Struggle for the Heartland: The Campaigns from Fort Henry to Corinth by Stephen D. Engle

Comments:

NEW 1/15/07

Stephen D. Engle. Struggle for the Heartland: The Campaigns from Fort Henry to Corinth. Lincoln, NE: The University of Nebraska Press (March 2005). 251 pp., 8 maps, notes, index. ISBN: 0-80326-753-3 $16.95 (Paperback).

Stephen D. Engle's Struggle for the Heartland takes the latest scholarship on "the campaigns from Fort Henry to Corinth" and ties the military, political, and social issues faced during the campaign into an efficient and readable discussion of these events. The book is an entry in the University of Nebraska Press' Great Campaigns of the Civil War series of books and covers the time frame of the military campaign from Fort Henry to Corinth, including the Battle of Shiloh. Rather than focusing solely on military events, however, Engle provides a large amount of coverage to social and political considerations as well. The result, then, is a balanced overview of a campaign in which there was a "struggle for the heartland" of the Confederacy.

Northern military planners saw the obvious routes of attack into the Confederate "heartland" region provided by the Tennessee and Cumberland Rivers. It was simply a matter of preparing the armies to move in this direction, at least according to timid, methodical minds such as Henry Halleck and Don Carlos Buell, the two department commanders in the west. Albert Sidney Johnston, the overall Confederate commander in the area, gave wide latitude to his subordinates. One of these, Bishop Polk, had become obsessed with defending Columbus, Kentucky along the Mississippi River and virtually ignored the forts on the Tennessee and Cumberland to the east even though they were in his department. The Union preparation may have taken quite a long time if not for the aggressive nature of Halleck's then unknown subordinate Ulysses S. Grant. Grant was determined to take Forts Henry and Donelson, defenders of the Tennessee and Cumberland Rivers, respectively. His movement south caught both Halleck and Buell somewhat by surprise. The end result was that Grant managed to subdue both forts and capture over 10,000 Southern prisoners while Halleck and Buell haggled over cooperating in the expedition. As Grant's Army of the Tennessee rested and refitted along the Tennessee River south of the now captured forts Buell was to march his army southwest to meet them. Continued arguments between Halleck and Buell coupled with Grant's complacency at his Pittsburg Landing camp almost ended in disaster at the Battle of Shiloh. While Buell slowly marched toward the Tennessee River, Johnston and his subordinates had been busy at Corinth trying to recover the large amount of territory lost to Grant at the forts. The Battle of Shiloh prematurely ended these hopes as Grant's army was able to recover from their shock at being attacked and hold on until Buell's Army of the Ohio reached the field of battle. Johnston was killed and Beauregard, his second in command, was forced to retreat to Corinth. At this point in the campaign, Henry Halleck managed to obtain sole command of the west, and he gathered the armies of Grant, Buell, and Pope (fresh off a victory at Island No. 10 on the Mississippi) for a laborious advance on Corinth, the most vital railroad crossing in the Confederacy. The ending to this large campaign was anticlimactic as Beauregard was forced to retreat due to poor water and increasing sickness in his army. Halleck had taken Corinth and cleared the Confederate Heartland of Southern armies. These military campaigns had seen great change in the way the North would prosecute the war, with important consequences.

Engle focuses quite a lot of time and energy explaining how the large increase in the amount of Confederate territory controlled by the Union led to changes in the initial "soft war" policy espoused by the Lincoln Administration. Before Grant sailed south on the Tennessee to assault Fort Henry, Union armies were typically restrained and respectful when it came to the treatment of Southern civilians. No one better personified this idea than the commanders currently in charge of Union affairs: George B. McClellan as General In Chief with Henry Halleck and Don Carlos Buell as department heads in the west. These men were all democrats, and they believed in a war that would not upset the status quo. In other words, they wanted to leave the slavery issue alone, instead trying to treat Southerners well and return their slaves in the hope that they would come quickly and quietly back into the Union. The campaigns from Fort Henry to Corinth showed that this soft war policy was not practical. Southerners continued to resist even when treated well, and guerrilla forces sprung up where Confederate armies were unable to hold territory in a conventional manner. Soldiers from privates to generals also began to see the difference between poor white subsistence farmers and wealthy slave owners, eventually blaming the institution of slavery as the primary cause of the war. These troops began to resent orders such as Buell's General Orders 13a, which prevented foraging, returned runaway slaves, and otherwise treated Southerners with kid gloves. Men such as division commander Ormsby Mitchel began to take matters into their own hands, and eventually the government agreed with this "hard war" course of action. Ironically, writes Engle, the Union push into Confederate leaning western and central Tennessee only hastened the Union policy change. If Buell had instead invaded Unionist eastern Tennessee, per Lincoln's wishes, this soft war policy may have continued long past June 1862.

