“And We’ll Bear the Glorious Stars of the Union and the Right” Reassessing the Western Theater’s Significance By Alvin Hao

“And We’ll Bear the Glorious Stars of the Union and the Right”

 Reassessing the Western Theater’s Significance

By Alvin H

Abstract

This essay reexamines the Western Theater’s role in the American Civil War, arguing that it was foundational to the Union’s eventual victory. Though overshadowed by the Eastern Theater, campaigns in Tennessee, Kentucky, and Mississippi forged a professional officer corps and shaped military strategy on both sides. Key figures like Ulysses S. Grant and George H. Thomas gained critical experience in the West that informed later successes in the East. The Western campaigns also delivered severe blows to Confederate morale, logistics, and territorial control. By focusing on this often-overlooked theater of the conflict, the essay highlights its decisive impact on the war’s trajectory.

Introduction

            The first half of the American Civil War was dominated by the campaigns of the Western Theater, culminating in the capture of Vicksburg on January 11, 1863. That event set the stage for the war’s major military action to shift eastward, closer to the Union and Confederate capitals. Few historians would dispute that the most dramatic and consequential battles of the Civil War were fought in the Eastern Theater, which has also maintained a tenacious hold on the collective imagination of military enthusiasts, professional and amateur historians, and the public more generally, in no small part due to the outsized media attention that part of the war received. More recent scholarship, however, has suggested that the Western Theater has not received the attention it deserves. Building on this newer historiography, this essay argues that the patterns, precedents, and outcomes observed during the Western Theater were as important, and in some respects more consequential, than those represented by famous battles such as Antietam and Gettysburg. In large measure, developments in both the Confederate and Union armies in this earlier phase set the stage for developments in the East in the war’s second half.

            This essay will assess the Western Theater’s significance in terms of the overall war’s trajectory through three related areas of inquiry. First, the rugged terrain of Western states such as Kentucky and Tennessee, entirely unfamiliar to the genteel officer classes of both armies, provided an important training and testing ground for the cadre of officers who played an outsized role in the later battles of the East. The successes and failures of the lower stakes engagements of the West provided important lessons that were applied later on a grander scale. Second, the devastating blow to morale caused by the devastating stream of Confederate losses had a profound psychological impact on the South, whose military significance cannot be discounted, especially with respect to its impact on the calculations of military planners later in the war. Third, the Western Theater commanders implemented important innovations due to perceived mistakes, especially on the Union side. Through a close engagement with these three themes, the essay offers a reassessment of the significance of the Western Theater, suggesting that, in some respects, its outcomes were more important than the latter, better-known, and final results of the battles of the East.

 

Overview of the Western Front

The term “Western Front” generally refers to the theater of conflict primarily in Tennessee, Kentucky, and Mississippi, while there were also some isolated engagements and campaigns in states as far afield as Texas and California; these are considered the “Trans-Mississippi Front.” Nevertheless, the developments of the Western Front in 1862-1863 profoundly shaped the later course of the war. Each of the Western conflicts built on the momentum of the previous one. The little-known Siege of Fort Henry, fought in Tennessee on February 6, 1862, is an event whose importance is generally unrecognized. It could be termed a younger brother to the Siege of Fort Donelson, which it preceded by only a few days. Seizing both forts was part of a Union plan to open the waterways to Northern forces. The fall of Fort Henry opened Upper Tennessee to the Union and set the stage for Donelson a week later. It was one of the first major Union victories amid the bleak months following Bull Run and Wilson Creek, resulting in a significant boost to federal morale. Moreover, it was also important as a naval battle; indeed, the day was already won by the Union Navy before Grant, bogged down with his infantry in the winter Tennessee mud, even showed up. Remarkably, out of 15,000 Union and 2,500 Confederates, only 63 people were wounded (Gott 210).

By contrast, the toll at the Battle of Shiloh, two months later, on April 6-7, 1862, led to a devastating 23,000 fatalities for both sides. This conflict in western Tennessee was one of the war's bloodiest battles. The Confederates engaged in an all-out offensive, while Grant held the Union line and responded with a bloody counteroffensive. The major controversy surrounding the battle, still debated by historians today, stems from the fact that Grant was taken by surprise. Though he won the battle, he was heavily criticized. The Battle of Shiloh seriously affected the rest of the Civil War. It ended Confederate hopes of blocking a Union advance to the Mississippi and stopped the Confederate military initiative in the West. In a blow to Southern morale, the main Southern commander in the West, General Albert Johnston, was killed. Along with Grant, Sherman was also at Shiloh. Thus, the two most important Union generals in the second half of the war learned valuable lessons at Shiloh (Luvass et al 1).

