January 2011

Naturally, Mr. Dowdey addresses himself to the question of how it all happened. Here, although he is working ground familiar to most Civil War students, he brings to an encyclopaedic knowledge of the facts a freshness of insight that makes the story seem new. If the tale has been told before it easily bears retelling, and although he does not labor his point unduly Mr. Dowdey never loses sight of the fact that behind his account of troop movements, bloody combats, and the errors of commanding generals there lies a picture of the nation’s greatest war reaching and passing its high moment of change. Here, not quite recognized at the time, was the moment of crisis. After McClellan’s beaten army retired to Harrison’s Landing, there was a different kind of war.

Lee had the game in his hand. McClellan’s army was penned in between the James and the Chickahominy, and on the map—and if Lee’s army had been what it was a year later—Lee had it in his power to destroy him. He could hang on McClellan’s rear, send his advance around to block his retreat, hit him in the flank as he moved, and win a shattering, conclusive victory. He saw it, planned it, ordered it—and learned that as things then stood he could not quite do it.

Part of the fault, as Mr. Dowdey points out, was Lee’s. He had commanded this army for less than a month and maneuvering a large army deftly was a skill he simply had not acquired. He had a staff that was almost wholly incompetent for this kind of operation, and he had not yet learned how to make certain that his principal lieutenants actually did the things they were ordered to do. Between army headquarters and the separate divisional commands there was a great deal of slippage; the Lee of the Seven Days had not become the Lee of Chancellorsville.

Unlike the ladies of the abundant Pennsylvania Dutch country (see “Fill Yourself Up, Clean Your Plate,” beginning on page 56), the army wives who followed their officer husbands to the American frontier in the nineteenth century faced difficult problems of supply with respect to niceties of the culinary art. There was always plenty of beef—beef, beef, and more beef. But many vegetables as well as dairy and poultry products were persistently hard to get, and when it came to desserts, the logistics of the situation were sometimes just short of disastrous.

Yet mere circumstances offered no exemption from the demands of military social life. The adobe quarters of Indian-fighting garrisons, furnished with rough, soldier-made tables and chairs, often saw banquets where brassbutton protocol was observed as punctiliously as it was back in Washington, D.C.

CUSTARD WITHOUT EGGS OR MILK

6 tablespoons of cornstarch
Essence of lemon
Sugar
Water

Few recall now those Plattsburg training camps of 1915 and 1916 where, during the dog days of late summer, several thousand sweaty, earnest businessmen-volunteers in unaccustomed khaki learned the manual of arms and how to form fours at a sleepy army post on the shores of Lake Champlain. The memory of their amateur soldiering—existing still in the minds of a few elderly men—has been obscured and overlaid by the mass levies of three intervening wars. Yet the Plattsburg idea was, for all its naïveté, the beginning in the United States of the twentieth-century conception of the citizen-soldier, the genesis of the officers’ training camps of the two World Wars, a psychological preparation for the drafts that were to follow.

The Turning Point Background for Crisis The Lost Opportunity

One of the haunting riddles of the American Civil War is the question of identifying its real turning point. It began as a simple struggle between two sections, and it became enormously complex, involving a lasting change in American society; as it changed, it ceased to be a war in which the Southern Confederacy could win its independence by one decisive stroke of arms and became one in which Confederate success depended on a dogged tenacity that would finally induce a war-weary North to give up the contest. To the end, the war remained one which the North could always lose, but somewhere along the line it became one which the South of its own efforts could no longer win. When and where did this change occur?

The natural place to seek an answer, of course, is in the mind of the soldier who knew most about it, General Robert E. Lee. This man of keen military intelligence never deceived himself in the least degree, and he obviously knew, long before the end, that the power to force a decision had passed out of his hands. But he kept his own counsel, then and thereafter.

Other colonial surveys besides that of Mason and Dixon were fraught with political overtones, both foreign and domestic. In 1726, for example, when North Carolina became a royal colony, the Crown directed its governor and that of Virginia to undertake a joint survey of the “dividing line.” The colorful William Byrd II, Virginia’s commissioner, tried to put the North Carolinians in a duly cooperative mood with his letter advising them of the plan the Virginians proposed to follow: