The Grand Design: Strategy and the U.S. Civil War

Abstract

Books on the military history of the Civil War crowd library shelves. Yet as Donald Stoker correctly asserts, most of those volumes deal with individual battles and the men who fought them, not with the overriding strategies that commanders and governments pursued. A professor at the Naval War College Monterey, Stoker has turned to the Civil War to address that imbalance. In The Grand Design, he offers a complex and unapologetically top-down history of the war and its evolving strategies. Admitting that the Confederacy could have won the war, Stoker maintains that the real question is what took the Union so long to prevail. The Confederacy never had enough men or means to defend its territory, nor did it have a strategic vision to compensate accordingly. Worse, Jefferson Davis started the war too soon—only the first in a series of catastrophic decisions that he made as an ineffective micromanager who lacked any strategic vision. In contrast, Abraham Lincoln came to Washington, D.C., with a clear sense of the war's political objectives, and over time he would develop a good strategic sense. Even so, Stoker does not depict Lincoln as the military genius who won the war, as some authors essentially do. Indeed, Lincoln's tendency to meddle in his generals’ plans, his indecision, and his habit of giving suggestions but not orders created such confusion that ultimately he helped prolong the war. It was George B. McClellan who was the war's best strategist, if still an ineffective battlefield commander. McClellan, not Lincoln or Ulysses S. Grant, first grasped that the best path to victory lay in coordinating Union manpower in simultaneous efforts across the South. Unfortunately, Lincoln demoted McClellan from the post of general in chief just at the moment when his guiding hand was most needed. Stoker goes on to chide the Union leadership for other failures, such as not supporting Ormsby M. Mitchel's force in northern Alabama when he could have taken Chattanooga in 1862 and bisected the Confederacy. He also criticizes Lincoln for focusing on politically motivated secondary targets such as east Tennessee or Texas when efforts elsewhere would have paid greater dividends. Only when Grant took command did Lincoln step back and let a general do his job. Ultimately, the president “stumbled toward success,” finally allowing the McClellan-Grant strategy of coordination and attrition to win the day (p. 406).