On September 19-20, 1863, the South secured a rare Western victory at Chickamauga in northwest Georgia. The victory came at an enormous cost, however. The Confederates lost 20% of their force at Chickamauga, making this the second bloodiest battle of the war after Gettysburg and the most lethal conflict of the West. Ten Union generals were killed or wounded. With 18,000 Confederate and 16,000 Union casualties, the battle saw the highest loss of any battle in the Western theater. Its aftermath could be regarded as the inverse of Gettysburg some months earlier. After Gettysburg, the Union could not pursue Lee because the Army of the Potomac had lost a significant amount of senior officers, effectively leaving the army without a head. Chickamauga was the exact opposite: the Confederate forces occupied the heights surrounding the town but failed to pursue Union General Rosecrans, meaning that the strategic city of Chattanooga remained a Union stronghold for the rest of the war (Official Report of the Battle of Chickamauga).

            A more general feature of the war that provides important context concerns the divide between volunteer and professional soldiers. As most non-generals were volunteers, it would have been important for soldiers to get field experience in a testing ground like the one in the West. In the north, volunteers were separate from the regular army and the militia. Of the 2.2 million Union soldiers who fought in the war, 2% were draftees, and 6% were substitutes (people paid to take the place of draftees). The regulars, consisting of professional soldiers who had served before the war, were a tiny proportion of the entire force. In 1860, the regular army numbered 16,000 troops, organized into ten regiments of infantry, four of artillery, and five of cavalry (Robertson 16) The officer corps was heavily Southern, and many Northern officers sympathized with the Southern cause. Two of three brigadier generals were Southern (Padre). The volunteer system became a default recruitment source because it provided the same benefits as the militias, while under federal authority. Local militias were under the states and were given to the national government for a limited amount of time. The main difference between these militias and volunteer formations was that while the former were under the state and remained so, volunteer formations were under the control of the national government, even though they were raised by the state. The volunteer system had significant implications for the conduct of the Western Theater. Virtually the entire force had little or no formal military training. This gave the North, in particular, an opportunity to create a system of unified command nearly from scratch (Padre).

 

“West” Point: Training Ground for Officers

            It is generally acknowledged that Union forces fared poorly in the first half of the war. However, viewing the Western Front as a litany of Southern failures obscures its broader significance for the Confederacy. In fact, the senior officers of both the North and the South made strategic and tactical mistakes in the Western states and drew similar conclusions, implementing reforms later on in the Eastern Front. The emergence of a seasoned officer corps on both sides of the conflict that had experienced failures earlier on made the Civil War more bloody, protracted, and strategically complex than it might have been. The emergence of two officer corps able to draw lessons from the mistakes made in the West constitutes one of the most important and overlooked factors in determining how and when the Union finally achieved victory at Appomattox, at tremendous cost in blood and wealth to both sides. Although Union generals proved adept at learning from their mistakes, this was also true for the Confederacy.

The Western Front produced some of the war’s greatest generals, individuals who went on to play a decisive role in the conflict’s final two years. On both sides of the war, this can be attributed to the mistakes these generals made and later generally acknowledged. Even though Union and Confederate senior officers became formidable adversaries in the rugged terrain of the Western states, they had much more in common than the context would suggest. A disproportionate share of the military leadership boasted a West Point pedigree; some of the figures on both sides had been classmates and even friends. As one contemporary noted: “There was a time when the faintest aroma of West Point lent a charm to the most unattractive candidate for a commission” (Higginson). Moreover, Confederate generals such as Robert E. Lee and Joseph Johnston and Union generals Ulysses Grant and Henry Halleck all made their military careers not far from the nation’s capital. On the Union side, other important figures included Col. Joshua L. Chamberlain, Maj. Gen. John C. Fremont and Brig. Gen. Don Carlos Buell. Representing the Confederates, there were such names as Maj. Gen. Braxton Bragg, and Gen. Pierre G. T. Beauregard. Many of these individuals were united by the alienness of the rugged terrain, hills, mountains, and weather of Appalachia and other Western regions. Of course, on both sides, the officers were colloquially divided between “West Pointers” and “political appointees.” Regardless of this distinction, most hailed from upper-class backgrounds, with the Confederate generals having been raised in the elite culture of the Upper South and the Union generals having a background in business or industrial families.