The Union war effort in the west was plagued with bickering among its top commanders, writes Engle. Partly to blame was the unwieldy command structure. Don Carlos Buell's Department of the Ohio and Henry Halleck's Department of Missouri joined together at the Tennessee River, precisely where the easiest avenue of attack into the Confederate Heartland was located. This naturally enough caused great friction between the two men, both of whom always proceeded cautiously and believed their own opinions were correct on military matters. McClellan and Lincoln did not help the situation in Washington, instead simply ordering the two men to cooperate. While they bickered over who should move first and along what lines, Grant seized the initiative and moved, catching both generals by surprise. Buell still refused to send much help and almost literally warned Halleck not to fail. Grant's attacks succeeded, and the next logical step was to concentrate on the Tennessee for a move against Corinth. This time Buell did finally advance, but he still managed to take his time. Luckily for Grant, Army of the Ohio division commander "Bull" Nelson marched forward rapidly and was available late on the first day at Shiloh. The command friction between these two men only ended when Halleck managed to persuade Lincoln and Secretary of War Stanton that the West needed one commander.

Halleck also had his problems with Grant. Grant's victories at Fort Henry and Fort Donelson made Halleck jealous, and he childishly reacted by removing Grant from command on trumped up charges of drunkenness and Grant's failure to be present with his army when the Confederates launched an attack at Fort Donelson. Lincoln and Halleck, impressed with the aggressive Grant, and especially when they considered the conservative Halleck and Buell, lost no time in forcing Halleck to reinstate Grant. After Shiloh, Halleck again removed Grant from command of the Army of the Tennessee, bumping him up to the meaningless and superfluous "second in command" position during the advance on Corinth. Despite these and other quarrels, the Northern armies were able to force the Confederates from a large portion of the territory they held at the beginning of 1862.

Much of the Southern failure to hold this territory had to do with Jefferson Davis' utter lack of concern for the West. The roots of this attitude can be traced to the appointment of Albert Sidney Johnston to command in the west. Johnston was Davis' friend, and Davis believed him to be the finest general the Confederacy had. Davis left Johnston with very little men and materiel to work with, and as a result he had far too few men with which to defend a much too long defense line running from the Appalachians to the Indian Territory. To make matters worse, says Engle, Johnston frequently gave his subordinates far too much latitude in defending their various districts. This came back to haunt Johnston when General Polk became obsessed with defending Columbus, Kentucky, spending very little time preparing Fort Henry and Fort Donelson. Grant's quick strike caught the Confederate generals by surprise as well, and Johnston decided not to fight for Fort Donelson, in effect abandoning middle Tennessee and the capital at Nashville. This loss of large amounts of territory shocked and angered many Southerners, and Davis finally consented to send Johnston reinforcements. Johnston and Beauregard attempted to regain the lost territory with a surprise attack at Shiloh and failed, costing Johnston his life in the process. Beauregard was subsequently unable to hold Corinth in the face of a large Union force, poor water, and increasing sickness in his command.

Despite these Union successes, the Northern generals did not typically take the political concerns of the Lincoln Administration into account in their military planning. The main case in point for the time frame of this book, according to Engle, concerns Lincoln's desire to liberate Unionist leaning, mountainous eastern Tennessee from Confederate rule. Lincoln knew that this area centered on Knoxville, Tennessee would more readily come back into the Union than the other flatter, slave holding sections of the state. Buell repeatedly refused to advance in this direction (at the same time refusing to cooperate with Halleck), claiming bad roads and numerous other reasons for delay. Buell also clashed with the Lincoln appointed military governor of Tennessee, Andrew Johnson. Johnson was a Radical Republican, and he wanted Southerners punished for their treason. He and Buell held violently opposite views on the prosecution of the war, and they would clash for as long as Buell held command of the Army of the Ohio.

