first area I want to deal with is the Mexican-American War and its role in this time period. Chris, how do you approach the Mexican-American War when you teach this class? Well, a good thing to bear in mind is the lead-in that you can get from the Napoleonic Wars when you look at this conflict because that was very much the inspiration in terms of commander's vision of themselves in the battlefield, the tactics employed, and the weapons technology was essentially unchanged from the Napoleonic period. Jeff? When I approach it, I try and approach it from a point of view of the personalities involved, leadership, what lessons you're going to learn, how you're going to try and solve problems in the case of the United States strategically on the offensive against what appears to be a superior foe, you know, and how do you plan for that and how do you react to it? Yeah, I personally like to deal with this in pointing out what it isn't. Many of my students say, well, that was a training ground for the American Civil War. Well, while it was a leadership training ground, particularly for the junior officers, the R.E. Lees and the grants, that people who would be leaders later on, it certainly wasn't an image of what would be the American Civil War. What were the size of the formations we were dealing with in the Mexican American War? 8,000, 9,000 for each of those armies. And we dealt with much, much larger armies when we get to the American Civil War. So while, yeah, there are some things that you can take from the Mexican American War and move it all over into the American Civil War, you also see what the gap was between 1848 and 1861 and how possibly unprepared people could be by 1861 to lead armies of 35 or 40,000 when we'd never seen that in their military experience. So I think you can approach that not only what the war was, but what the war wasn't. Well, it certainly set up the expectations of a lot of people involved and as you indicate, not very realistically. A Mexican warrior looking at a small, rather highly professional army, the technology obviously is going to change. There's a lot of things that a commander might expect that he knows about war in 1861 and that's changed on him. What about casualties, Jeff? Do you think there's any... I mean, we see huge casualties by the time we hit the American Civil War and we'll talk about how technology impacts on that. Do you think maybe that commanders expected casualties in the American Civil War at first to run like they did in the Mexican American War? Relatively low. I think they expected that. But when you compare it to the Mexican American War, I'm not sure the casualties are really that low. I think on a number of troops you had involved, they're actually relatively high, especially when you factor in disease and the potential for non-battle casualties. So I think they're fully prepared to have relatively large casualties on a per-unit basis, although not the mass numbers that actually occurred. We asked one of the reading questions we asked students out there is assessing that effect of the Mexican American War on the military institutions. And that kind of leads us towards the military between these wars. What kind of effect do you see the Mexican American War itself having on the institutions which would lead us to 61? On that professional army you talked about. Well, its biggest impact was on the geographical scope of the army's mission. The Mexican War added a tremendous amount of territory to the United States and the United States Army did not grow to match the expansion in territory. And so in the decades between the Mexican American War and the Civil War, the United States Army on the frontier is going to be even more diluted in terms of soldiers per square mile or perhaps square miles per soldier would be more accurate than it had ever been before. So you're going to go into the Civil War with an army that was not used to seeing more than a company of troops assembled together in one place at one time. Yeah, for example, I mean, I'm looking at some figures I've got on the Army 4 structure over time and at the 1845, just before the Mexican War starts, we're running at about 8,600 soldiers in the Army roughly. At 46 we go up just over 15,000. The peak of the Mexican American War we're at 30,000. But by 1853 we're back down to just under 14,000 that it shows here as far as the authorized strengths. So like you say, the territory grows immensely. That stretches basically, you see the shining sea now, but yet the Army is down to a mere 14,000 soldiers to try to police this. You know, you keep focusing us toward the American Civil War and means for there and this is part of something that the United States has been learning ever since the American Revolution. And that it's a kid's capacity to grow to meet any threat that it receives through volunteers that doesn't need a large standing army and the ability of the American Army to perform well during the Mexican American War at least as seen by the public would seem to reinforce that fact. So that until you actually need the troops, you don't need to have them on hand. That brings up question, is the Army that fights the Mexican American War that prototypical volunteer Army that the United States depends on or is it a smaller professional Army? The Army that did most of the fighting was the professional Army. There was a volunteer Army that turned out but was not as heavily engaged. Nonetheless, this is not a requirement in the foundation of a myth or the perpetuation of a myth. So you can leave the Civil War convinced that the volunteer soldier won the war. No, it's not only that, it's like I said what it appears to be is, you know, who are the press reporting to? They're reporting about the hometown boys and what they're doing and their success and they're not going to be reporting on the regular units and the long standing Army. They're going to be reporting on like Jefferson Davis's Mississippi Rifles and those are units that are going to get the press and the notoriety. Okay, so we've got a small regular professional Army that between 1848 and 61 is largely a constabulary force. As you said, not soldiers per square mile but square miles per soldier. How does that fit into the American strategic posture of the time? I mean how do we depend largely on our Navy then? I mean that's what Glenn says in his, Dr. Robertson in his intro, is that there's a large dependence on the Navy, it gives you the buffer, so that professional Army can do its thing and then grow if it needs to. Do we really spend the money to create this Navy that our strategy calls for? Yeah, to the extent that our strategy was a commerce based one and their military requirements to