On both sides of the conflict, a generation of leaders was formed in the rough terrain of the Western Theater. One way to illustrate this trend in both the Confederate and Union armies is to examine famous as well as lesser-known officers who played a pivotal role in the West and went on to fight consequential engagements in the East. Examining a variety of figures reinforces the argument that the trials of the West had a similar effect on both militaries even though the Union generally prevailed in battle.

Of course, the figure who exemplifies the story is the most famous of all. Ulysses Grant got his first major war experience as a brigadier general for one of the main Union commanders, General Halleck, who would later become the chief of all Union armies. Though technically, he served in the Mexican-American War, he did not see much combat there. Much of the early formation of Grant’s career as a military thinker took place in the rugged hills of Kentucky. Grant’s experience in this setting dates from the very beginning of the war. After scoring an early victory over a Confederate force in Missouri in November 1861, shortly after the outbreak of the war, Grant sped down to Kentucky, breaking the Confederate line. Grant’s career in the Western has to a large extent been defined by his mixed performance at the Battle of Shiloh (April 1862) and the Battle of Vicksburg (July 1863), in many respects, his crowning military achievement. An emphasis on these two battles, with all the accompanying scrutiny of the general’s decisions, overshadows his lesser-known experience in Kentucky and Tennessee in early 1862. It is important to note that Grant himself assigned paramount importance to a battle not much discussed today, the Union victory at Fort Donelson of February 13-16, 1862. Grant takes special care in his memoirs to describe how impregnable the fort’s position was. “The fort stood on high ground, some of it as much as a hundred feet above the Cumberland. Strong protection to the heavy guns in the water batteries had been obtained by cutting away places for them in the bluff.” No less imposing were other obstacles, such as “the limbs [that] had been trimmed and pointed, and thus formed an abatis in front of the greater part of the line,” as well as “a ravine running north and south” that also formed a natural barricade (Grant 197). Writing many years after the fact, it is clear that Grant believed that the physical setting of the site posed particular challenges. Notably, this battle, which has been consigned to the footnotes in Civil War histories, was assigned prime importance by the most influential Union general. “I was very impatient to get to Fort Donelson because I knew the importance of the place to the enemy and supposed he would reinforce it rapidly.” (Grant 197). He went on to suggest that the victory was important enough that I could have ended right then and there:

The news of the fall of Fort Donelson caused great delight all over the North. . . My opinion was and still is that immediately after the fall of Fort Donelson the way was opened to the National forces all over the South-west without much resistance. . . Rapid movements and the acquisition of rebellious territory would have promoted volunteering, so that reinforcements could have been had as fast as transportation could have been obtained to carry them to their destination. On the other hand there were tens of thousands of strong able-bodied young men still at their homes in the south-western States, who had not gone into the Confederate army in February 1862, and who had no particular desire to go to it (Grant 215).

Grant’s recollections concerning this battle are important in understanding his development as a military thinker during the war. It is possible that he embellished the facts, given that he was writing two decades later, but what cannot be disputed is that he viewed the event as formative in his own training as a military leader. He also took singular pride in the victory. This suggests that its importance was not recognized sufficiently enough to be acted on. Donelson forced Grant to take stock of fighting tactics in geographical conditions very new to him. Less importantly, Grant did not view Donelson as his own achievement alone: In his memoirs, he noted that his staff had also been promoted. Thus, in Grant’s account, we can see an acknowledgment that the early campaigns contributed to an esprit de corps and professionalization that would prove pivotal in z  the grueling final two years of the Civil War.

            Grant, who would go on to great victories determining the course of the war, benefited from his victories and miscalculations on the Western front. However, by looking at lesser-known figures, one can also see the same pattern at work: The Union generals who acquired the reputation for the greatest competence generally had cut their teeth in the rugged terrain of the West. On the Union side, George Henry Thomas was one such figure who is not much remembered today but commanded colossal respect by the end of the war. Although he was credited with a “transcendent” role in shaping the war by William Sherman, his reputation has suffered in posterity due partly to the fact that he destroyed his personal papers and was very zealous of his privacy (American Battlefield Trust).