Struggle for the Heartland is one volume of many in the Great Campaigns of the Civil War Series, published by the University of Nebraska Press. Series editors Anne J. Bailey and Brooks Simpson write that the series "offers readers concise syntheses of the major campaigns of the war, reflecting the findings of recent scholarship. The series points to new ways of viewing military campaigns by looking beyond the battlefield and the headquarters tent to the wider political and social context within which these campaigns unfolded..." In addition to exploring strictly military events from February to June 1862 along the Tennessee, Cumberland, and Mississippi Rivers, Struggle for the Heartland takes a deeper look at the political and social issues as well, weaving all of these together into a cogent whole.

The eight maps are functional, but the battle maps do not add considerably to the discussion. The notes are mostly secondary sources, but in this case it is acceptable since the book's primary purpose is to bring together a syntheses of the latest findings on this subject. I suspect that the other books in this series follow this mold as well. Rather than a bibliography, we instead get a "Bibliographical Essay" of several pages. While I typically favor a standard bibliography, the focus and goals of this series make this essay perfectly acceptable under the circumstances. The index is rather bare bones as well, but serves its purpose.

Struggle for the Heartland is a well written summary of the campaigns from Fort Henry to Corinth, giving readers used to a military-only approach to the Civil War a look into the political and social aspects of of the war tie into and guide military thinking. Engle's book is a fine example of "New Military History", and one which should serve to enlighten quite a few students of the war used to standard military history approach to a campaign. I do not want to imply that this book supplants those focusing on specific battles, such Benjamin Franklin Cooling's work on Forts Henry and Donelson or Larry Daniel's and Wiley Sword's studies of Shiloh. Instead, Struggle for the Heartland supplements traditional campaign studies and ties together strategic, political, and social concerns across a large area and span of time. I would recommend this one to those readers less interested in the military tactics of the battles themselves who are instead looking to study other aspects of the war. The book also serves as a fine primer for those students of military history looking to decipher how political and social aspects of the conflict moved and shaped military campaigns.

(Note: Special thanks goes to The University of Nebraska Press.)

