Whether the refusal to allow the Confederate states the right to self-determination, flying as it did in the face of the Declaration of Independence, was the first overt act of American imperialism is a question that goes largely undiscussed. John Keegan does not raise it. For him, unlike World War I, which was ‘cruel and unnecessary’, the American Civil War was cruel and necessary. (What constitutes an uncruel war is not explained.) Necessary both sides deemed it. At the outset volunteers came forward in such numbers that equipping them and finding capable officers to lead them proved nearly beyond both the Union and the Confederacy. Cruel it certainly was, one of the bloodiest wars in modern history, though two-thirds of its casualties succumbed, not to gunfire, but to disease (much of it caused by bad cooking).
That ratio, Keegan informs us, contemporaries would have accepted as ‘perfectly normal’: it was higher in the Crimea and much higher in Napoleon’s wars. Had the first major battle, the stalemate at First Bull Run, not been greeted by southerners as a victory, encouraging them to believe in ultimate triumph, the war might have ended quickly. Instead, it lasted for four years, and one of its most striking aspects was ‘the remarkable ability of infantry on both sides to accept casualties’. It became, like the Vietnam War, a ‘body-count’ war, but whereas the Vietcong could sustain heavy losses, the Confederacy, much less populous than the North, was eventually bled to death.
Geography was fundamental in contributing to the war’s attritional nature. The theatre of the war, fought almost entirely on southern soil, was vast, yet the South had no strategic centres of population, offering the North the possibility of a knockout blow. The result was an extra-odinarily high number of battles, 257 of them named, fought at close man-to-man combat. The South had only one available strategy, to repel the invader wherever he was encountered. The North struggled to find a winning one. The Anaconda Plan, framed by General Winfield Scott at the beginning of hostilities, looked to the asphyxiation of the South by blockading its Atlantic seaports and taking control of the Mississippi valley, thus depriving the south of foreign trade, especially the import of arms, and grinding it into submission. Though well-conceived, the plan had a defect. ‘Notable,’ writes Keegan, gently droll, ‘was the omission of any mention of battle.’ The South was to capitulate without protest.
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