Men of War: Essays on American Wars and Warriors

By Henry I. Kurtz

Men of War is an anthology of the best military history articles written by author Henry Kurtz. In vivid prose, Mr. Kurtz describes key events and personalities in 18th and 19th Century American military history. Included are battle studies on Phil Sheridan at Five Forks George Washington at Dorchester Heights U.S. Grant at Belmont Henry Bouquet at Bushy Run George Armstrong Custer at the Washita William Moultrie at Sullivans Island; also profiles of the Militia and Regular Army before the Civil War; pen portraits of Hubert Dilger, the Union Armys top artillery gunner; Caleb Huse, the Confederacy major arms procurer; Hiram Berdan and his elite Union sharpshooters; John Basil Turchin, the Union Armys only Russian-born general; and other lively and engaging narratives.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Oct 25, 2006
• ISBN: 9781469119106

Henry I. Kurtz

Henry I. Kurtz is a writer and editor whose published books include biographies of John and Sebastian Cabot and Captain John Smith; also Defending Our Country: The U.S. Army and The Art of the Toy Soldier. His historical articles have appeared in American History Illustrated, History Today, Civil War Times Illustrated and American Heritage, along with newspapers and other periodicals. A graduate of Columbia University, where he studied history under such distinguished scholars as Richard Hofstadter, Fritz Stern and William Leuchtenburg, he has also studied at Georgetown and Oxford Universities. He lives in New York City with his wife Leah and their cat Billy Budd.

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Copyright © 2006 by Henry I. Kurtz.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2006905015

ISBN:                           Softcover                          978-1-4257-1715-5

ISBN:                           Ebook                                 978-1-4691-1910-6

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Contents

Introduction

Acknowledgements

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

CHAPTER FOUR

Chapter Five

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

For my wife Leah and for Rose and Benjamin Kurtz

The Lord is a man of war.

Exodus, Chapter 15, Verse 3

Wars may be fought with weapons, but they are won by men. It is the spirit of the men who follow and the man who leads that gains the victory.

General George S. Patton, Jr.

U.S. Cavalry Journal

September, 1933

Introduction

During the gloomy, rain-swept late night hours at the end of the first day of the bloody Battle of Shiloh, with the Union army having been badly mauled, General William Tecumseh Sherman met with his friend and commander General U.S. Grant for a council of war. Pessimistic about the outcome of the battle, an exhausted Sherman exclaimed, Well, Grant, we’ve had the devil’s own day, haven’t we?

Ulysses Grant pondered that comment for a moment, and then, with the assurance of a chess master who knows he will ultimately checkmate his adversary, replied Yes—Lick’em tomorrow though.

Grant was right of course, as every student of the Civil War knows. He understood the big picture: the worn-out Confederate attackers, whose commander Albert S. Johnston had been killed early in the battle; the fresh Union troops that had begun to arrive and that would give both a numerical and a moral edge to the Northern army; and, perhaps most important of all, his own dogged determination to stand rock-like in the midst of the chaos of battle, refusing to accept defeat no matter how desperate the situation. And so at daybreak on the morning of April 7, 1862, Grant’s reinforced army counterattacked, driving the Confederates from the field and plucking a costly but important victory from what seemed, only hours earlier, a sure defeat.

Grant’s victory at Shiloh illustrates the importance of force of will and moral strength as characteristics of a great general. As Napoleon observed: Military genius is a gift from God, but the most important quality of a general-in-chief is the strength of character and resolution to win at all costs.

Some months earlier in the war, an inexperienced but audacious General Grant fought a less successful battle at Belmont, Kentucky (an account of which constitutes a chapter of this book). Although defeated at the Battle of Belmont, Grant exhibited another important characteristic of the successful general—a willingness to take risks. Expressing his own view of the matter, Grant wrote, No man ought to win a victory who is not willing to run the risk of defeat.

