‘My General Idea of This War’: Simultaneous Advances and Civil War Military History

This essay offers a reconsideration of an idea in the ‘old’ Civil War military history, the wisdom of simultaneous advances, that has become part of the established wisdom about its conduct at the operational level of war during the more than 150 years that have passed since the conflict ended. (This essay's definition of the operational level of war follows the one contained in the June 2025 edition of DoD Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms: ‘The level of warfare at which campaigns and operations are planned, conducted, and sustained to achieve operational objectives to support achievement of strategic objectives’. ¹ ) It by no means makes any pretension of offering a comprehensive assessment of Civil War operational methods; nor does it make any pretension of breaking new ground in terms of the sources it utilises. Moreover, it is designed to be suggestive and recognizes that some of the arguments may not hold up if subjected to further investigation. In short, it is written in the spirit of Henry Adams who declared, ‘I have written too much history to believe in it. So if anyone wants to differ from me, I am prepared to agree with him’. ² —a spirit that should inform the efforts of all who write on subjects as complex and well-chronicled as the American Civil War in general and its military history in particular.

Abraham Lincoln's analysis of the challenge of operating on exterior lines at the operational level of war and his formula for overcoming it has been identified by historians as one of his great merits as a military thinker. On 13 January 1862, Lincoln, believed he had figured out a solution to the North's problem of overcoming an enemy operating on interior lines. That day, he laid out what he proclaimed to be, ‘[m] general idea of this war’, in a message to western commanders Maj. Gen. Henry W. Halleck and Brig. Gen. Don Carlos Buell. ‘[W]e have the greater numbers’, Lincoln observed, ‘and the enemy has the greater facility of concentrating forces upon points of collision; that we must fail, unless we can find some way of making our advantage an over-match for his; and that this can only be done by menacing him with superior forces at different points, at the same time; so that we can safely attack, one, or both, if he makes no change; and if he weakens one to strengthen the other, forbear to attack the strengthened one, but seize, and hold the weakened one, gaining so much’. ³

To support his analysis of the North's operational problem and his prescription for solving it, Lincoln turned to history, specifically the events of July 1861. The failure of Brig. Gen. Robert Patterson's forces to aggressively conduct offensive operations in the Shenandoah Valley had allowed the Confederates to take advantage of their interior lines to send forces from the Valley to Manassas Junction, which played a key role in the ability of the Confederates to win the Battle of First Manassas on 21 July. While there was much that was undeniably true in Lincoln's analysis, this was, the president himself clearly knew, a somewhat oversimplified explanation for why the North had been defeated at First Manassas. It was also an explanation that conveniently downplayed a number of other factors that contributed to the outcome of that campaign—not the least of which appeared to many in retrospect to have been an unwise insistence on the part of the president on offensive operations by a force commanded by Brig. Gen. Irvin McDowell that had been hastily assembled, composed of inadequately disciplined troops, and lacked adequate intelligence regarding what it would face in the field. ⁴

It would take over two years, though, for Lincoln's operational vision to receive its deserved validation. Until then, he was compelled to endure a series of generals who, among their many personal and professional flaws, were either unable or unwilling to grasp the wisdom of the president's vision or translate it into action. Finally, in 1864, Lincoln would appoint as commanding general of the U.S. Army a man who had the wisdom to put the North on the road to success by putting the concept of simultaneous advances into practice. As Lt. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant declared in his July 1865 report on his tenure in command, the problem with the Union war effort prior to his ascension to the post of general-in-chief in March 1864 had been that:

The armies in the East and West acted independently and without concert, like a balky team, no two ever pulling together, enabling the enemy to use to great advantage his interior lines of communication for transporting troops from east to west, re-enforcing the army most vigorously pressed. … It was a question whether our numerical strength and resources were not more than balanced by these disadvantages and the enemy's superior position. From the first, I was firm in the conviction that no peace could be had that would be stable and conducive to the happiness of the people, both North and South, until the military power of the rebellion was entirely broken. I therefore determined, first, to use the greatest number of troops practicable against the armed force of the enemy, preventing him from using the same force at different seasons against first one and then another of our armies. ