The Search for Napoleon in the American Civil War

“I never had a plan of operations,” Napoleon is reported to have said in exile on St. Helena. The remark is quoted by David Chandler, the twentieth-century military historian whose The Campaigns of Napoleon (1966) is still regarded as a classic of Napoleonic studies. Chandler’s argument is that the emperor’s genius lay less in a system than in a set of principles he could freely depart from, and improvise upon, as circumstances required. “Napoleon never held to a rigid set of principles,” he writes, adding later: “actions are far more revealing than words, and it follows that any analysis of Napoleon’s mode of waging warfare should take as its starting place a study of the actual events.” Napoleon, in other words, is to be understood from what he did, not from what he or his admirers said he did.

It is a view Timothy B. Smith would endorse, and one that, he argues, the generals of the American Civil War never grasped. His Napoleon’s Long Shadow: How French Military Genius Shaped the American Civil War opens with a run of quotations from American generals and common soldiers alike, each invoking the late French emperor in the course of Civil War operations. Napoleon was in fact within the living memory of older Americans: the last veterans of his wars died around the turn of the century. In their pursuit of glory and victory, the participants in the war turned to Napoleon as a model. Their letters, orders, and reports, Union and Confederate alike, are full of references to his battles and campaigns, to his much-quoted Military Maxims, and to the principles of war he made famous: the maneuver on the rear (manœuvre sur les derrières), the central position, interior lines, the battle of annihilation.

Stephen Kotkin has called Joseph Stalin “the gold standard of power.” Napoleon holds the same place in war. He remains the standard of martial excellence against which later commanders measure themselves and which they seek to emulate, notwithstanding, as Smith points out, his parallel reputation for personal vanity and tyrannical government. Smith describes his book as “an examination of how Civil War commanders did what they did,” set within the commanders’ own understanding of how modern war ought to be fought. For many generals in the war, Napoleon was the lodestar, whether or not they said so. The volunteer officers, many of whom rose to the rank of general, also knew of Napoleon’s great victories. Even the literate private soldier, Smith points out, could make references to the emperor and his battles that were crude but broadly accurate.

Napoleon’s Long Shadow proceeds chronologically through nine of Napoleon’s battles and campaigns, pairing each with a Civil War episode of comparable character. Smith writes chiefly for American readers who know the Civil War but not Napoleon’s campaigns. He summarizes both episodes in each pair, then closes with remarks on their differences and similarities and, where the evidence allows, on the ways in which Napoleon’s example directly shaped his American students. The result is a lucid, well-organized book, and on its central claims a persuasive one. The first part of Smith’s thesis is that Americans’ repeated attempts to emulate Napoleon failed, and for two reasons.

The first is that the Civil War, in its strategy and its politics, was unlike Napoleon’s wars against the coalitions of Europe. The South fought for independence; the North, at least at the outset, sought to crush the rebellion and preserve the Union. Either one side would cease to exist as an independent entity de facto, or the other would undergo drastic political, social, and economic change. The Napoleonic Wars, until their final years, were neither wars of annihilation nor struggles for national existence. They were wars—the plural matters—between separate states, which ended when military pressure became acute and resumed when diplomatic opportunity arose. Years often separated one conflict from the next, and the belligerents used them to study the last campaign, reform their armies, and prepare for the next war. Austria is the clearest example: defeated in 1805 and again in 1809, it recovered, intervened decisively in 1813, and contributed substantially to Napoleon’s final defeat.

The second reason is that the American generals, for all their admiration of Napoleon, largely misunderstood both his art of war and the causes of his success. The career officers of the antebellum army, who later formed the core of both the Union and Confederate armies, had received some instruction in the history of his wars. At West Point, in the academy Sylvanus Thayer had reformed—Thayer, himself an admirer of Napoleon, had traveled to France and brought back French military texts and maps to remake its curriculum—Dennis Hart Mahan taught the cadets of the 1830s and 1840s from the writings of Antoine-Henri Jomini, a staff officer who had served in Napoleon’s army. Jomini, who wrote on the art and science of war before Carl von Clausewitz, gave Napoleon’s military vocabulary its wide currency, and he was the first to attempt, from his own experience, a systematic account of Napoleon’s method. Clausewitz was not translated into English until the latter half of the century, so Jomini’s works, capped by his Summary of the Art of War (1838), were the best account of Napoleonic warfare available. Grant admitted that he “never read it carefully,” though his Memoirs do discuss Jomini’s Napoleonic principles. Still, the instruction was not equal to what that generation of officers would soon face on the battlefield. West Point trained its cadets in the duties of the junior officer more than in strategy and operations, and for a reason: on the eve of the war the United States Army was barely 16,000 men strong.

