THE THIRD YEAR BEGINS---April 12, 1863---Attrition

APRIL 12, 1863:         

The third year of the war begins. General “Fighting Joe” Hooker U.S.A. lives down his nickname by giving the government a new plan for the Spring Offensive: In it, Hooker, like Burnside and McClellan before him, would flank Robert E. Lee’s much smaller army and lay siege to Richmond.  

After two years of war, the Union found itself locked in a military stalemate with the South. Having stood at the gates of Richmond, and having controlled most of Tennessee and Kentucky, the Union had lost ground, largely through the timorousness of its field commanders.

Lacking General Officers with the skills, the dash, and the brilliance of Lee, Jackson, Stuart and Longstreet, Abraham Lincoln was forced to rely on a cadre of second-rate Generals whose attitudes toward the war covered a vast personal and political spectrum. Some Generals, like Fremont, were Abolitionists, and disliked what they saw as the President’s slow movement on the subject. They chose to promote their own goals rather than the nation’s. Some were aggressive commanders in small-scale settings but unfit for higher command. Many Generals were War Democrats and Military Engineers. They disavowed the aims of the Administration, and worked to prod the South toward some kind---no one knew what kind---of conciliation with the North. Rather than meet the enemy in open battle, they preferred strategic and tactical maneuvering on the field.

Some, like McClellan, were brilliant organizers. Some, like Halleck, were brilliant administrators. Some, like Pope, had an agenda to humiliate the South into subjection. Some, like Burnside, were merely mule-stubborn. It was not for nothing that Lincoln chided Joseph Hooker for engaging in too much office politics. After all, it was office politics that had had men arrested for “attacking the enemy without orders,” an absurdity which only made sense inside the minds of the Generals themselves. After having had Winfield Scott, Irvin McDowell, McClellan, Halleck, Pope, Burnside, and now Hooker in overall command, Lincoln was still looking for “his General.”

Most the United States’ Generals were products of a system that made personal advancement a more important goal than military effectiveness. Subtle and not-so-subtle infighting among the Generals meant that the Union Army could not capitalize on its great advantages in manpower and materiel. McClellan and Pope’s mutual animus meant that men died at Second Manassas who needed not die. The persistence of “political Generals” and popularly elected regimental Colonels in the ranks made the Union war machine an uncertain thing.

Perhaps the greatest strength of the Union at this point was the weakness of the South. The Confederacy’s civilian population was beginning to starve, and as its war machine consumed more and more of what was becoming less and less, the war fervor of many Confederates began waning. Lee, though a brilliant commander, needed to remain a largely defensive commander for the simple reason that shortages---of feed, of food, of clothing, of ammunition and weapons---plagued his armies virtually from the day Sumter was attacked. The Third Year of the war would confirm that the Civil War was, in all respects, a war of attrition.