            Like Grant, Thomas made his career in the West and ended up in the East. In 1865, he participated in Sherman’s March. Unlike Grant or Sherman, he spent most of his Civil War career in the West. He was also a West Point graduate and served in the Mexican War. Despite his obscurity today, the Union general credited with winning the first major Northern victory of the Civil War is none other than Thomas. The Battle of Mill Springs, which took place on January 19, 1862 in central Kentucky, displayed the general’s sang-froid for which he would later become so famous. The battle, which took place “in the midst of a heavy downpour and illuminated by lightning,” involved heavy engagement with Confederate forces that “included bayonet charges and artillery exchanges.” The Southerners put up stiff resistance, even burning their steamboat, the Noble Ellis, to prevent it from falling into the enemy’s hands. The battle offered Thomas early exposure to unpredictable Southern tactics in the rugged Kentucky terrain. Thomas’s victory spoils included “twelve pieces of Confederate artillery and their complement of limbers and caissons, 150 wagons, and over 1,000 horses and mules now property of the United States government.” Yet perhaps more important than the victory were the lessons he learned from the conduct of the battle. The Union troops allowed a large number of Confederate soldiers to escape. As one historian noted, “Thomas would always remember the campaign with a smoldering rage” (Wills 131-141). Nevertheless, the lessons derived from Mill Springs gave the Union troops valuable insight into the enemy's conduct. As a biographer of Thomas noted, the general’s “Mill Springs victory was but the first in a series of Union successes in the West that staggered the Confederacy along a more than 700-mile front” (Palumbo 103). Thomas thus offers an example of a figure with relatively little military experience who put the lessons of the Western theater to good use after initial experience early in the war with Southern tactics.

            Historians generally disparage the Confederacy’s performance on the Western front. After all, most of the Confederacy’s major victories were in the East. This is surprising. One would have expected the Confederacy to perform more successfully in the West, given that guerrilla warfare was one of their strengths. This would have been a predictable response to the Confederate Army’s generally poor state regarding resources and equipment. The West offered much better terrain for that kind of warfare. Moreover, hundreds of thousands of troops from Western states fought on the Confederate side. It is therefore surprising that the South folded so quickly in the West. Yet despite this uninspiring record, it is possible to identify a similar pattern in terms of officer training on the Confederate side. The terrain offered a proving ground for even inexperienced officers to turn themselves into respected and effective military leaders, even if their contributions in the West were not as spectacular as those of their federal counterparts.

            One example is provided by a little-known general named Edward Walthall. Unlike many other officers, he did not attend West Point, but he received his military education at an academy in Mississippi, eventually becoming an aide to the governor. Walthall appears to have been a self-starter with little formal military experience. When the war broke out, he organized a volunteer rifle company and proposed the establishment of his own regiment to Confederate President Davis, the 29th Mississippi Infantry (Bohannon 218). Despite his relative lack of formal training, he proved adept at commanding Confederate forces in Tennessee. For example, at the Battle of Lookout Mountain on November 24, 1863, his Mississippians were outnumbered by Union forces. They “retired slowly across the rugged, boulder-strewn ground and around the northern end of the mountain, sustaining heavy casualties. Eventually, the Mississippians formed part of a defensive line a few hundred years south,” which they held until nightfall. Walthall was criticized at the time for his performance in the battle but in fact, had only been following orders. Two decades later, in 1882, the pages of the Philadelphia Weekly Times would feature an acrimonious debate between Walthall and a certain Colonel Daniel R. Hundley, who accused Walthall of being caught by surprise. The debate only ended when a certain Brigadier General Edmund Pettus, who had also fought at Lookout Mountain, confirmed Walthall’s account. Walthall, one of few Confederate generals in the West to go on to command troops in the East, would continue leading troops until the very end of the conflict, fighting at the last major battle of the war, Bentonville (Walthall 223).

