The Turning Point
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Turning points are handy for teaching history because they give a certain sense of being somewhere in what may otherwise be a dreary time line. Unfortunately, outside of a teaching environment or some dramatic exposition, they make little sense because there just aren’t that many of them that were that distinct.
Still…
For generations schools have taught that the turning point in the American Civil War was the battle of Gettysburg, that titanic clash in southeastern Pennsylvania where the Army of the Potomac under Meade and the Army of Northern Virginia under Lee fought for three days to decide the fate of a continent. Sounds romantic, doesn’t it?
Too bad it just isn’t true.
By the 19th century, events in the halls of government and the trading floors often overshadowed events on the battlefield or in the hearts and minds of the populace, making war a very complex matter. With the Civil War, what happened in Pennsylvania in the first three days of 1863 was indeed a large battle, but it was pretty irrelevant to the war (regardless of what the National Park Service tries to sell at the battlefield park). For two years, the two largest armies had been glaring at each other between Washington and Richmond, fighting occasionally, maneuvering up to Maryland and down into the Wilderness from time to time, but mostly just glaring and camping. In the 90 miles of space between the two capitals, there was a marked dearth of anything like decisive fighting.
Not so in the West.
Anywhere west of the Appalachians, a typical army (there were four principal hosts on each side and several others for most of the conflict) covered 90 miles every quarter and fought at least one major battle in the same span. One reason for this was more space, but the other was there was so much more war to fight out there, with more objectives.
One fact that most people don’t appreciate is that it is a greater distance between Chicago and New Orleans than it is between Berlin and Moscow.
While most of the population and a large percentage of the manufacturing and dairy production were in the east, but most of the grain, cotton, lumber, niter, salt, mules and horses, not to mention specie, were not. Armies by the 19th Century traveled not just on guns and butter, but on wood and wheat, and paid for with gold and silver, not just promises as they are today. And, in the west was the great Mississippi River, which made nearly all the other rivers on the continent pale in comparison not only for sheer size, but for its value as a transportation axis.
The fighting for control of the Mississippi River was far more crucial for the success and failure of the war than was who controlled the capitals.
The free flow from the grain silos, lumber yards, and steel mills of the Midwest and Ohio Country to the markets of Europe and Latin America was crucial to the success or failure of both causes. Further, the flow of gold and silver from California, which the South could never affect and never seriously tried, ensured that, baring disaster, the North could buy an army if it needed to.
That aside, the blockade of the Southern coasts, dreary and relatively uneventful as it was, had global importance few nations appreciated.
After the Declaration of Paris in 1856, the ability for a nation to control its own ports determined who could trade with them, who could recognize them as a political entity, and thus whether they were a country at all. As long as the South couldn’t permanently open their ports not just for the outflow of cotton and tobacco (their prime exports and main source of capital), but for the inflow of manufactured goods (especially since the City of New York had more foundries and steel mills than the whole of the Southern Confederacy combined), their legitimacy as a country was doomed by international law. The South would have had to have open-water warships capable of consistent operation in all weathers to break the Union blockade with any consistency, something they never came close to.
On top of all these considerations, there was the slavery issue.
Chattel slavery had largely vanished from the major powers of Europe, where all the money and manufactured goods were. When Russia freed the serfs in 1862, all the Great Powers were, theoretically, free societies. As the Confederacy insisted that their “peculiar institution” was critical to their existence, so too would most of Europe insist that slavery was an abomination that was anathema to the rising trade union movement, let alone the waves of liberal social reforms that were transforming the industrialized world.
Where was the turning point?
You could make convincing arguments for Champion’s Hill that slammed the door on Vicksburg and was the penultimate battle for control of the Mississippi. You could also, given war in the Industrial Age, argue that Fort Sumter was the turning point for, as soon as the South started the war, they lost, and they never had a chance for a lasting and meaningful military, diplomatic, or economic victory. So, if you’re looking for a single event that changed the destiny of the Civil War, Gettysburg surely isn’t it, and I’m not sure that there was one.
The Devil’s Own Day: Shiloh and the American Civil War
Shiloh wasn’t a turning point, but it was a watershed. In two days of savagery, the country learned that this conflict was not like any other they had ever seen.
The Devi’s Own Day is an attempt at rationalizing chaos, picking through the legends and the hyperbole to get at the truth of this pivotal non-turning point in American history. Available from your favorite bookseller or from me if you want an autograph.
Coming Up…
History and Zeitgeist
When Philosophy Meets History, History Wins
And Finally...
On 13 July:
100 BC: Gaius Julius Caesar is born in Suburra, Italy. Struggling most of his life because of epilepsy and an uninfluential family, Caesar reached the pinnacle of power in the Roman republic after winning fame and fortune in Gaul (France), Egypt and in the War of the First Triumvirate.
1568: The Dean of St. Paul’s in London, England, Alexander Newell, perfects bottled beer by forgetfulness. The legend—for that’s what it is—goes that Newell, an avid angler, neglected a bottle of ale in the grass while fishing. By one version, Newell caught a titanic fish and spent a day hauling it in and dressing it. A more likely version just has the prelate forgetting it, whereupon the brew went through a secondary fermentation that yielded a beverage sudsier than ale.
And today is NATIONAL BEANS ‘N’ FRANKS DAY. As it is summer and a traditional repast is beans and hot dogs…why not? Now, beans ‘n’ franks is that concoction of hot dogs cut up in the beans, but you get the idea.