When the Civil War began, Northern soldiers and civilians alike
sought a framework to help make sense of the chaos that confronted
them. Many turned first to the classic European military texts from
the Napoleonic era, especially Antoine Henri Jomini's
Summary of
the Art of War. As Carol Reardon shows, Jomini's work was only
one voice in what ultimately became a lively and contentious
national discourse about how the North should conduct war at a time
when warfare itself was rapidly changing. She argues that the
absence of a strong intellectual foundation for the conduct of war
at its start--or, indeed, any consensus on the need for such a
foundation--ultimately contributed to the length and cost of the
conflict.
Reardon examines the great profusion of new or newly translated
military texts of the Civil War years intended to fill that
intellectual void and draws as well on the views of the soldiers
and civilians who turned to them in the search for a winning
strategy. In examining how debates over principles of military
thought entered into the question of qualifications of officers
entrusted to command the armies of Northern citizen soldiers, she
explores the limitations of nineteenth-century military thought in
dealing with the human elements of combat.