promote commerce around the world require showing the flag, maintaining a certain amount of safe harbors and later calling stations and the Navy was adequate for that largely symbolic purpose. The Army then as now was basically trying to find a mission for itself and that it had the frontier and it had coastal defense and beyond that there was not a great deal of pretense that we even needed an Army. You have to kind of take a look just like we do now trying to identify just what we perceive the threat that we need military forces for. You start taking a look at 1846, 1848 and then after the Mexican-American War what is that primary threat and I think it's still perceived to be the British Navy. And just like Chris said, it's coastal defense is what's important. We're perceived as having a long enough coast, especially with the acquisition of new territory that the British can't blockade it. So all you need is enough defense to keep from having your port seized by the British and you do not need a large Army to do that. What you need is fortifications and you need to protect the key points of that sea coast like the opening in the Chesapeake Pace that ships can get out and spread your commerce to the world and as long as your commerce can still get out and not be stopped, you're not blockaded. Okay, so what we have with the military between the wars and this period if I've got what you guys are talking about correctly is we have a small regular Army, 14, 15,000 somewhere in there which does the constabulary work that's got to be done. We have a standing Navy to give us that commerce protection that we can talk about to guard the approaches to the Chesapeake along with coastal defense batteries. In fact, I think the Navy is still basically a commerce-rating Navy, a little bit larger, but it's the place the pressure on the British and force them to consolidate their fleet. Isn't that its primary purpose between the wars? Yeah, if there was a war. Yeah, if there would be a war. Day in, day out, its presence is a symbolic. But our fleet is not meant for fleet action. We're not looking for the blue water fight then. That's not really what we're looking for here. It's largely defensive in nature, dealing with our coastal waters. And then the backbone, I guess, of the ground force would have to be considered the militia structure that is behind that regular Army. Is that accurate? Well, certainly in case of any significant threat to the nation, it would be, but the militia as such has become a pretty ghostly presence. It doesn't have much in the way of a real physical body behind it for most of the period that we're looking at here. So it's not like our National Guard today where we have an organized entity out there? By and large, you had organized units that did turn out and drill, but they were as much ceremonial and social as anything. And there was really not that much in the way of a true implementation of the militia laws, which were still on the book. As I recall, there was only one state that actually maintained up-to-date militia roles, and I think it was Delaware. So there was not much of a physical embodiment of the militia, although certainly people still expected it to be the main line of defense in case of a war. Obviously, if they don't even have accurate roles and those sort of tools that we use today, I'm sure the weapons that were out there in militia units were certainly not up-to-date, and the newer technology that we're going to talk about here in a few minutes. So I guess we're talking maybe still old flintlocks in some of them, not even capfire and weapons. Maybe it's worth remembering that until our own times that is the last century and a half, military technology didn't tend to go obsolete very fast. That it was very common to finish a war, stockpile the weapons in an arsenal and leave them there until the next war, and they were still perfectly good. And so when we look at people dealing with technological change, to us it looks like an easy thing to deal with mentally, but to them it was a rather startling phenomenon to have weapons that were only 10 or 20 years old being obsolete. Okay. I'm going to probably leave that. You did ask Chris about what he thought about the background of the military. The militia units themselves, I agree, were not. As a pool of manpower, when you did need to ask for volunteers, they were a great place to start at. They had already that camaraderie built and there's free among there. There are unit members to get large numbers to be able to volunteer at one time rather than trying to rely on straight volunteers out of the general population. So I do think as far as a reliance, there was a reliance on the militia from that standpoint. Well, and I think that's, I think you're obviously right based on the way we see the structure with a mere 15,000 sitting there in the regular army. Obviously someone had to be planning to use the militia as a backdrop there when they went through their assessments. They had to do very similar to us today to look at requirements and then try to plan against it. Whether we agree with the requirements that they laid out, I certainly don't think anyone could look forward to the requirements of the American Civil War and plan against those because that is certainly not the threat that they were planning against. There certainly weren't major mobilization plans either to bring certain numbers together under certain conditions. So how ready do we think the forces were for the war that would come in 61? I mean, how would you assess the readiness of the regular army, the militia, for what would culminate in 61? Well, certainly in terms of the regular army, it was in no sense postured to fight a major war with its small garrison scattered all over the frontier and the seacoast. Probably its greatest weakness was in the fact that at the time of the Civil War there were only a handful of serving officers who had ever commanded a unit larger than a regiment in the field. And what we're going to see is that whereas the smaller units could be gotten ready fairly quickly when it came to the general ship at the higher levels, particularly dealing with some of the changes in warfare that had transpired since 1848, the weakness will be at the higher operational strategic levels. Jim, what about you? How would you assess the readiness of the forces? I would look at it a little bit differently. In comparing the two forces, the American Civil War is not so much are they prepared for it as much as both of them are prepared equally the same. So you have a balance. So if both sides had predicted and could expect what would happen had trained larger units, you still would have had basically the same situation