Each of the chapters of this book that deals with American battles and commanders illustrates some important principle (or principles) of fighting a successful or unsuccessful battle. At Bushy Run in August of 1763, a Swiss-born soldier-of-fortune named Henry Bouquet, in command of British troops, fought a two-day battle with Indians in Pennsylvania. Surrounded and on the verge of annihilation, Bouquet’s command was saved by a clever stratagem that involved deception followed by counterattack. By turning an ambush into a counter-ambush, Bouquet was following a maxim formulated by the ancient Chinese military philosopher Sun Tzu, who wrote: All warfare is based on deception. Hence, when able to attack, we must seem unable… Hold out baits to entice the enemy. Feign disorder and crush him.

Another proven maxim of war is that it is better to outflank an enemy than to strike him directly in a frontal attack. Great generals, writes Bevin Alexander, know that a direct attack… consolidates an enemy’s defenses… practically all their successful attacks have been made against the enemy’s flank or rear… . Two good examples of how not to win a battle are the Battle of Bunker Hill and the Battle of Sullivan’s Island during the American War of Independence. In both cases, British commanders, contemptuous of American fighting skills and arrogantly believing in their own military superiority, chose to directly attack well-entrenched American troops. At Bunker Hill, the British might have outflanked the American positions and cut off the Rebel forces on Charlestown Peninsula. Instead they launched foolish frontal assaults that resulted in 40% casualties—though the British did win a technical victory. At Sullivan’s Island, what B.H. Liddell-Hart called the indirect approach was discarded in favor of a head-on naval assault on a solidly constructed and well-manned American fort, resulting in a costly British defeat.

By contrast, General George Washington flushed the British out of Boston without the loss of a man in the bloodless Battle of Dorchester Heights. If as Sun Tzu observed, Supreme excellence consists in breaking the enemy’s resistance without fighting, Washington’s action at Dorchester Heights is a supreme moment of excellence in the American Revolution. By arranging for captured British heavy artillery guns to be brought from Fort Ticonderoga (New York) to Boston, where they were positioned on Dorchester Heights, Washington created an intolerable situation for the British garrison. The result was the peaceful evacuation of Boston by the British and the triumphant occupation of that city by American troops.

Napoleon famously remarked, In war, men are nothing; it is one man [the commander] who is everything. This is often the case; but just as often it is not. At Bunker Hill, for instance, it was the courageous, well-disciplined British regulars who surged up Breed’s Hill three times in the face of steady blasts of musketry, thereby winning the day—in spite of the bungling of the British high command. Similarly, at the Battle of Chancellorsville, when Stonewall Jackson—putting into action his principle that one should mystify, mislead and surprise the enemy—brought his corps down on the exposed Union right flank and nearly routed the whole Federal army, it was the heroism of a few Yankee soldiers, especially a German-born artilleryman named Hubert Dilger, that held back the grey tide for a few precious minutes. With a single cannon, Captain Dilger slowed the Confederate attack and prevented a disaster from becoming a catastrophe. Similarly, a special unit of marksmen, Berdan’s United States Sharpshooters, performed many significant deeds on a score of battlefields, influencing the outcome of those engagements.

On the other side of the coin, as Napoleon suggested, the force of will and tactical skill of an individual commander is often the determining factor in war. Certainly this was the case at the Battle of Five Forks—sometimes called the Waterloo of the Confederacy—when General Phil Sheridan made his presence felt all over the battlefield and when his original battle plan went awry, improvised a substitute that led to a decisive Union victory. Little Phil Sheridan’s utter lack of concern for his own safety in the heat of battle is well known to all students of the Civil War. Chided by one of Grant’s staff officers for recklessly putting his life at risk, Little Phil retorted, I have never in my life taken a command into battle and had the slightest desire to come out alive unless I won.

That determination to win at all costs—or die in the effort—is a quality common to all the great military commanders of history. Death is nothing, wrote Frederick the Great, to live defeated and without glory is to die every day. All of the men of war described in this book had the virtue of boldness; they were willing to take risks and to implement unorthodox actions to achieve their ends. Two years before General William T. Sherman commented on the necessity of exposing southern civilians to the hard hand of war, a less well-known Union general, the Russian-born John Basil Turchin, was already putting such a policy into effect. His sacking and burning of Huntsville, Alabama nearly got him cashiered. But Lincoln was persuaded to keep him on and Turchin performed many notable feats in later campaigns.