Here the problem Smith identifies appears in full. Even a cursory overview of the war’s battles shows none of the crushing victories won by Napoleon and other commanders of his era, in which an army was beaten in the field and then dissolved in disorderly retreat. A superficial reading might conclude that something was wrong with how the war was fought and how its generals conducted themselves. In one sense that conclusion is correct. But to compare the average with the best is bound to be unflattering to the former.

There were many capable generals in the Civil War, some with flashes of brilliance, others merely dependable. It follows almost by arithmetic that there would be few, if any, who could rightly be called “the Napoleon of the Civil War.” Even much-criticized figures such as Braxton Bragg, George McClellan, John Bell Hood, and John Pope had sound insights into strategy and tactics, showed real organizational ability, or planned and executed creditable maneuvers and won notable successes. A significant reason why none of them reached the Napoleonic standard was the failure, already noted, to understand Napoleonic warfare above the tactical level.

In making this argument, Smith takes on four received ideas of Napoleonic and Civil War historiography, and shows how they, or more precisely the generals’ understanding of them, shaped the perceptions and decisions of Civil War commanders. These are the myths of the turning movement, the annihilating victory, the dead cavalryman, and the first modern war.

The turning movement was, in theory, one of the easier maneuvers in war. It was achieved many times in the Civil War: at Forts Henry and Donelson and at Pea Ridge, at Tullahoma and Vicksburg, and in the opening days of the Overland Campaign. By placing part or all of his army on the enemy’s flank, a commander threatens that army with destruction or with the loss of its line of retreat. In the language of Napoleon’s day and of the Victorian period, this meant placing one’s army astride the enemy’s “lines of communication,” above all those running back to his nearest base of supply or to the capital and its political authority. Napoleon constantly sought to “turn the enemy flank” and put his forces on those lines. The enemy then had two choices: to await destruction or capture, or to attempt a breakout and restore his supply lines. By seizing the initiative in this way, Napoleon could bring the enemy to battle on his own terms, even when outnumbered, as he often was in his first and last campaigns. The turning movement was easy enough to achieve; to capitalize on it was another matter.

The annihilating victory followed from the turning movement. “It is abundantly clear,” Smith writes, “that Civil War commanders continually thought in terms of the annihilating victory on the battlefield.” They were right to do so. The destruction of an enemy army in the field brought the greatest glory, and, done properly and in the right circumstances, it could end a war at a stroke.

Napoleon won such victories several times, in varying degrees, at Marengo, Ulm, Austerlitz, Jena–Auerstedt, and Friedland; in the Civil War they were exceedingly rare. Smith quotes another historian’s remark that Civil War generals “chased the ghost of the Napoleonic decisive battle,” and adds that “few actually ever produced Napoleon-style results.” The description is apt: the generals pursued a form of victory that belonged to another war. Indeed, even Napoleon struggled with the concept, particularly later in his career as the determination of his enemies mounted and they learned ways to counter his methods. For one reason or another, some of his greater victories in his final years, like those at Bautzen, Dresden, and Ligny, and several in the desperate 1814 campaign outside Paris, failed to produce spectacular war-altering results. The perfect constellation of circumstances had to align for even a great general like Napoleon to capitalize upon them.

One well-known cause of Napoleon’s later failure to win annihilating victories, and probably the principal cause in the battles just named, was the weakness of his cavalry. His losses in mounted troops in Russia in 1812 were catastrophic. Despite many brilliant maneuvers in the German campaign of 1813, he could not destroy the Coalition armies, even in victory, as he had in earlier wars. Without cavalry he could not follow up his successes, run down his beaten enemy, take prisoners by the thousand, and scatter the rest.

Civil War generals were plagued by similar problems, though the want of decisive pursuits owed as much to poor judgment as to any real shortage of cavalry in a given instance. “The lack of a Confederate pursuit after Chickamauga made it a ‘barren victory,’” Smith notes. Of Lee’s great victory at Second Bull Run in 1862, he observes that Jeb Stuart’s cavalry, compared with the hard-charging troopers of Marshal Murat, “was simply no such force.” Even that shocking Union defeat, nearly on the doorstep of Washington, could not be turned into a war-altering result.

Smith concedes that terrain accounts for part of the difference. Most Napoleonic battlefields were open and fairly flat, with few woods, while most Civil War battlefields were densely wooded. But mindset and objectives differed as well. Civil War cavalry was employed in ways quite different from its Napoleonic predecessors. It screened the army and gathered intelligence, as cavalry always had, but it also served very often as a raiding force, striking supply lines, burning bridges, and seizing stores of food and ammunition. European armies in Napoleon’s day had centuries of experience in handling large bodies of cavalry. No such experience existed in the American military tradition.

