Sherman on Testosterone Poisoning

Tyler Cowen is intrigued by the destabilizing influence of unattached young men in society (link—see Truth # 4). He isn’t the first to notice. An earlier exemplar is General William T. Sherman, reporting from his Army headquarters in Mississippi in 1863:

The young bloods of the South: sons of planters, lawyers about towns, good billiard-players and sportsmen, men who never did work and never will. War suits them, and the rascals are brave, fine riders, bold to rashness, and dangerous subjects in every sense. They care not a sou for niggers, land, or any thing. They hate Yankees per se, and don’t bother their brains about the past, present or future. As long as they have good horses, plenty of forage, and an open country, they are happy. This is a larger class than most men suppose, and they are the most dangerous set of men that this war has turned loose upon the world. They are splendid riders, first-rate shots, and utterly reckless. Stewart, John Morgan, Forrest, and Jackson, are the types and leaders of this class. These men must all be killed or employed by us before we can hope for peace.

William T. Sherman, Memoirs 361 (Library of America 1960)

That would be Jeb Stewart, more or less the model of the dashing cavalryman (link), and Nathan Bedford Forrest, a much nastier piece of business—a sometime slave trader, a ferocious warrior and one who may or may not have participated in the founding of the Ku Klux Klan (link). By Jackson, I assume he means Stonewall Jackson, but this is an odder choice. Jackson was a brilliant commander, but he himself was a model of order and restraint (link).

And yes, Sherman uses the N-word. His attitude towards African-Americans is complicated and controversial but a fascinating study in its own right. Nothing to be gained by polishing him here.

It’s interesting to compare Sherman’s views of the young bloods of the south with his advice to his own army on its being disbanded (link).

Sherman on Insurgency, And the Dispersal of Armies

We insist on talking and thinking about the Iraq insurgency as if it were new or unexpected; yet the most elementary sense of history will throw doubt on this proposition. General Sherman at the end of the Civil War, winding up one of those most sustained and successful campaigns in human history, agonized over the terms of surrender, and made every effort to assure that the Confederate forces dispersed in an orderly manner, lest the “vanquished” disintegrate into a mob. “What we now want,” he said “is the new form of law by which common men may regain the positions of industry, so long disturbed by the war.” Protesting when he was overruled, he said, “I now apprehend that the rebel armies will disperse; and instead of dealing with six or seven States, we will have to deal with numberless bands of desperadoes.

In the end, matters worked out mostly to Sherman’s liking, although the history of Reconstruction, and indeed the long history of the opening of the American West may be regarded as an extended coda to the Union victory.

It’s interesting to note that Sherman’s concern for good civil order extended to his own troops as well as the enemy. Here he is in his farewell letter to the Army that had followed him in the long march across the Confederacy:

To such as remain in the service, your general need only remind you that success in the past was due to hard work and discipline, and that the same work and discipline are equally important in the future. To such as go home, he will only say that our favoured country is so grand, so extensive, so diversified in climate, soil, and production, that every man may find a home and occupation suited to his taste; none should held to the natural impatience sure to result from our past life of excitement and adventure. You will be invited to seek new adventures abroad; do not yield to the temptation, for it will lead only to death and disappointment.

William T. Sherman, Memoirs 870 (Library of America ed. 1990)

Chevauchee

Underbelly's Chief Military Correspondent weighs in on General Sherman:

...Sherman’s ‘March to the Sea’ was a classic chevauchee, a tactic used regularly in the Hundred Years War and related to scorched earth and the Russian defense in depth. A chevauchee was a cross country raid that literally wiped out everything of any value in a broad swath of countryside. According to Barbara Tuchman in A Distant Mirror both sides set out on these rampages killing and burning everything of value that they couldn’t carry off or eat on the spot. The path of destruction could be miles wide and 50 miles long. In the process they not only burned crops in the field or storage but girdled fruit trees, up rooted grape vines and burned everything else. Some of this went on in the 30 Years War – as the tactic was to deny the enemy the support of the local population and of course food. It could be accomplished by a smaller group of men and avoided pitched battle (source: link)

Sherman pretty well sliced the South in half and kept going. They uprooted the train tracks they weren’t using and bent the rails – and since the South didn’t have much industrial capacity, that was the end of the railroad. (Footnote, the South maintained a different rail road gage until the 1880 when a single width rail line was standardized.)

What I find amazing is that the population always came back from hiding and in a few years, had good farms running again. In parts of Germany, the countryside was so depopulated that men were forbidden to enter Holy Orders until age 50 and polygamy enjoyed a brief, sanctioned revival.

