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The Civil War On The Fringe

Starboard Batteries Engaged During the American Civil War, when Union forces blocked Confederate ports, the Confederacy countered by waging guerrilla warfare on Union merchant shipping. One of the most skilled Confederate raiders was the sloop-of-war Alabama. On June 19, 1864, the U.S.S. Kearsarge and the C.S.S. Alabama (foreground) fought off the coast of Cherbourg, France. The Alabama sank less than two hours after the first shot was fired.

During the Vicksburg campaign, sailors from the Manitou of the Mississippi Squadron found themselves grounded on battery emplacements constructed by General William T. Sherman's soldiers. Off the boat for the first time in months, the sailors followed their normal routine. Working with instinctual determination, they re-created their ship on shore. They quickly constructed a wooden plank floor similar to the deck of a ship. Over this, they raised a tent and slung their hammocks. Every morning, to the continuing amazement of onlooking soldiers, they pulled a stone attached to ropes back and forth across their miniature wooden deck until it was declared shipshape. After cleaning, the sailors sat down in their mess groups and ate from nautical mess tables using knives. Amused soldiers who saw this odd re-creation knew they were witnessing a service and brand of men entirely different from their own.

Reactions like these replayed themselves throughout the war. As soon as sailors sailed into port or made landfall, curious civilians, watchful policemen, and mindful Northern soldiers dropped whatever they were doing and gawked. "We are a great curiosity to them," wrote landsman Joseph Fry from Pensacola, Florida, "and they make the most original remarks you ever heard." The Cincinnati Daily Commercial reported that residents of Cairo, Illinois, proved instantly intrigued by the sailors landing in their town. Even though they had witnessed thousands of soldiers pour through their rumpled village, the newspaper reported that the sailors' black-ribboned hats, short blue jackets, and voluminous breeches drew the rapt attention of Cairo's citizens. As one onlooker wrote as he gazed upon a group of sailors working and playing aboard a blockade vessel: "There are characters enough among them to furnish material for a volume."

Yet no volume exists. Even though sailors proved instrumental in the North's victory by manning the blockade and helping subdue the Mississippi River, the Civil War was and continues to be a soldiers' war. During hostilities, politicians, newspapers, and citizens ignored the contributions made by sailors. After the war, sailors enjoyed little of the hallowed glow enjoyed by soldiers. In 1894, a still angry Cornelius Cronin, a gunner on the Brooklyn, grumbled, "The sailors were first in the war, and last out of it; and last 'In the hearts of their countrymen.'"

Without question, the attention to soldiers has been rightly justified. Common Union soldiers did most of the fighting, suffering, and dying during the war. Part of the reason for the neglect was the nature of the naval war. Since the Confederates possessed a small navy, there were, save the Monitor and the Merrimac, no epic battles to memorialize and no myths to mount. Moreover, Union sailors served on the fringes of the war, severed from land, severed from home, and severed from the persistent gaze of war correspondents and politicians. As a result, soldiers garnered the lion's share of attention, and Union sailors languished on the conflict's periphery as oddities, sidelights, or sources of amusement.

More important, common Union sailors—known as "bluejackets" or "Jacks"—never fully registered in the nation's consciousness for two reasons. First, their numbers paled in comparison to the over two million men who served as Northern soldiers; only 118,044 men enlisted as sailors during the war. Second, Union sailors bore little resemblance to the mythical and historical portrait of the war's poster boys, common Yankee soldiers. Sailors tended to come from different segments of society and enlisted for different reasons. They came from the poor and working classes of Northern cities rather than rural towns and farms. Many sailors were foreigners fleeing hunger and economic turmoil and slaves running to freedom.

On a deeper level, the men who enlisted as sailors also possessed a markedly different set of values and ideas. The typical Union sailor was a hard, pragmatic, and cynical man who bore little patience for patriotism, reform, and religion. He drank too much, fought too much, and prayed too little. He preferred adventure to stability and went for quick and lucrative jobs rather than steady and slow employ under the tightening strictures of the new market economy. He was rough, dirty, and profane. Out of date before his time, he was aggressively masculine in a Northern society bent on gentling men.

Overall, Union sailors proved less committed to emerging Northern values and were less ideological than soldiers for whom the broader issues of freedom, market success, and constitutional government proved constant touchstones during the war. Sailors possessed weaker support for the war. Most did not join the navy to save the Union, free the slaves, or prove their courage. Instead, the decisions by sailors to join the war proved more dependent on the practical factors of economic need, ethnic tendencies, class outlook, and race. In short, huge numbers of immigrants, former slaves, and working-class men enlisted as sailors and did so based on individual rather than collective reasons.

Yankee sailors also fought a different type of Civil War. Although they participated in traditional naval campaigns, their wartime experiences were marked by a number of personal battles—with training, with monotony, with officers, and with religion. Many struggled with the bottle. Others violently contested the presence of former slaves who shipped as new sailors. In the process, Union sailors carved out a war, shipboard lives, and a maritime culture that was uniquely their own and unquestionably different.

In general, part of the problem of studying sailors of the past has been that they tended to be peripatetic. They wrote less, moved around more, and left fewer reminders of their presence except for the wonderful lore and stories. This source problem has largely held true for Union seamen except for a couple of critical and fortunate differences. First, the majority of Union sailors were not sailors before the war and as a result possessed sufficiently more education than the typical nineteenth-century sailor. This meant that Union sailors, although they wrote little, probably wrote more than the average sailor. Second, owing to the years many of them spent floating on ships with no respite, many men, who may not have been inclined to write had they had something else better to do, did write because they had the time.