In battle, in any case, Civil War cavalry fought more like mounted infantry than like cavalry. More often than not the troopers rode to the field, dismounted, and fought with their carbines. Many a Civil War cavalryman never drew his saber in anger, let alone used it. Soldiers joked, “Did you ever see a dead cavalryman?” A Napoleonic soldier could have answered without hesitation that he had. Because of the way they were used, Civil War cavalrymen did not suffer the casualty rates of the infantry or the artillery.

Yet another part of the conundrum faced by Civil War generals was that the old manner of war, in which armies marched back and forth across the map and met in pitched battles in open fields, was drawing to a close. Popular histories have made much of “Napoleonic tactics being employed with modern weaponry,” and historians have debated the point for more than a century; it can be argued either way. Related to that line of argument is the oft-repeated claim that the Civil War was “the first modern war” generally, with the widespread use of railroads, telegraphs, rifled muskets and artillery, and ironclads.

The stronger version of that claim applies at the operational and strategic levels rather than the merely tactical or technological. “The Civil War,” Smith writes, “was not the first modern war but rather the most modern to that time, a title that could be given to each succeeding war to come.” Modernity, for Smith, is a matter of degree, and each war holds the title only until the next. The railroad shows why. The Crimean War of the 1850s saw the first railway built to supply an army in the field. The Civil War saw railways used tactically for the first time, though such instances were rare.

The North’s dominant industrial capacity and its extensive rail network were key factors in its victory. Railroads played a still larger part in the wars of German unification, whose decisive phase began in 1866, a year after the Civil War ended. In those rapid but violent wars, the Prussian army mobilized quickly and moved to the frontier, where it inflicted heavy defeats on its Austrian and French opponents. Rifled weapons, moreover, had already seen use in the Crimean War, particularly by the British and to a lesser degree by the French; and the British, French, and Sardinian forces besieging Sevastopol made use of the telegraph.

The faster operational and tactical movement of the early and middle years of the war eventually gave way to a different kind of war. The campaigns of 1864 show the change. In place of the sweeping movements and rapid strikes of 1862, and to a lesser extent of 1863, commanders came to rely on long defensive lines at key points, daring the enemy to attack them directly. Robert E. Lee and Joseph E. Johnston used this method repeatedly in 1864, in the defense of Richmond and of Atlanta respectively. Each time, their opponents, Grant and Sherman, chose instead to turn the flank: Grant moved around Lee’s right, Sherman around Johnston’s left. The threat to Confederate lines of communication could be fatal, and it left the defenders two options, to attack or to retreat. Lee chose the first, especially at the start of the campaign; Johnston chose the second. The two times the Union commanders chose to attack rather than flank were at Cold Harbor, just a few miles from the gates of Richmond, and at Kennesaw Mountain, just a few miles from Atlanta. At Cold Harbor Grant suffered his worst defeat of the war; at Kennesaw Mountain Sherman was needlessly bloodied, handing the Confederates a badly needed boost to morale.

To drive home his argument that the two wars were joined only by a tenuous bridge, Smith works through his comparisons between Napoleon and his American successors movement by movement. The first chapter sets side by side two of the most famous campaigns of Napoleon’s career and of the Civil War. Napoleon’s Italian campaign of 1796–97 is generally held to be his greatest. Here a twenty-six-year-old general with nothing to lose set out in his first effort in senior command with an extremely bold and aggressive plan of operations. Over the next twelve months he won nearly twenty battles, destroyed three enemy armies, and dictated peace to the plenipotentiaries of the Holy Roman Emperor—ending the War of the First Coalition essentially single-handedly. Sometimes assailed by two armies at once and woefully outnumbered, Napoleon conjured numerous offensive movements, taking the enemy by surprise and, with few exceptions, winning. Smith notes that Clausewitz called Napoleon’s effort the “brilliant campaign of 1796,” adding, “had he [Clausewitz] observed Jackson’s operations [in the Shenandoah Valley], he no doubt would have said the same thing about them.”

