pork, dried peas, tents, blankets,
overcoats, lumber, axes, shovels,
saddles, bridles, harnesses, bullets,
bandages, and coffins.Policies and problems
Supply depots were established near
railroads and steamship wharves.
The North had little trouble gathering
up supplies from its farmlands and
industries and depositing them in
the depots. In contrast, the South
had been trammeled by the North’s
naval blockade, shortcomings in its
infrastructure, and bureaucratic
inefficiencies, and so faced greater
difficulties in amassing supplies and
transporting them to where they were
needed. In the middle of the war, the
Confederate Army
of Tennessee
found itself
particularly short
of supplies. The
logistics policy
meant that it was
deprived of its
natural resource base in Tennessee.
Local foodstuffs were gathered and
diverted instead to the Confederate
depot in Atlanta, from where they were
shipped by train to Petersburg to feed
Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia.
By 1864, the Union campaigns
against the railroad hubs at Petersburg
and Atlanta faced contrasting logistical
issues. At Petersburg, where General
Ulysses S. Grant had the James River at
his back, his supply base was close to his
headquarters. He had established a
depot at City Point, where mountains of
war material was piled amidst railroads,
wharves, hospitals, repair shops,
blacksmith forges, and
even bakeries making
100,000 loaves daily.I
n the spring of 1863, if a Union
army—such as Major General
William S. Rosecrans’s Army of the
Cumberland—came marching down
a dusty highway, its thousands of
tramping infantrymen, its horse-drawn
artillery and caissons (ammunition
wagons), and its ambulance train
all would constitute just part of the
spectacle of an army in motion.Wagon trains
Marching armies would be followed by
a seemingly interminable procession of
white-topped wagons, a hundred of
them for each mile of road. If the
wagons rolled along in single file,
they might reach back for 20 or even
30 miles (32–48km), since up to 3,000
wagons could
accompany an
army. While
the army’s
infantrymen each
carried three days’
rations and 40
cartridges, the
wagons carried the tons of extra food,
ammunition, medical supplies, and
baggage that would be needed. They
also carried forage for the animals
pulling the wagons, which might
amount to thousands of sacks of grain.
Pulled by a six-mule team, the
canvas-covered army wagon rolled
along at less than 3 miles (4.8km)
an hour. But slow though it was, the
wagon was the vital link between
the individual soldier’s haversack and
cartridge box, and the huge depots well
to the rear that stockpiled essential
supplies—coffee, sugar, hardtack, saltBEFORE
The Civil War was the first major war in
which railroads played a crucial role. At
sea, the Union naval blockade posed a
special problem for the South.
RAILROAD ADVANTAGE
The North, with many more miles of track
❮❮ 218–19, held the advantage with their
railroads. But the South’s interior lines of
transportation made it easier to transfer
troops and material from place to place.
ANACONDA PLAN
General Winfield Scott’s “Anaconda Plan”
❮❮ 64–65 and the Union blockade ❮❮ 72–73
were intended to cut off the South from
overseas trade and supplies. In response,
Southern blockade-runners delivered
cargoes containing everything from Enfield rifles
and German sabers to cognac and medicine.
By the war’s end, the Union army had
embraced a scorched earth policy to
disrupt Confederate supply networks.SCORCHED EARTH
In the fall of 1864, General Sheridan burned
the Shenandoah Valley 268–69 ❯❯. Shortly
after, General Sherman embarked on the march
through Georgia and the Carolinas 296–97 ❯❯
that devastated the heart of the Confederacy and
caused perhaps $100 million in damage.NEW DEVELOPMENTS
Mechanized transportation, along with
advances in military telegraphy, signaling,
and airborne observation, ushered in a
revolution in military logistics and communication.Ten miles (16km) away, General Robert
E. Lee fought to protect the last of the
Petersburg railroads still bringing in
supplies from the Confederacy’s rapidly
shrinking resource base in southern
Virginia and North Carolina.Railroad to Atlanta
At Atlanta, Union general William T.
Sherman was also dependent on a
single lifeline. Supplies had to be brought
over a single-track railroad that snaked
back hundreds of miles through the hills
of Georgia to supply bases in Tennessee.
To protect the route from Confederate
raiders, he garrisoned every mile of it
and then stockpiled depots along the
route. Without the railroad, he asserted,
his four-month campaign would have
required “36,800 wagons.”AFTER
SUPPLY, TRANSPORTATION, AND LOGISTICSSupply, Transportation,
and Logistics
During the Civil War, the armies’ constant need for food, clothing, ammunition, and medical
supplies determined the nature and outcome of some of the conflict’s most significant campaigns.
Logistics dominated everything from grand strategy to battlefield tactics.
Food foraging
A contemporary illustration
shows Union troops foraging
near Wacsaw Sound, Georgia,
during General Sherman’s 1864
March to the Sea. Sherman’s
62,000 soldiers appropriated
almost all of the local
agricultural resources.Ammunition packages
Cartridges usually came in packages of ten—such as these
for the British-made Enfield rifle—or in wooden cases of a
thousand. Where wagons could not go, pack mules might
carry the ammunition cases forward.The number of officers
and men in the U.S.
Army in 1860, before the war. A year
later it had swollen to 186,000, and
by the end of the war the Union army
totaled more than a million men.16,000
“Old Brains,” as Henry Halleck was often
called, was author of Elements of the
Military Art, one of the West Point Military
Academy’s most venerated textbooks in
the 1850s. Although a theoretician of the
first rank and the Union’s general-in-chief
from July 1862, Halleck proved not to be
a field commander. His talents lay more
in administration, planning, and logistics.
In 1864, when President Lincoln
replaced him as
general-in-chief with
Ulysses S. Grant, he
made Halleck the
army chief of staff.
In that position Old
Brains found his niche,
ensuring that
Union forces
had everything
necessary to
guarantee
victory.UNION GENERAL (1815–72)HENRY HALLECK