Sailors helped perpetuate the stereotypes by living up to them, as can be seen in the observations of certain valuable "intermediaries" aboard ship, men in service who were neither officers nor sailors. They possessed no formal rank but had constant contact with sailors owing to their official duties. Often they had never previously met or seen sailors. Many were civilians before the war and were not steeped in naval culture and prejudice. They tended to marvel at what they saw and drank deep of the odd and fascinating world of the common Union sailor. The most formidable of these intermediaries were surgeons, chaplains, and paymasters, who took care of sailors when they were ill, heartsick, and broke. Their observations, while harsh, were honest since they dealt with sailors at first hand and without the blurring quality of rank.

Michael J. Bennett. Union Jacks: Yankee Sailors in the Civil War. University of North Carolina Press. 2004.

The Guerrilla War 1861-1865

Stuart and Mosby As the Confederate Army prepares to go into winter quarters, Mosby asks permission of Stuart to stay behind with a detail of men to conduct guerilla operations in Loudon County. At that moment, Mosby's Rangers were born.

Could the South, once its armies were defeated, have continued the conflict through large-scale guerrilla war (Guerrilla (also called a partisan) is a term borrowed from Spanish ("guerra" meaning "war" and "guerrilla" meaning "little war") used to describe small combat groups. Guerrilla warfare operates with small, mobile and flexible combat groups called cells, without a front line.), worn down the Union occupation forces, and ultimately gained its independence? Some Southerners, as the Confederacy began to crumble, advocated such a course of action. But these diehards were wrong, whereas Lee was right in advising his soldiers at Appomattox to return home and be peaceful, law-abiding citizens. The objective and subjective conditions for successful guerrilla war simply did not exist in the South in 1865. There were no regular armies to sustain it, and the areas best suited for partisan operations - the mountains and swamps - were dominated by Unionists and deserters.

In addition guerrilla war of the magnitude advocated presupposes a spirit and attitude among the population at large which did not exist in the South: Although the Confederacy may have been, as one historian has called it, "a revolutionary experience," the majority of Southerners did not conceive of it in revolutionary terms. But above all, by 1865 the people of the South, and especially the fighting men, were thoroughly sick of war. Thus when a civilian shortly after Appomattox told one of Lee's veterans that "You should have taken to the mountains and fought guerrilla warfare," the soldier replied, "Look! I've been in thirty-five battles since this war started, and I'm plumb satisfied!" An attempt to continue the struggle through guerrilla war would merely have prolonged and intensified the misery of the already ravaged South and engendered greater vindictiveness in the North.

What did the guerrillas contribute to the Confederacy's military effort? Some historians have asserted that they tied down tens of thousands of Union soldiers, and by so doing, and by striking at Federal supply and communication lines, they postponed Confederate defeat. But cold analysis of the evidence provides little support for such claims. Most of the troops employed against partisans were militia who would not have been sent to the front in any case. As for regular troops, they were stationed in the rear not so much to combat bushwhackers as to protect against the cavalry raids of Stuart, Forrest, Van Dorn, Morgan, Wheeler, Price, et al - forays which made a greater strategic impact than the comparative pinpricks of the partisans. Moreover, as has been noted, the Confederates themselves had to divert troops to counter Unionist guerrillas and round up deserters.

As for postponing defeat, the only guerrilla operations, which significantly contributed to that, were those of Mosby and other Virginia partisans during the summer and fall of 1864. Circumstances were unusually favorable for guerrilla war in this case - and Mosby and his men were exceptional guerrillas. In fact, they were more like regular cavalry permanently stationed behind enemy lines than guerrillas in the traditional sense of that word. Outfits such as Quantrill's, on the other hand, were inherently incapable of accomplishing much of military value even in the rare instances when Confederate commanders, such as Hindman and Price, tried to make use of them.

Civil War Times

Probably the most telling commentary on the military contribution of the guerrillas is the fact that by 1863 nearly all Confederate generals and officials agreed that they did more harm than good, and that they would be of greater service in the regular forces. Indeed, apart from their role in the 1864 Virginia campaign, and the boost that some of their exploits gave to Southern morale, their activities overall had negative results: The devastation of west Missouri, north and west Virginia, north Arkansas, and other areas; misery and death for hundreds of people; murderous local feuds which plagued some states (notably Tennessee, Kentucky, and West Virginia) for a generation; and last but not least the spawning of a host of postwar outlaws, the most famous of which were the legendary James boys and Younger brothers.

Nevertheless, the survivors of the two main guerrilla organizations, Mosby's and Quantrill's, were proud of their deeds. Well into the 20th century they held annual reunions to celebrate the "good old times." Mosby, who lived until 1916, was able to attend most of the Virginia gatherings. Quantrill's veterans, on the other hand, had to make do with a large photograph of their chieftain, draped in black.

Behind Enemy Lines This book's stories of espionage, raids and guerrilla warfare provide riveting accounts of the often overlooked heroes and heroines of unconventional warfare during the Civil War and examines how the South - with its daring cavalry and constant struggle for supplies - at times resorted to brutal attacks and bloody guerrilla warfare.

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