you had in 1861, two forces that would not be able to come to a decisive victory early. To me the real question becomes if one side was able to be more prepared than the other side, then what might have been different? Those are some of the issues we're trying to wrestle with today, trying to make sure that we're more prepared than an opponent we may meet on the battlefield. Earlier, Chris talked about changes in technology and weapon systems. And one of the things that we deal with as you lead into the American Civil War is some changes in technology that will make some changes in this war. How would you analyze those changes? What would you see as the most important technological changes as we move towards the American Civil War? My personal opinion is it's kind of, I think the most important change in technology would be the telegraph. I know there's a lot of, a lot of people try to think in terms of either rifling, especially in the musket, in addition to artillery and in the railroad. But I tend to think the telegraph is more important, the ability to communicate, the ability to bring different forces to bear from very different parts of the country at one concerted action. Maybe not on one point, but bringing pressure to bear all at one time. And by the time we get to 1864, we'll see grants start to do that. Up to that time, your problem is you have to combine forces on one battlefield for them to get full effect. With the telegraph, we're able to move beyond that. And that is something that changed to communications and ability to command and control with communications is still something we're progressing through today. And I think very often it gets very short notice within our current army to improve versus other systems like tanks and artillery pieces where I think if we focus a lot more on communications, we have more effect. So when you teach this lesson, I take it that you focus on that command and control aspect when you talk about the technological change over some of the others. Chris, I mean, do you do likewise or do you have a different spin? No, I think the big one is logistics and beyond a doubt, steam power changed the face of warfare. It's important to talk long distances but steam power enabled armies to move long distances and accomplish some of the things that Jeff talked about. And it's really a quantum change to go from an army wagon that can carry one ton to a steam boat that can carry 500 or a railroad train that can carry one or 200 tons. This is the first major war in human history in which the movement and the logistics is not all done by muscle power. And when you think about all the changes in warfare through history up until this time as great as Napoleon was he was still using the same logistical system as Alexander the Great which is muscle power. And this is the first great war at least involving the United States in which that changes and it changes very dramatically. The key thing the reason why I've always focused away from that is at the same time on a tactical level that's true on an operational level that's very true but on a strategic level that also constrains yourself to only certain avenues that you can use. In the case of using shipping where you can carry large tonnage or even railroads, you're tied to either railroads or you're tied to rivers. Wagons may only carry one to two tons at a time but it's more difficult to predict their advance. And I think we've seen the same thing today with our reliance still on trucks even though barges will still carry more than a truck wheel and even over aircraft which are limited where they can land even though they can carry more tonnage than our trucks can. So I agree it's very important and it's a major breakthrough in the ability to logistically supply very large armies but there's also a handicap to using those capabilities that I think sometimes is often overlooked. Well that's true but there are some aspects of this war that simply could not have been done with Wagons power. You can find a number of campaigns that would have ended had it not been for steam power transportation and logistics. I absolutely agree. The scale of this war is enormous. The distance from one theater to another would take you from Paris to Berlin back again. And there are just some things that could not be done. Campaigns just compared this war for example to the French and Indian war, the American Revolution War of 1812 on the frontier and see how in those conflicts 90% of the war was just getting armies where they had to be in a condition slightly better than starving to death. And the side that did that won the campaign. Originally in this war we're operating over even larger distances with huge armies that are able to deliver enormous combat power despite the distances they've traveled. As an instructor who teaches logistics and has a logistician you begin to see here something that will be true throughout history from then on is that the real weakness of a logistics system goes are those joints between types of transportation and you talk about we use the barge and it carries 500 tons where a wagon carries one time. But the barge won't have to eat any of his one time? Well I agree but the point that slows logistics down you'll find in this war is when you have to take it from the barge to the wagon and that's where life slows down and we'll see that through the wars that will follow right through World War II and all the way into Desert Storm you'll see that as a problem. Probably the best example would be Von Moltke and the Franco-Prussian War when he gets to the frontier and all of a sudden it's a different gauge and he's got to start unloading and he just doesn't have the wagons to keep up with what the train will haul. So you create a whole new set of logistical problems also for the logistics with that and the amount of equipment that we can haul on those trains. Well that gets back to a point Jeff raised earlier and the constraints that are involved you draw big arrows on the map for the Civil War campaigns and the great majority of them follow rail lines or rivers or both and the ones that don't turn into raids that can't go where they want to go and stay where they want to stay. Eventually they have to get where the other side of the map is and they can't help against the numbers that they just can't support without using the same kind of means. Best example I can think of that is actually outside this lesson but it's Sherman's campaign to Atlanta where he basically uses the railroad bed as his axis of advance and the supplies are going right into the back of his army as they come down from a local and national. So I think that's a good example about this and most people I think would make the jump out of asking the same question about what changes in technology would have jumped on a rifled musket and yet our discussion we've completely gone away from that as if none of us have considered that as being that as important as telegraph or logistics. I think that it makes changes at the tactical level where what you guys have talked about is largely there are some tactical changes but there's a large piece there that's operational strategic but that rifled musket makes changes earlier you and I were talking about I asked you the max effective range of 12 pound Napoleon with canister which was a common way to utilize that weapon system in the time prior to 1861 and what was it about 400? 