Stephen D. Engle	Struggle for the Heartland: The Campaigns from Fort Henry to Corinth
Comments: NEW 1/15/07 Stephen D. Engle. Struggle for the Heartland: The Campaigns from Fort Henry to Corinth. Lincoln, NE: The University of Nebraska Press (March 2005). 251 pp., 8 maps, notes, index. ISBN: 0-80326-753-3 $16.95 (Paperback). Stephen D. Engle's Struggle for the Heartland takes the latest scholarship on "the campaigns from Fort Henry to Corinth" and ties the military, political, and social issues faced during the campaign into an efficient and readable discussion of these events. The book is an entry in the University of Nebraska Press' Great Campaigns of the Civil War series of books and covers the time frame of the military campaign from Fort Henry to Corinth, including the Battle of Shiloh. Rather than focusing solely on military events, however, Engle provides a large amount of coverage to social and political considerations as well. The result, then, is a balanced overview of a campaign in which there was a "struggle for the heartland" of the Confederacy. Northern military planners saw the obvious routes of attack into the Confederate "heartland" region provided by the Tennessee and Cumberland Rivers. It was simply a matter of preparing the armies to move in this direction, at least according to timid, methodical minds such as Henry Halleck and Don Carlos Buell, the two department commanders in the west. Albert Sidney Johnston, the overall Confederate commander in the area, gave wide latitude to his subordinates. One of these, Bishop Polk, had become obsessed with defending Columbus, Kentucky along the Mississippi River and virtually ignored the forts on the Tennessee and Cumberland to the east even though they were in his department. The Union preparation may have taken quite a long time if not for the aggressive nature of Halleck's then unknown subordinate Ulysses S. Grant. Grant was determined to take Forts Henry and Donelson, defenders of the Tennessee and Cumberland Rivers, respectively. His movement south caught both Halleck and Buell somewhat by surprise. The end result was that Grant managed to subdue both forts and capture over 10,000 Southern prisoners while Halleck and Buell haggled over cooperating in the expedition. As Grant's Army of the Tennessee rested and refitted along the Tennessee River south of the now captured forts Buell was to march his army southwest to meet them. Continued arguments between Halleck and Buell coupled with Grant's complacency at his Pittsburg Landing camp almost ended in disaster at the Battle of Shiloh. While Buell slowly marched toward the Tennessee River, Johnston and his subordinates had been busy at Corinth trying to recover the large amount of territory lost to Grant at the forts. The Battle of Shiloh prematurely ended these hopes as Grant's army was able to recover from their shock at being attacked and hold on until Buell's Army of the Ohio reached the field of battle. Johnston was killed and Beauregard, his second in command, was forced to retreat to Corinth. At this point in the campaign, Henry Halleck managed to obtain sole command of the west, and he gathered the armies of Grant, Buell, and Pope (fresh off a victory at Island No. 10 on the Mississippi) for a laborious advance on Corinth, the most vital railroad crossing in the Confederacy. The ending to this large campaign was anticlimactic as Beauregard was forced to retreat due to poor water and increasing sickness in his army. Halleck had taken Corinth and cleared the Confederate Heartland of Southern armies. These military campaigns had seen great change in the way the North would prosecute the war, with important consequences. Engle focuses quite a lot of time and energy explaining how the large increase in the amount of Confederate territory controlled by the Union led to changes in the initial "soft war" policy espoused by the Lincoln Administration. Before Grant sailed south on the Tennessee to assault Fort Henry, Union armies were typically restrained and respectful when it came to the treatment of Southern civilians. No one better personified this idea than the commanders currently in charge of Union affairs: George B. McClellan as General In Chief with Henry Halleck and Don Carlos Buell as department heads in the west. These men were all democrats, and they believed in a war that would not upset the status quo. In other words, they wanted to leave the slavery issue alone, instead trying to treat Southerners well and return their slaves in the hope that they would come quickly and quietly back into the Union. The campaigns from Fort Henry to Corinth showed that this soft war policy was not practical. Southerners continued to resist even when treated well, and guerrilla forces sprung up where Confederate armies were unable to hold territory in a conventional manner. Soldiers from privates to generals also began to see the difference between poor white subsistence farmers and wealthy slave owners, eventually blaming the institution of slavery as the primary cause of the war. These troops began to resent orders such as Buell's General Orders 13a, which prevented foraging, returned runaway slaves, and otherwise treated Southerners with kid gloves. Men such as division commander Ormsby Mitchel began to take matters into their own hands, and eventually the government agreed with this "hard war" course of action. Ironically, writes Engle, the Union push into Confederate leaning western and central Tennessee only hastened the Union policy change. If Buell had instead invaded Unionist eastern Tennessee, per Lincoln's wishes, this soft war policy may have continued long past June 1862. The Union war effort in the west was plagued with bickering among its top commanders, writes Engle. Partly to blame was the unwieldy command structure. Don Carlos Buell's Department of the Ohio and Henry Halleck's Department of Missouri joined together at the Tennessee River, precisely where the easiest avenue of attack into the Confederate Heartland was located. This naturally enough caused great friction between the two men, both of whom always proceeded cautiously and believed their own opinions were correct on military matters. McClellan and Lincoln did not help the situation in Washington, instead simply ordering the two men to cooperate. While they bickered over who should move first and along what lines, Grant seized the initiative and moved, catching both generals by surprise. Buell still refused to send much help and almost literally warned