On the allure, importance, and limitations of military history.
As a young AmericanStudier, I was obsessed with the Civil War for a variety
of reasons; but if I had to boil it down to one central obsession, it would
have to be the maps of battles and campaigns. I flipped again and again to the
lavish battle illustrations in Bruce
Catton’s American Heritage Picture History
of the Civil War; I laid out the forces in my favorite complicated
board game, Avalon
Hill’s Gettysburg; I even created
my own maps for a futuristic “Second Civil War” (minus the whole slavery thing;
what can I say, I was a younger AmericanStudier then). And when it came to
perfectly mapped and charted strategies, I don’t know that any Civil War battle
or campaign came close, in my young mind, to Stonewall Jackson’s Valley
Campaign of 1862.
I was ignorant of a lot in those days (see: that whole slavery thing), but
from what I can tell most Civil War and military historians agree with my
youthful assessment, defining
the Valley Campaign as one of the most impressive strategic efforts of the war.
By successfully occupying and befuddling more than 50,000 Union troops who were
otherwise headed for an assault on the Confederate capital of Richmond, Jackson
won at least as decisive a victory as far more overt ones such as First Manassas
or Fredericksburg. Even for
those Americans not at all interested in military strategy or history, the Valley
Campaign offers many valuable lessons: about how intelligence and subterfuge
can outweigh might and raw numbers; about the importance of knowing and
responding to the geography and environment around us; about charismatic and
effective leadership, even when said leader is also widely
thought to be crazy as can be.
On the other hand, I’m no longer able to assess or analyze military history
in a vacuum, and in context Jackson’s Valley Campaign is, at least from certain
angles, a tragedy. Had those Union troops reached Richmond, the war might have
ended three years earlier, hundreds of thousands of American lives (on both
sides) might have been spared, slavery might have likewise ended far earlier (or
perhaps not—history is never simple, and alternative history doubly so).
Those historical contexts don’t make Jackson’s strategies any less impressive—and
in pursuing them he was simply doing his job, and I don’t mean to argue
otherwise—but, if this makes sense, they make me less impressed and more
frustrated when I read about the campaign. To put it another way: there’s no
doubt that the Union’s generals were for the first few years of the war
consistently outmatched by the Confederacy’s; but while the youthful me
responded to that fact with interest, as a student of military history, to the
grown-up AmericanStudier it represents one of the great national horrors.
Next Virginia post tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you think? Other Virginia connections you’d share for the
weekend post?
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