400 yards and what do we have as the max effective range now for the rifle musket 450? 480? Somewhere in there? 1,000? 1,000 maybe so we begin to see the difference here where when we hit first bullet run in a few minutes and we're on Henry House Hill and they crank up a battery out in front of the union forces as they would in the normal tactical flow to start firing canister into the confederate forces that happens to those two batteries the people who man them cease to exist because of the ability of a rifle musket to take them out which couldn't have happened earlier I think it's a good way to approach it the easy way to think of the rifle musket is that it's suddenly mowing down soldiers in huge numbers and rendering certain tactics impossible just because of the carnage involved I think it's important to remember that most of Frederick the Great's frontal attacks failed this is an incremental change and what it's going to do is subtly alter the balance among the combat arms artillery can no longer stand in front of the infantry range and deliver canister with impunity it's going to deepen the killing zone that a cavalry charge has to go through by a factor of 4 so it's not going to irrevocably change the face of the battlefield but what it does is it subtly changes the balance of what works and what doesn't it changes the percentages it changes the batting average so to speak of a specific tactic in a specific situation and I think that's where this particular technological change comes in but even with the improvements in rifling you still had to fire on the average 150 rounds to wound one enemy soldier in this war and so it's not as if everybody's dying from musket shots all of a sudden well and I think the fact is if my reading is correct is that the average infantry soldier in one of these battles didn't fire 50, 60, 70 rounds I mean if they got off 8 or 9 or 10 rounds that would fall more into the realm of reality looking at it from a low gestation I mean we're still 50 60 years from a point in time where an infantry soldier can't carry enough with him basic load of bullets to keep him through a very extended period of time, nothing like what we have today where machine guns run out of ammo and you've got to have ammo bearers to continue to get it for them that's not the kind of volume we're dealing with here we're dealing with maybe 40, 50, 60,000 men each firing 8 or 10 rounds rather than hundreds of rounds per man so there's a as you say it's an incremental change what about later in the war we'll go to breach loaders not in the same kind of quantity as the muscle loaders early but do you see that making much of a difference no so all the hoopla about repeating rifles the problem perceived then with repeating rifles first of all you're talking two different things now between repeaters and breach loaders they're the same thing but in the case of both those weapons you're talking a much more sophisticated piece of ammunition that has to be manufactured in great numbers and if you tried to outfit a whole army with those types of weapons the logistics system just couldn't keep up with that type of manufacture and distribution as perceived by the people making decisions on whether to use those kinds of weapons or not the fact is if someone's firing a repeater you can anticipate a soldier will fire more often probably less carefully and use up their ammunition very quickly and need to be resupplied very quickly now we would look back today and say yeah but you can do the same thing with one-tenth of soldiers so you know maybe it'll balance out in the long run but then again if it's a balance have you gained anything I think they perceived then we can look back in hindsight and say they made a mistake not going into those new technologies but in reality to bank well the new technologies to the expense of other things without being sure they would work without those problems I think probably would have been a mistake I think from a soldier's perspective the one thing about the repeater or the recently weapon is that you no longer had to be standing to reload that weapon system much harder with a muscle loader to do that in a prone position where from a soldier's survival standpoint at least you could now take those weapons and fire them and reload them from the prone at the same time you got a soldier in a prone position and you're fighting out a cornfield and wheat and you can't see your target so it's all fine and good to say that what you can really do is protect the soldier before the infantry is close enough to shoot at them but for the most part they're still going to have to stand to shoot at an approaching battle line well probably the biggest impact of those weapons is in with infantry at all but one of the things that emerges at Bull Run is that traditional sword-wielding cavalry seems to be losing a decisive place on the battlefield and the repeating weapons the breech loaders in particular are going to I think play their greatest role later in the war when it comes to the cavalry arm but that's not a factor in the Bull Run battle so basically we begin to see what will later be called mountain infantry where they can use their horses as a means to carry them somewhere and then dismount and fight as infantry that is it might be to load a muscle loader on the ground doing it on a horseback is a major problem that's a good point a lot of times we approach an American Civil War like it's a continuation of a polyonic tactics in the case of cavalry that would mean a shock arm by the time you see the both armies in the beginning of the American Civil War the cavalry is primarily a reconnaissance arm a raiding arm and they're not really used as a shock arm at all so you see the cavalry units distributed throughout an army sometimes as low as brigade level to be used in reconnaissance they come together as large units to be used so that's a good point it kind of breaks from the traditional thought process too that they're based on the