The High Tide of Small-r Republicanism

A couple of days ago, I posted an item about the old soldiers at the Delhi Durbar. It put me in mind of another memorable public spectacle—the celebratory parade down Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington at the end of the Civil War, and in particular, the force led by General William Tecumseh Sherman, ending the long march that had taken it across the length and breadth of the Confederacy:

The morning of the 24^th was extremely beautiful and the ground was in splendid order for our review. The streets were filled with people to see the pageant, armed with bouquets of flowers for their favorite regiments or heroes, and every thing was propitious. Punctually at 9 a.m. the signal-gun was fired, when in person, attended by General Howard and all my staff, I rode slowly down Pennsylvania Avenue, the crowds of men, women and children, densely lining the sidewalks and almost obstructing the way. … When I reached the Treasury-building, and looked back, the sight was simply magnificent. The column was compact, and the glittering muskets looked like a solid mass of steel, moving with the regularity of a pendulum. …

[Sherman’s Army] was, in my judgment, the most magnificent army in existence—sixty-five thousand men, in splendid physique, who had just completed a march of nearly two thousand miles in a hostile country, in good drill, and who realized that they were being closely scrutinized by thousands of their fellow-countrymen and foreigners. … The steadiness and firmness of the tread, and the careful dress on the guides, the uniform intervals between the companies, all eyes directly to the front, and the tattered and bullet-riven flags, festooned with floors, all attracted universal notice. Many good people, up to that time, and looked upon our Western army as a sort of a mob; but the world then saw, and recognized the fact, that it was an army in the proper sense, well organized, well commanded and disciplined, and there was no wonder that it had swept through the South like a tornado. … Some of the division commanders had added, by way of variety, goats, milch-cows, and pack-mules, whose loads consisted of game-cocks, poultry, hams, etc., and some of them had the families of freed slaves along, with the women leading their children. M mach division was preceded by its corps of black pioneers, armed with picks and spades. These marched abreast in double ranks, keeping perfect dress and step, and added much to the interest of the occasion. On the whole, the grand review was a splendid success, and was a fitting conclusion to the campaign and the war.

--William T. Sherman, Memoirs of General W.T. Sherman 805-6
(Library of America ed. 1984)

I am aware, of course, that there are places in this country where people still find it possible to contain their admiration for Sherman. Perhaps because I grew up in New Hampshire, I have never been tempted to see things their way. As a warrior, he was a success by any measure. Yet the mark of a successful general is not his kill rate but his capacity to prevail. Sherman’s capacity to prevail is beyond any cavil but his kill rate, measured in context pretty mild. What he produced was not just a famous victory, but one of the most remarkable armies in human history—in many respects, the high tide of small-r republicanism, the very model of a citizenry in arms.

Fn.: April 24th. By my count, that is 142 years ago Tuesday.

War Is About Winning, Not About Killing

Not being a regular reader of the New York Post, I don’t think I had ever heard of Ralph Peters until I stumbled onto this intriguing review by TigerHawk. I’ve now had a chance to explore a bit of Peters’ work with (qualified) pleasure and (qualified) profit. Without pretending to be present a fully developed review of my own, let me see if I can make one basic point.

But first, background. It may help to have earplugs. Peters is a romantic with a gushy, hand-wringing over-the-top style that assures you the world will end on Thursday if you don’t listen to him. His primary theme is something on the order of “the beleaguered virtue of the soldier” versus “the fecklessness and corruption of”—well, of just about everybody else. (quoted words are mine, not his) As a literary trope, this is pretty well worn. Still, as a rule of thumb for life, it probably has more truth than a lot of literary tropes. There’s no escaping the fact that the organized military is a behemoth organization and as such, is vulnerable not just accidentally, but systematically and predictably, to the kinds of ailments that beset behemoths everywhere. As TigerHawk says:

Peters['] sharpest observations turn on the relationship between weapons procurement and America's likely warfighting requirements. In short, he believes that the defense industry, the Pentagon brass, and the Congress have, through a combination of stupidity and self interest, seduced the rest of us into believing that small numbers of extraordinarily expensive and technologically advanced weapons systems can both achieve American military objectives and substitute for quantity.

Myself having almost as little military experience as our President, this kind of stuff gets beyond my pay grade fairly fast, but I’m generally persuaded that there is something to it: the chances are very good to excellent that the structure of the military enterprise will guarantee that it spends tons of money on the wrong things.

Now, take this as context for what seems to me to be Peters’ central error: he seems to believe that war is about killing. He doesn’t say so in so many words—at least not in what I’ve read. But he does seem to say that “war is about winning” and that “winning involves annihilation of the enemy (my quotes again).

If this is, in fact, his point, he is wrong. War is about winning. Sometimes, this involves a lot of killing, and sometimes it does not. There was probably no way for the Russians to beat back the Germans than with wholesale slaughter. But (to take just one example among many possible), consider General Sherman: a great warrior and a great victor—but not a great killer. The South remembers him bitterly for having achieved almost total dominance over them. They forget that he did it with only modest loss of life.

By contrast, consider that most useless of all modern battlefields: the Western Front where two sides hammered away at each other savagely because neither could think of a good reason to stop—the cream of ironies was that they never had a good reason to start in the first place.

That, of course, is the lesson of the modern “people’s wars” that we seem so determined to misunderstand. As may have said, we won it twice and lost it twice. As Ho Chi Minh liked to say, it didn’t matter because we didn’t understand the war we were fighting. So also the Israelis with an even more dramatic record of success on the battlefield and disappointment after the battle is over.

We do a bit better these days. No American seems to have understood the Vietnam War while it was going on. A few seem to understand Iraq today. On issues of operation and management, Peters is probably one of them: he certainly merits attention. On articulating strategic goals, he is not to be trusted.

[Peters’ book is: Never Quit the Fight available here, and do your best to ignore the fact that Amazon offers it as a companion piece to Ann Coulter.]