Before Robert E. Lee was appointed to command the Army of Northern Virginia—before anyone but political or military figures knew who he was—the hero of the Confederacy was Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson. His part in the war’s first major battle, the Confederate victory at Bull Run, had already made him a household name. But his effort to save the economically vital Shenandoah Valley from Union occupation in the spring of 1862 was one of the defining moments of the entire Civil War. Faced at times with three separate armies that threatened to combine and outnumber him three-to-one, Jackson deftly utilized interior lines and, with hard marches, concentrated his small force against the enemy time and time again, bringing them to battle and defeating them in six of seven engagements. “A defensive campaign,” Jackson later said, “can only be made successful by taking the aggressive at the proper time. Napoleon never waited for his adversary to become fully prepared, but struck him the first blow, by virtue of superior activity.” The sentiment is Napoleonic indeed; but in this instance, unlike so many others, Jackson backed his understanding of Napoleon’s art of war with impressive actions of his own—Chandler’s “actual events.” Jackson’s Valley campaign, as it is known, is rightly celebrated as one of the most dramatic and impressive episodes of the Civil War, and it remains a textbook case of interior lines, concentration of force, and defeat in detail, the foundations of war at the operational level.

As Smith takes the reader through one American campaign after another, it becomes clear that his case is, to a degree, an embarrassment for the Americans. Yet when he compares what are arguably the greatest campaigns on either side, Napoleon’s at Ulm and Grant’s at Vicksburg, each ending in the surrender of an entire enemy army after rapid turning movements had cut its line of retreat, Smith argues that Grant’s was the more impressive:

The argument can be made that Grant’s Vicksburg campaign was actually more difficult and thus more brilliant than even Napoleon’s Ulm effort. There is plenty of praise for Ulm, Napoleon himself writing his wife that “never has there been such a catastrophe in military annals!” Military theorist Jomini similarly declared them to be “brilliant operations.” But in analyzing the commonalities and differences above, there emerge several significant challenges Grant faced at Vicksburg that Napoleon did not endure at Ulm.

It is a bold assertion on its face. Still, he argues it well. Unlike the emperor, Grant had superiors to answer to. He did not have Napoleon’s constellation of talented subordinates, could draw less food and forage from the country, and faced a more competent and aggressive opponent.

The facts ultimately bear out the argument. Smith acknowledges that Ulm was one of the most impressive feats in military history. He further concedes that, while Grant lacked authority over the whole army and the government, and could neither set war policy nor reinforce his own army with badly needed troops, neither was he burdened with directing other armies or with “running an empire.” Napoleon famously did both even on campaign, dictating dozens of letters a day to Paris on state finances, regional governance, and dynastic affairs. Contemporaries also drew the comparison between the two campaigns. Chief among them was Henry Halleck, general-in-chief of the Union armies, who wrote to Grant, in unusually glowing terms, that his triumph would “compare favorably” with Napoleon’s. Those were no small words from America’s leading authority on Napoleon, whatever Halleck’s own limitations as a commander. History has vindicated Halleck’s judgment. Vicksburg is widely considered Grant’s greatest campaign and one of the most spectacular of the war.

Smith makes similar comparisons throughout. His treatment of Vicksburg does not douse the flames of Napoleon’s legend or legacy, however. In fact, the failure of most American generals to hold a candle to Napoleon only enhances the emperor’s reputation. Only Robert E. Lee, “perhaps a distant second,” is presented as another Napoleonic figure, though Smith notes that his record is marred by the defeats at Antietam and Gettysburg. Smith quotes Grant, “perhaps in a backward slap at Halleck,” complaining that the commanders’ obsession with history and with Napoleon’s campaigns restricted their ingenuity and decision-making. “They knew what Frederick did at one place and Napoleon at another,” Grant said; “they were always thinking about what Napoleon would do.” He went further: “Even Napoleon showed that, for my impression is that his first success came because he made war in his own way, and not in imitation of others.”

All this leads to the climactic claim of the book and the final part of Smith’s thesis: that the only Civil War general to truly approach Napoleon’s greatness as a campaigner and tactician, who grasped the fundamentals of warfare at all levels of command, and who produced results close enough to be compared to the French emperor himself, was Ulysses S. Grant. Like Napoleon, he was aggressive; when on the offensive, he moved quickly and with determination; he understood the value of attacking an enemy’s lines of communication and forcing battle on favorable terms.

No other commander produced, again and again, the same startling sequence: turning an enemy, getting on his line of communication, bringing him to battle, and winning that battle—often destroying the enemy army in the process. Not all his efforts succeeded, any more than Napoleon’s did, but Grant’s three great turning movements that ended in the destruction or capture of an entire army—Fort Donelson, Vicksburg, and Appomattox—brook no argument.

For his own part, Grant said he “never admired the character of the first Napoleon; but I recognize his great genius.” Many other generals, both during and after the war, wrote effusively of Napoleon and often framed their own operations in his terms. Grant, who famously did not care to hear “what Lee was going to do,” cared little more for Napoleonic allusions. Perhaps history justifies the sentiment. After all, as Smith succinctly and pointedly remarks, even Napoleon, in the final analysis, lost. Grant did not.