polyonyics I think you can see from our discussion here the idea of technology there's different ways you can go but I think the three key elements that you probably want to deal with is communications command control like Jeff talked about is logistics which usually hear the technological changes in the steam engine the rail the boat that area and then in the weapon systems the rifle muzzle loader specifically and I don't know if everyone out there really knows what the difference is between the smoothbore weapon and the rifle musket the basic difference is and correct me if I get off here but with a smoothbore weapon because of the way that black powder fouls a bore you end up using a ball that is much smaller somewhat smaller than the bore itself is because otherwise as it fouled you'd have a hard time getting it down in there after repeated rounds so really this thing is being fired there are no grooves in that barrel it's smoothbore so it's bouncing down the muzzle as it comes down but basically wherever it bounces last is what's going to determine where it's going to go where it's going to be a little high, a little low, a little left, a little right where with the invention of the minaball which will expand to fit those grooves lands and grooves in the rifle musket you now have some ballistic stability when that round comes out the barrel much like what we're more used to today and that gives you that greater range with accuracy than you got before also has to be a little smaller because you're still dealing with black powder so it will still foul the bore but now the back of it will expand with those gases grab the lands and grooves and down it will go so that's really the is that an accurate discussion of the basics between those two the rifle was recognized for its advantages and accuracy for probably 200 years but finding a practical military weapon particularly with the loading problem you've identified was really what prevented it from being widely adopted I would imagine and I think too keep in mind that there are advantages to the musket one it could be loaded more quickly because it didn't fit as tightly so you could fire it more quickly than you could a rifle in addition when you got into close range you could double shot it with a rifle so while you may not have the accuracy you do with the ball you can put two balls down the bore at one time so if you could find positions where you didn't have to worry about the range of the rifle musket say 100 yards in front of a tree line a musket can be very effective and very often more effective than a rifle Jeff what about we haven't talked about artillery much at all but what about the state of I mean you're an artillery man you're an artillery going into the American Civil War well artillery of course ruled supreme on the battlefield throughout history more appropriately that's a good question artillery especially with the changes with the rifle musket we talked about that a little bit really during the Mexican American War you saw artillery having a great effect offensively for the American Army by the time you get to the American Civil War for reasons that Chris mentioned earlier the ability to unlimber within rifle range of enemy troops which is about the same max effective range as canister you cannot get the same offensive use out of your artillery another factor that works into it is tree lines and close quarters that you had to get too close to be able to unlimber and even muskets could then get to it it wasn't just a rifle but if you could set up in a position defensively with artillery spread among your between the regiments of a brigade I think just strengthen defense tremendously in doing that very rarely did you see the kind of artillery counter-battery fire that you see at Gettysburg before a picket's charge most of the time it's an anti-infantry weapon used by the defense and that's where it has its greatest impact and we've talked about canister here folks the instructors out there may not understand exactly what it is either of you want to explain what canister really was Chris go with that for a 12 pounder Napoleon canister would be 27 iron balls about an inch and a half packed in a can with a powder charge behind it and when the powder charge detonated the can and the balls would spray out shotgun fashion short maximum range but terribly effective against mass infantry do you want to talk about one pound each ball no it's not a pound I mean just about remember what the weight is I really don't but we're basically turning that 12 pounder Napoleon into a shotgun and that's really what we're doing with it okay that gives you an idea about infantry weapons artillery as we start into this war what I'd like to do is leave technology here for a minute and Chris you and I talked earlier today about the importance of war aims as we approach the war aims as we roll towards the American Civil War in 1861 when you teach this class well I think the war aims in this conflict isn't any war that you may study in this course are a very very valuable ruler to hold up against the operations that you'll be looking at as you go through the war if you establish up front what the war aims are that gives you then a gauge against which you can judge the strategies and the campaigns and the various players will choose to implement as the war goes along give you some ability to assess whether they were doing the right thing or not in the case of the American Civil War you need to be rigorous in your definitions war aims being the political end state that the nation wishes to achieve by resorting to arms and that needs to be kept distinct from strategy which is the various employment of military means to accomplish those aims in the American Civil War you need to get to the point where there's some consensus that the war aims are essentially on the part of the Confederacy to establish and maintain its status as a sovereign independent state and for the Union to restore the Union or as the war aims were stated to preserve the Union in that the Lincoln Administration refused to admit that they were taking place so if you take these two war aims you can then go through the remainder of this conflict and every time you come to a campaign an operational concept you can hold that up against this war aim and ask your students whether this particular campaign plan will take you towards your war aim or not and this gives you something beyond just in judging what was effective and what was not in terms of the campaigns and battles of this war one illustration of this for Down the Road is that the focus on perhaps something like the Battle of Gettysburg will be inevitable and yet when you hold this up to the war aims and ask