Industrialization of War, 1840–84 243therefore, the struggle turned out to be more nearly equal than it had
been in the Crimea. What tipped the balance decisively against the
Confederacy was the South’s weakness on the sea and along inland
waterways. By blockading the southern states, the United States Navy
made it impossible for the Confederacy freely to remedy deficiencies
of its own production by importing arms and supplies from Europe. In
addition, strategic mobility along the coasts and navigable rivers was of
key importance in many of the Union’s offensive campaigns. These
critical roles for water transport in war were nothing new. The fact
that warships were sometimes steam-propelled and even armored, as
in the famous encounter between the Merrimac and the Monitor in
1862, gave the naval actions of the Civil War a novel character and
underlined the importance of newfangled industrial capacities that
alone could produce such complicated instruments of war.
Railroads were a far greater novelty. The mechanical power of
locomotives radically transcended older limitations on land transport.
A hundred miles by rail became easier to traverse than ten by cart; and
a single train could carry as much as thousands of horse-drawn wagons.
Railroads, in fact, allowed armies of a hundred thousand and more to
fight for years while drawing supplies from hundreds of miles away.
Such feats, quite impossible in any earlier age, demonstrated once
again the vital importance of industrial capacity for waging a new kind
of war.
By 1865, the president of the United States, like Cromwell some
two centuries earlier, found himself in command of formidable armed
force. But instead of trying to maintain its newly won armed might, as
Cromwell had done, the United States vigorously dismantled its mili
tary establishment, treating the war, in effect, as an aberration. This
made it all the easier for Europeans to regard what had happened in
northern Virginia and at Vicksburg and Chattanooga not as an intelli
gent response to changing technology, but as a clumsy failure to achieve
a professionally efficient management of war.
This judgment was sustained by the brisk tempo of the wars that
broke out on the European continent (not to mention a number of
colonial campaigns) between 1859 and 1870. The principal disturber
of the peace was Napoleon III, who saw it as his historic role to assure
the grandeur of France by supporting national aspirations for liberty.
Success in the Crimea simply whetted his appetite, so he lent himself
gladly to schemes for driving the Austrians from Italy, expecting the
grateful Italians to look to France as their patron. The result was a
short, sharp war in 1859. French armies defeated the Austrians in two