Another grizzled warrior, John S. Ford, Mexican War veteran and Texas Ranger turned Confederate cavalry leader, showed his talent for bold and decisive action at the Battle of Palmetto Ranch—which had the distinction of being the last major engagement of the Civil War—fought, incidentally, a month’s after Lee’s surrender at Appomattox. When Union troops advanced from Brownsville, Texas to round up stray bands of Confederates, Ford hastily organized a counter stroke that drove the Union force back to its base and gave the Confederacy one last victory.

Controversy has, and continues to surround the life of General George Armstrong Custer. No military figure in American history has been the subject of more books, articles, or fanciful Hollywood motion pictures than this flamboyant golden-haired cavalry leader. Courageous and resourceful in battle, especially during the Civil War campaigns that gained him justifiable fame and admiration (at least in the North), he could also be brutally harsh both to enemies as well as his own soldiers. Audacious in combat, he was also dangerously reckless.

In this anthology, Custer is shown during the 1868 winter campaign—initiated by General Phil Sheridan in an effort to intimidate potentially hostile Indians—at the moment of his greatest success as an Indian fighter. Leading his Seventh Cavalry on a daring raid into Indian territory in the midst of a winter storm, Custer struck a Cheyenne Indian camp on a bitterly cold November morning, destroying the village and killing or capturing most of its inhabitants. The Battle of the Washita was a classic example of the search and destroy mission that became a standard tactic in the Vietnam War 100 years later.

Celebrated as a great victory by many, denounced as a shameful massacre of helpless Indians by others, the Battle of the Washita was an example of bold and decisive action leading to victory. But in tactical deployment—Custer divided his regiment into several assault columns—it was a prelude to the foolhardy and disastrous attack on a much larger Indian encampment eight years later. Frederick the Great had cautioned a century earlier that if you separate your forces, you will be beaten in detail. Custer did not heed that maxim at the Battle of the Little Bighorn in June, 1876, resulting in the destruction of an entire battalion of the Seventh Cavalry and his own death.

Which brings us to another shrewd observation of Frederick the Great: If you want to gain the affection of the soldier, do not… expose him to [danger] unless it is necessary. Be his father, and not his executioner.

Two of the chapters in this book deal with the soldiers—the ordinary men of war—who fought the wars of the United States in the early years of the Republic. These were the men who served in the militia, the citizen soldiers who could be called up when needed, and their professional counterparts, the soldiers of the Regular Army. In Chapter Five we provide A Character Sketch of the Militia, that is the organization, composition and structure of the different types of militia units. Originally conceived by the Founding Fathers as the mainstay of national defense, the record of the militia was a mixed one. Often poorly trained, armed and disciplined, the common militia, to which most able-bodied citizens belonged, had more failures than successes on the battlefield. A second category of militia units, the volunteer or independent corps, was generally of better quality. These were the units that President Lincoln called upon during the first months of the Civil War, and which were the forerunners of the later National Guard.

By contrast, the small but efficient Regular Army used to police the frontier, which was so crucial in the development of the west and the expansion of the nation, proved its worth in the War of 1812, the Mexican War, and the various Indian Wars. Chapter Six, The Regular Army: A Soldier’s Life, provides an overview of the often tedious, always harsh life of the regular soldier. A mixture of recent immigrants and native-born adventure-seekers, the regulars were the backbone of our national defense throughout most of the 19th century. Despite meager pay, Spartan living conditions and the many hazards of military life, they served then as now, with few exceptions, honorably and faithfully. To cite one notable example, although scores of Southern officers resigned their commissions to fight for the Confederacy during the Civil War, fewer than 30 Regular Army enlisted men of southern birth deserted and joined the Confederate forces.