what this campaign accomplished in terms of either side's war aim the answer is not much because things didn't change after that but it's a fine instrument to use in assessing what the different campaigns of this war were truly all about and I agree with Chris completely and you start to take a look at 1861 and 1862 on what the war aims are that definitely has an impact on the military campaigns they're waged for limited objectives they're attempting to use limited power and both sides are attempting not to punish the other side cities by destroying towns by ticking off the civilian population and both sides are doing those things and we'll see a change by the time we get to the end of the war so a lot of times you see the criticism of the generalship early in the war and the campaigns that are developed it's based on the war aims in 1865 not the war aims in 1861 so you have to be very careful to identify it and sometimes those aims are not always easy to identify you have to kind of extrapolate it and a lot of different pieces of information to determine what they were at the time the war aims aren't always what the president says correct and as you allude to very typically a war the aims will modify and change over time whether anybody wants them to or not the conduct of war itself can introduce new goals into what the nation needs to accomplish by the end of that war I think one of the most controversial discussions about war aims here I get it from my students every time I teach this course wraps around slavery the Emancipation Proclamation was it really a war aim of the union to end slavery though this is military history that pops up every time I teach it and I go back to and I'm going to paraphrase this quote from Lincoln he said that if I could preserve the union and never free a slave I would and if I could preserve the union and free all the slaves I would do so and if I could preserve the union and free some of the slaves and not free others I would do so my goal is to preserve the union and that's a paraphrase but I think that goes back to the heart of the war you talked about earlier that's the key and even when he does do the Emancipation Proclamation I mean that's a diplomatic and political statement driving towards that preservation it's not a human rights issue it's really driving towards preservation but at the same time you can't get away from that slavery as probably the one primary divisive issue between the two sections and while you don't have the north going to war for the sake of abolition per se you still can't get away from the fact that the primary divisive issue between the two sections is still slavery I think you'll find when you guys teach this class that though this is military history, evolution of modern warfare this may be the first class you get where there are a lot of your students who have some very definite opinions I mean most people don't have a lot of opinions about the Mexican American War but when you hit the American Civil War you run into Civil War buffs you run into people who have read more on this than any other conflict you've hit so far and they have some very pronounced opinions I think you won't have any problem when you get into this war getting class participation on some of these discussions as you hit first pull run and you hit the technology piece here and then move on into the next lessons to deal with the American Civil War and really from here on out I find in my classes that I get more and more participation as we leave the American Civil War because people study this war and then you move towards the 20th century where people are much more familiar with what's going on your problem does change though in that a few people that will know a lot sometimes though it's actually pretty limited and those that still don't know any more than they did about the Mexican American War and they apply that same level of knowledge to the American Civil War and while you may have more participation the participation will really be key to a few individuals and the challenge becomes how do you get the other people into it and one way to try and do that is when people offer their opinion and it's an informed opinion based on their readings is even if you believe and you support their same opinion just come across with something that's different and challenge them and that'll help encourage those others to challenge them as well even though they may not have the same background knowledge anything else on war aims for me though that's one of those things that's not treated a lot in Glenn's intro but it's something that we're agreed that you need to lay a foundation here to help you as you move along in later lessons well I do it in every lesson where we deal with a war because unless you establish what the war aims are you have no grounds upon which to evaluate strategy and campaign planning you use it regularly as an analytical tool then you give them an asthma and then you can check how well people do against that asthma and also look at how war aims change during a conflict especially the longer it goes so just before we go on to the case study of First Bull Run and talk about it in the article that Glenn's got out there I have something that I normally do with my students that I call the balance sheet and try to lay out for these two forces what their relative strengths and weaknesses were and there's a lot of ways to do it I probably go into more detail than I should but what you might want to do is lay out some of the differences such as population difference between the two sides a rather mundane topic but it allows you if you only have a very small population you can only mobilize a certain portion of that population because you still have to feed people someone still has to farm and depending on which source you deal with I've seen a lot of different numbers I use these the north had roughly 22 million population of 22 million at the coming of the war where the south was running somewhere just under 10 of usable manpower I think that lays out well that's total population white and black, slave and free combined so it lays out some of the initial problems that the south's got in trying to match the north in this particular war you talk about how they're equally usable problems earlier but the big advantage for the north is that they have far more to start with it's like a basketball team that's got five and one that's got ten and there's some issues of tiredness there and just being able to throw a lot of numbers of people so they start in a bit of a hole there the confederacy does when they start into this some of the other things I like to talk about are the miles of railroad that are available to them using