British historian John Keegan’s book The American Civil War: A Military History offers the reader an interesting overview of the major leaders, battles and circumstances of a conflict that unfolded across a vast and changeable theater of war covering thousands of square miles. Many of the great military leaders of 19th-century Europe deprecated the skills of Union and Confederate generals as well as the legitimacy of massive American armies that were considered little more than roving bands of armed vigilantes. Keegan’s book provides a “big picture” concept of the Civil War that shows the contending armies had to adapt, supply and operate logistically in ways and on a scale that even the greatest European commanders would have found daunting. Keegan appears sympathetic to the Union cause and the fight against slavery, yet there is an insufficient distinction made between the Union and Confederate causes concerning the institution of slavery.
There is no doubt that the Confederate military leadership (as distinct from its government administration) waged a remarkable military campaign, but Keegan seems at times too little concerned with the fact that Lee, Jackson, Longstreet and the other skilled military tacticians who led the Southern armies had committed their skills to preserving a way of life based on enslavement. Keegan is an influential and honored military historian, yet there are some wars in which an emphasis on military strategy and tactics fails to grasp the deeper meaning of the conflict. Writers like James McPherson have proven that the American Civil War must be studied in a much broader light. The book’s strength lies in Keegan’s close examination of the war’s leading figures, men like Lee, Grant, McClellan, Jackson and Sherman. Here, Keegan presents truly interesting insights into what made these men successes or failures. Lee, for instance, benefited from “quick and correct decision-making in the face of the enemy” (Keegan, 328), while McClellan suffered from an impulse to “take counsel of his fears” (119). Keegan successfully shows the reader how fundamental character flaws or strengths played an important role in the war and had a major effect on its length, as well as the length of casualty lists.
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"Big Picture, Little Depth: Keegan’s ‘The American Civil War: A Military History’".
However, while Keegan’s view of the generals’ abilities and their impact on the course of the war is illuminating, his sketchy grasp of the less glamorous facts detracts from what is an otherwise admirable accomplishment. It is, perhaps, a function of his English orientation, but Keegan’s failure to get right some basic facts undermines much of the book’s historical credibility. There are a number of significant errors (for instance, his identification of Disraeli as the British prime minister during the war when it was actually Palmerston) that indicate Keegan’s strength as a scholar is much more as an observer of “macro” history, of the over-arching factors that determine outcomes. What is missing is the fastidious and minute attention to detail of other Civil War historians.
For example, Keegan does well to discuss the strategic importance of the nation’s large network of rivers, yet he concludes that the Cumberland, Tennessee and the many other streams that lie between the Appalachian mountains and the Mississippi River were actually an advantage for the Confederacy (71). Most historians have agreed that the rivers presented the Union with a ready means of access to the Southern interior, a blow from which the Confederacy never recovered. “The Ohio and its big tributaries, the Cumberland and the Tennessee, form a line of moats protecting the central Upper South, while the Mississippi, with which they connect, denies the Union any hope of penetration, even were lines of communication to become available in the West” (Keegan, 71-72).
Keegan’s evident perspective on the slavery issue derives from moral ground. Whereas others have emphasized the economic and political problems associated with slavery, Keegan appears to favor the idea that the moral aspects of the slavery debate held the upper hand. He notes that when Abraham Lincoln met Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the president supposedly commented, “’So, this is the little lady who wrote the big book that made this great war…’ (Lincoln) was as near to the truth as it was possible to get” (Keegan,18). Clearly, Stowe’s great novel was culturally impactful and helped galvanize public opinion against slavery, but Keegan’s comment gives rather more weight to this factor than to the socio-economic and legal influences that created such an unmanageable political environment.
The Southern planter class that drove the region’s economy simply could not do without slavery, while the government could no longer afford to look the other way in order to hold together what had for decades been a tenuous union of states. Ultimately, Keegan offers an enlightening assessment of what took place between 1861 and 1865, and of the men who planned and led the great fight over the institution of slavery. However, his position on what led to the break-up of the union lacks the kind of depth that he devotes to the personas and skills of the war’s leaders and its leading soldiers.
- Keegan, John. The American Civil War: A Military History. New York, NY: Random House, 2009.