            Walthall may not have gone on to notable victories, nor did he ever lead an army. However, his record was consistently of keeping his ground and protecting his troops in the face of inadequate support from his superiors. His doggedness endured even as he began to see that the South could not win the war. As he reportedly said to a fellow officer on February 26, 1865, “I am afraid that the Lord is a Union man” (Walthall 239). Nevertheless, Walthall and his 241 exhausted men veered from orders to join Johnston’s army, which fought with the Union at Bentonville, NC, in the war's last major battle, where the Confederates surrendered. One historian's assessment confirms the Western Front's pivotal role in allowing men such as Walthall to make the contributions they made toward the end of the war. “Edward C. Walthall’s military career provides an outstanding example of the professionalization of the citizen soldier in the mist of war.” As this scholar notes, it was the Western theater that provided the training ground for his important, if unsung, contributions to the Confederate war effort; his troops were responsible for thousands of Union casualties. “Walthall had proven himself as a capable brigade commander by the summer of 1864, when a shortage of experienced upper echelon generals in the Army of Tennessee thrust him into command of a division” (Walthall 241).

            The examples of Grant, Thomas, and Walthall are only three of many others that could be provided, especially on the Confederate side, where beginning officers were given important commands despite their junior rank and went on to inflict significant casualties on the Union in the east. Their contributions are not remembered today because the Confederacy had so few victories to its credit later in the war. Yet, these generals were responsible for making the war last as long as it did, and this was due in no small part to the experience they gained when thrust into the foothills of Tennessee, Mississippi, and other Western states.

The Effect on Morale

            Jefferson Davis presciently said that “Vicksburg was the nailhead that holds the South’s two halves together” (American Battlefield Trust). The Confederate loss on July 4, 1863, combined with the loss at Gettysburg on the same day, was a devastating blow to the morale of the South and, in many ways, set the tone for the rest of the war. Brigadier General E. P. Alexander, chief artillery officer in Longstreet’s corps, put it mildly when he said that “the prospects of the Confederacy had been sadly altered by our failures at Vicksburg and Gettysburg” (Alexander 357). Moreover, the Union could now focus on eliminating the Confederate forces in the East, where the bulk of the South’s military potential still rested (Gabel 61).

            This was true above all in military affairs. The Union capture of the Mississippi made a wide military strategy impossible. From then on, military operations in the West and East could no longer be coordinated. There was no longer a unified army, and the loss at Vicksburg put as many as 30,000 men out of service. The Confederacy also lost 60,000 weapons and 260 cannons, an enormous financial blow (Gabel 60). It also deprived the South’s military planners access to the resources and massive manpower available in the states of Arkansas, Louisiana, and Texas, “an appalling loss of manpower that the South could not recover from” (Dossman 145).

            The impact on Southern morale was not confined to military matters. The Confederacy was no longer a geographically contiguous state. Richmond, the capital on the far end of the Southern Nation, had less and less control, not just of the states west of the Mississippi but over the western states to the east of it. However, Vicksburg’s political significance could be expressed in point. With Grant in control of the main waterway of the Confederacy, the South could no longer negotiate with the North to recognize its existing borders. After Vicksburg, negotiation was no longer an option. The Confederacy had to militarily dominate the Union to weaken the internal maritime blockade it imposed on the Mississippi (Dossman 2).

            That internal blockade also dealt a crippling economic blow to the South. In the words of one historian, “as the railroads deteriorated and money lost value, the Confederacy ceased to have any national or even regional economy at all. By the end of the war, commerce and trade had reverted to subsistence farming and local barter through much of the Confederacy, thanks in large part to Union control of the western rivers” (Ball 121). The Vicksburg catastrophe had the effect of dividing the Confederacy not only politically but also economically. As Christopher Memminger (1803-1888), Secretary of the Treasury of the southern states, noted, the $200 million in new Confederate dollars issued were only circulating in the states east of the Mississippi, with the western states reliant on old federal dollars (Ball 121). According to Douglas Ball, “from July 1863 to April 1864 only $27 million in notes and $18 million in bonds reached the Trans-Mississippi area”, while “unpaid debts and requisitions” from those western states “totaled a disproportionately high $82 million out of $313 million owed in early 1865.” His conclusion about the impact of Vicksburg on the economy is that “thus on July 6, 1863 the Confederacy was cut in half” (Ball 121).