that logistics piece that you talked about earlier the sheer mileage that's out there in the north because of its economy and the way it worked much more railroad mileage was built there than it was in the south the agriculture economy of the south didn't dwell on the industry therefore didn't have near as much rail some of those sort of things square miles, actually the confederacy in many ways is bigger for square mileage than is the union and then I look at a couple other things I go into horses and mules which again though we've got steam you've still got to take things by wagon to most armies and the union will have a tremendous advantage in horses I think part of that is keeping Missouri and Kentucky nominally on the union side in the war you know places that you can get considerable horse flesh but I think that sometimes it can be helpful in doing that kind of a balance sheet just a very quick balance sheet look at what each side starts the war with because it has something to do with the strategy that is translated from those military aims because if you only have X amount to deal with there are some things you can do and some things you cannot do I always think you've got to be careful though you do balance it just to highlight a couple things for example in population while the south definitely has a much smaller population than the north at the same time they're not going to have to if you look at their war aims and they're defensive in nature they just have to maintain their territorial integrity has north advances they need to use more troops to maintain their lines of communications so that strips away from combat power from the front they're talking about mobilized manpower in addition to that in the case of the railroads the north does have a much greater number of railroads but do they have a greater number of railroads where it advances into the confederacy itself and that becomes a more important point it's fine for moving the logistics around in the rear but when you try and get it down into the armies and you can only support so much manpower it kind of inhibits the sheer number or number of miles of railroads becomes less important than the number of railroads that are entering the confederacy the same with the population if you can only support an army of X size it doesn't matter how many people you can mobilize for the military you can only use an army that's big enough that's the size that you can support and another one in the case of horses and mules the south is falling back toward their depots they don't have to bring the supplies forward like the northern armies do and the population to farm and grow things whereas a lot of the horses and mules are being used on farms in the north and otherwise aren't available so while it would look the balance sheet looks kind of uneven and very often that's used to support the southern military does so much better because look at how far down they start to begin with there's a lot more balance in there when you take a look at it than otherwise would appear I think the mileage of railroads in the north versus south these rails normally run they don't run north into south because that wasn't the trade route they run from the east into the old northwest into Iowa, Ohio that area which allows the north to move considerable forces back and forth between the theaters if they wish to now then the nice thing for them is that the rivers strike deep into the south while the rail doesn't go there many of the rivers when you get over into the western theater go from the north and flow south and so what I think those rails give you is the ability to move equipment, manpower, supplies laterally between the theaters while you then do have the problem and very few rail lines the L&O Louisville Nashville I admit there's a definite advantage you've got to take a look at it and recognize maybe the advantage isn't as great as just looking at the mileage would indicate I just like to use this balance sheet piece to give a context it doesn't explain the war by any means what it does is lay out a context for my students that shows maybe it dictates some of why the south strategy is set up the way it is is the south strategy dictated by what they want to do or is it dictated by what they can do there's just some arguments there that you can use I think it places it in context it's just one of the techniques that I like to use it's handed neither side as a blank slate and one thing to bear in mind when you're looking at the advantages of the north is that many if not most of them do not translate into military advantages it will run the simple fact is that these are assets that are not easy to turn into military power particularly the time we're looking at when governmental powers are limited by today's standards so all those rail miles may or may not be an advantage it depends on what the union government is able to do with them yes the last thing that we do in this lesson is we use first bowl run as a case study on kind of wrap up these changes between the war and what the army looks like Jeff how do you use this case study when you teach it in the classroom on your honesty I don't want to fall away from bowl run or first manassas depending on how you want to call it for the simple reason that there's so many other good issues to talk about I just don't get there that's the primary reason the second reason I don't focus on is we're going to focus on a lot of other campaigns where I can refer back to it and talk about how things have changed so I don't feel a need to really get into it if I've always gone unprepared to get into it and to me the thing to focus on is you have both sides actually come up with pretty sophisticated plans on how to use their military forces much greater than you'd expect based on them not having any experience at handling forces of that size what they're unable to handle though is that the execution of orders are not trained and they're not drilled people don't know how to handle them how to handle their orders they don't know how to use their own initiative within small units when the plan has to change they don't break down on both sides during the battle but keep in mind that the plan itself is pretty sophisticated on both sides and they do understand what to do with the forces it's just in the execution there begins to be problems and they're not prepared to handle those problems Jeff brings up a point for all of you out there that while we give you a lesson plan and we set you with some things to talk about you're not going to be able to get to everything in all these lessons we normally give you more than we'll fit to be honest with you so you've got to pick and choose myself, I like