Providing enough weapons of quality to the fighting men has been a major preoccupation of governments in all wars. One of the great—and persistent—myths of the American Civil War is that Southern soldiers often lacked sufficient numbers of weapons and ammunition to fight the Yankee hordes. In John Huston’s film version of Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage, for example, a captured Confederate soldier angrily remarks, I would’ve killed more Yankees if I hadn’t of run out of powder ! Hollywood fiction aside, nothing could be farther from the truth. Confederate soldiers were adequately supplied with weapons and munitions throughout the war. As we learn in Chapter Eight, Arms for the Confederacy, this was due in large measure to the diligent and devoted efforts of Confederate procurement agents in Europe. Thanks to the work of men like Caleb Huse and James Bulloch, hundreds of thousands of small arms and cannon were brought into the Confederate States by blockade runners. As a result, Confederate soldiers were well armed with European firearms, chief among them being the superb Enfield rifle from England. Ironically, Major Caleb Huse, the chief Confederate arms procurement agent, was a Yankee from Massachusetts; and his boss, the Confederate ordnance chief Josiah Gorgas was a Pennsylvanian.

Over the centuries, many military men have offered their views on what is somewhat euphemistically referred to as the art of war. In concluding these brief introductory remarks to Men of War, I thought it useful to include two that strike me as being right on target. Napoleon offered his view that The art of war… can be learned neither from books nor from [practical experience]; it is a touch for command that constitutes a genius for war. A more straightforward assessment comes from Ulysses Grant: The art of war is simple enough. Find out where your enemy is. Get at him as soon as you can. Strike him as hard as you can and as often as you can and keep moving on.

And now, in the spirit of U.S. Grant’s remarks, let us keep moving on. But before we proceed to the body of this book, a few acknowledgements are in order.

Acknowledgements

The author wishes to express his appreciation to Primedia, the publisher of Civil War Times (formerly Civil War Times Illustrated), and American History (formerly American History Illustrated) for granting him permission to reprint the following articles that originally appeared in those magazines and that constitute eleven of the chapters in this book. From American History Illustrated (now American History): The Battle of Bunker Hill, November, 1967; The Battle of Sullivan’s Island, June, 1968; Victory on Dorchester Heights, December, 1969; and A Soldier’s Life, August, 1972. From Civil War Times Illustrated (now Civil War Times): John Basil Turchin—The Russian Thunderbolt, August, 1961; The Last Battle of the Civil War, April, 1962; Dilger’s Battery—The Best Federal Artillery Unit, November, 1962; Berdan’s Sharpshooters, February, 1963; The Battle of Belmont, June, 1963; Five Forks—The South’s Waterloo, October, 1964; and Arms for the Confederacy, April, 1967.

Although they are no longer with us, I would like to acknowledge my indebtedness to Robert Fowler, the founding editor of the above-mentioned magazines, and managing editor Wilbur S. Nye for their encouragement, guidance and support during the many years that I wrote for American History Illustrated and Civil War Times Illustrated.

The author also would like to express his gratitude to the publisher of History Today magazine for permission to reprint the articles on Colonel Henry Bouquet and the Relief of Fort Pitt (The Relief of Fort Pitt, 1763,); and Colonel George A. Custer and the Battle of the Washita (Custer and the Indian Massacre, 1868), which originally appeared in the October, 1963, and November, 1968 issues, respectfully.

Thanks are due also to the Publications office of Columbia University for permission to reprint A Character Sketch of the Militia: 1800-1860, an article adapted from a thesis produced under the guidance of the late Richard Hofstadter, which was originally published in the Columbia College Journal of the Social Sciences, King’s Crown Essays. It was my good fortune to have studied history as an undergraduate and graduate student at Columbia University during a time when that institution had one of the finest history departments in the nation. It was distinguished historians such as Richard Hofstadter, Fritz Stern, James P. Shenton, Henry Graff and William Leuchtenburg who instilled in me the high standards of scholarship and good writing that I have tried to live up to over the years. My friend and associate Frank Antonucci earns a special note of praise for typing and computerizing the various manuscript versions of Men of War. Finally, I must pay special tribute to my wife Leah for her unwavering support and interest in this and other writing projects.

Henry I. Kurtz

New York City

Chapter One

BUSHY RUN:

A BOLD MANEUVER

I see that the affair is general… [and] I believe, from what I hear, that I am surrounded by Indians. I neglect nothing to give them a good reception; and I expect to be attacked tomorrow morning. Please God I may be. I am passably well prepared. Everybody is at work, and I do not sleep… . Captain Simeon Ecuyer, Swiss by