Halleck not to fail. Grant's attacks succeeded, and the next logical step was to concentrate on the Tennessee for a move against Corinth. This time Buell did finally advance, but he still managed to take his time. Luckily for Grant, Army of the Ohio division commander "Bull" Nelson marched forward rapidly and was available late on the first day at Shiloh. The command friction between these two men only ended when Halleck managed to persuade Lincoln and Secretary of War Stanton that the West needed one commander. Halleck also had his problems with Grant. Grant's victories at Fort Henry and Fort Donelson made Halleck jealous, and he childishly reacted by removing Grant from command on trumped up charges of drunkenness and Grant's failure to be present with his army when the Confederates launched an attack at Fort Donelson. Lincoln and Halleck, impressed with the aggressive Grant, and especially when they considered the conservative Halleck and Buell, lost no time in forcing Halleck to reinstate Grant. After Shiloh, Halleck again removed Grant from command of the Army of the Tennessee, bumping him up to the meaningless and superfluous "second in command" position during the advance on Corinth. Despite these and other quarrels, the Northern armies were able to force the Confederates from a large portion of the territory they held at the beginning of 1862. Much of the Southern failure to hold this territory had to do with Jefferson Davis' utter lack of concern for the West. The roots of this attitude can be traced to the appointment of Albert Sidney Johnston to command in the west. Johnston was Davis' friend, and Davis believed him to be the finest general the Confederacy had. Davis left Johnston with very little men and materiel to work with, and as a result he had far too few men with which to defend a much too long defense line running from the Appalachians to the Indian Territory. To make matters worse, says Engle, Johnston frequently gave his subordinates far too much latitude in defending their various districts. This came back to haunt Johnston when General Polk became obsessed with defending Columbus, Kentucky, spending very little time preparing Fort Henry and Fort Donelson. Grant's quick strike caught the Confederate generals by surprise as well, and Johnston decided not to fight for Fort Donelson, in effect abandoning middle Tennessee and the capital at Nashville. This loss of large amounts of territory shocked and angered many Southerners, and Davis finally consented to send Johnston reinforcements. Johnston and Beauregard attempted to regain the lost territory with a surprise attack at Shiloh and failed, costing Johnston his life in the process. Beauregard was subsequently unable to hold Corinth in the face of a large Union force, poor water, and increasing sickness in his command. Despite these Union successes, the Northern generals did not typically take the political concerns of the Lincoln Administration into account in their military planning. The main case in point for the time frame of this book, according to Engle, concerns Lincoln's desire to liberate Unionist leaning, mountainous eastern Tennessee from Confederate rule. Lincoln knew that this area centered on Knoxville, Tennessee would more readily come back into the Union than the other flatter, slave holding sections of the state. Buell repeatedly refused to advance in this direction (at the same time refusing to cooperate with Halleck), claiming bad roads and numerous other reasons for delay. Buell also clashed with the Lincoln appointed military governor of Tennessee, Andrew Johnson. Johnson was a Radical Republican, and he wanted Southerners punished for their treason. He and Buell held violently opposite views on the prosecution of the war, and they would clash for as long as Buell held command of the Army of the Ohio. Struggle for the Heartland is one volume of many in the Great Campaigns of the Civil War Series, published by the University of Nebraska Press. Series editors Anne J. Bailey and Brooks Simpson write that the series "offers readers concise syntheses of the major campaigns of the war, reflecting the findings of recent scholarship. The series points to new ways of viewing military campaigns by looking beyond the battlefield and the headquarters tent to the wider political and social context within which these campaigns unfolded..." In addition to exploring strictly military events from February to June 1862 along the Tennessee, Cumberland, and Mississippi Rivers, Struggle for the Heartland takes a deeper look at the political and social issues as well, weaving all of these together into a cogent whole. The eight maps are functional, but the battle maps do not add considerably to the discussion. The notes are mostly secondary sources, but in this case it is acceptable since the book's primary purpose is to bring together a syntheses of the latest findings on this subject. I suspect that the other books in this series follow this mold as well. Rather than a bibliography, we instead get a "Bibliographical Essay" of several pages. While I typically favor a standard bibliography, the focus and goals of this series make this essay perfectly acceptable under the circumstances. The index is rather bare bones as well, but serves its purpose. Struggle for the Heartland is a well written summary of the campaigns from Fort Henry to Corinth, giving readers used to a military-only approach to the Civil War a look into the political and social aspects of of the war tie into and guide military thinking. Engle's book is a fine example of "New Military History", and one which should serve to enlighten quite a few students of the war used to standard military history approach to a campaign. I do not want to imply that this book supplants those focusing on specific battles, such Benjamin Franklin Cooling's work on Forts Henry and Donelson or Larry Daniel's and Wiley Sword's studies of Shiloh. Instead, Struggle for the Heartland supplements traditional campaign studies and ties together strategic, political, and social concerns across a large area and span of time. I would recommend this one to those readers less interested in the military tactics of the battles themselves who are instead looking to study other aspects of the war. The book also serves as a fine primer for those students of military history looking to decipher how political and social aspects of the conflict moved and shaped military campaigns. (Note: Special thanks goes to The University of Nebraska Press.)