to use this case study just to show potential impact that we're going to have when the leaders on both sides have been trained basically by the same system where you have a northern leader and a southern leader who try to do basically the same thing at 1st Bolton and because they were trained in the same schools you know this the long discussion about the impact of West Point here to me one of the things that's always interesting is what we've got is we've got two armies whose leaders were trained the same way and so they often do things very similar and they're able to read each other pretty well Chris how do you use it? Well it illustrates so many of the things that we've touched upon you can simply pull pieces and parts out of this campaign as we've been doing we've gone through our discussion here this afternoon to illustrate tactics, technology, logistics many of the things play out here including one might inquire as to what this does in terms of the war aims of the participants does this campaign make a great deal of sense would the capture of Richmond have ended the rebellion? Would the capture of Richmond which has only been the capital the Confederacy for a matter of a couple months have caused the Confederacy to throw their hands up and say oh that's too much we quit and I think it begins to introduce some thoughts about how bitterly and stubbornly this conflict is going to be played out because we're in a theater this is simply the first of many essentially stalemates that we're going to run into in this theater we're going to continue for three more years One of the other things I like to point out in this class and when I teach my Civil War class is that both sides approach this believing that this will be a one battle war we're looking for a decisive victory here and the other will go away basically there's even the you know the story that you got in the Civil War PBS type series the guys doing the picnics up on the hillside because wars is a gala to go and watch but they both sides leaders will get a a quick education into the violence and difficulty of this war with the the victory that the south will win but a not a clear decisive victory by any means in both sides being being bloody much more than they expected to be I think it leaves an imprint down on the leadership makes them think a little about those war aims because all of a sudden this isn't going to be the easy decisive we'll whip them and on we'll go and I think they start to get that feeling for just how difficult this war may be and with this serious battle of the war that's where they do fall into that Napoleonic concept of win the decisive battle you win the war and that's just not going to happen because we close any parting comments from you two on teaching this lesson on anything we haven't touched on here yeah there's two thoughts for this lesson but I think they're particularly prominent when you're looking at the Civil War number one the people who lived this did not have a crystal ball and they didn't know it was going to be a four year conflict had they known that undoubtedly they would have done things differently in 1861 and number two none of them as far as I know ever got up and in one morning and decided to do something profoundly stupid a lot of Civil War historiography focuses on the chump of the month club and how dumb could this guy be whereas I think there's a lot more to be learned from history in general from the Civil War in particular if you approach it with a philosophy that the individuals involved were doing what they thought was the best thing based upon the information they had and the context they found themselves in and from my part that goes back to something that I normally tell my students in the very first day and that's when you study history you can only hold historical actors responsible for what they could have known I mean the vast knowledge that we have since then of what happened or they should have realized this you can only hold them responsible for something that they could have known at the time like you said they don't have a crystal ball and they can't see into the future so you have to be careful when you evaluate them to not impose ideas on them that they could not have had because but you're real smart because you're a hundred years later and you have so much more to look back on anything, any closing thoughts there Jeff? My return to where I started is a look at generalship you're looking in the Mexican American war we have our junior officers that are fighting that war that have come out of West Point and they're trained to be military professionals but they're senior commanders or not you know Scott, Taylor these are guys that have come up to West Point and they're in charge so as you take a look at the Mexican American war take a look at the differences between your senior leaders and your junior leaders then try and ask yourself what do those junior leaders learn from the Mexican American war and how are they going to apply those lessons in the American Civil War and part of that is they've been successful in that Mexican American war so they're going to try and use those as positive lessons and stick to them in the case of the South you're probably going to find they're going to stick to those lessons in the North will and largely because at the beginning of the war they're still successful with those tactics or at least they perceive it as so whereas the North will change and adjust and it's kind of interesting to watch that interplay and just to also reinforce with Chris said when he talked about stump to chump it's real easy to criticize some of the generals especially early in the war an example would be General McClellan he's criticized very often but he was a very effective general in major flaws but some of his ideas were really good in how to prosecute the war and may have been successful however it also would have been led to a protracted war probably as opposed to a very quick short war which is what Lincoln was after at the time in closing here I think that the one comment I'd leave you with as we close out is that don't feel compelled to use everything that you've read everything you've heard in here in the conduct of your lesson all of us walk into a classroom prepared to teach all of these things but we go where the class takes us largely if your students get interested in something we let them talk generally so don't feel compelled to get through all of this it's not a check the block effort it's looking at those things which you can use to make your students think because that's really what we're here for teach them what to think and use those things that you can really pull out of them thank you very much