Lessons Learned

While it is true that the South generally underperformed throughout the war, both sides nevertheless learned lessons from the Western Front. In the first half of the war, both armies engaged in dramatic and often disastrous tactical offensives. As two military historians have noted, “few commanders demonstrated during the war that they understood that the right had made the tactical defensive dominant over the offensive” (McWhiney and Jamieson 106). While it is often assumed that the Confederacy was more reckless in its offensives, the North paid a high price for looking down on defensive actions. Thus, “William T. Sherman seems to have learned the high cost of taking the tactical offensive against entrenched positions, although it was probably late in the war before he did so,” while “Ulysses S. Grant did not learn to respect the entrenched defensive until very late in the war.” After the Battle of Kennesaw Mountain on June 27, 1864, Sherman explained his growing preference for defensive tactics by noting that “at this distance from home, we cannot afford the losses of such terrible assaults as Grant has made” (McWhiney and Jamieson 108). Even Gettysburg, the Union’s most famous victory, indicates this shift in thinking, as the North sat in a trench on a hill repelling disastrous rebel attacks.

The Confederates also made significant charges early in the war. They were much slower in learning how self-destructive attacks could be. General Daniel H. Hill commented, "We were very lavish of blood in those days.” Despite their many defeats, generals such as Lee and Braxton Bragg were consistently admired among their southern peers for taking on the tactical offensive, however dismal the results (McWhiney and Jamieson 108). There was general agreement that entrenchment in fieldwork sapped soldiers' morale; whether this was due to the more martial quality of southern culture, as has long been supposed, is unclear. Southern troops engaged in an artillery offensive at the Western Battle of Shiloh, where the difficulty of bringing up guns in the hilly terrain contributed to their strategic loss to the North. As the war progressed, though, Lee, in particular, entrenched his forces significantly. As he found himself forced to defend Richmond, he dug in as Grant put him on the defensive. He was left with no choice. In part, the more defensive posture adopted by the South was a response to the grim direction of the war. Yet, it also reflected an awareness of the inappropriateness of offensive tactics in numerous Western battles.

Another important practice imported to the East from the West was a practice known as living off the land, often encountered in scholarly literature in the guise of the euphemism of “foraging.” At the beginning of the war, Union armies adopted a conciliatory attitude toward the civilian population, prohibiting troops from seizing food and other property. This changed in November 1862, when Don Carlos Buell took command of the Department of the Cumberland in middle Tennessee (Grimsley 101). Militias known as foraging parties were dispatched by both the North and the South to seize food supplies for the army. While foraging was supposed to be carried out on the basis of (eventual) reimbursement, these regulations were enforced less and less over the following year. “By the Spring of 1863, western generals had initiated a routine foraging system” and “even begun to accept, although not to condone, the fact their troops were chronically committing acts of pillage and vandalism.” In the east, by contrast, the behavior of the Army of the Potomac during the same period furnished a notable contrast. Its actions “remained far short of the destructive standard then common among western troops” (Grimsley 105). As historian Mark Grimsley argues, it was the “guerrilla menace” of irregular Confederate troops that led the eastern armies to adopt the strategy of living off the land, culminating in all-out looting during Sherman’s march on Atlanta. Union generals “might have preferred at the outset to win the war with a minimum of damage to civilian property, but when military necessity prodded them to seize goods from Southern farmers and destroy Southern railroads and factories, they scarcely had to create a new paradigm of war” (Grimsley 215). The methods of the Western theater were simply applied to the East as the conflict became more savage.

Conclusion

            The West has not gotten the attention it deserves because of its remoteness from the two capitals. This was one reason newspapers discussed more at the time, a bias that has continued to influence how it is represented and remembered. However, it is impossible to understand the war accurately without looking at its first and, in some respects, most consequential front. Although regretfully underrepresented and overshadowed by the Eastern Front, the campaigns of Tennessee, Kentucky, and Mississippi, in particular, played an arguably more important role in the Civil War, supplying a stream of constant Union victories and undermining the Confederate war effort, holding up many Confederate troops, boosting morale, and acting in accordance with the Anaconda plan, helping immensely in bringing a favorable conclusion to the Union. The Western Front proved a vital staging ground as a “West Point Field Training Camp” hands-on experience in properly conducting warfare and creating veteran commanders who otherwise were greenbacks in the art of modern military war. While the war dragged on in the East, dynamic efforts in the West truly decided the outcome of the Civil War. 

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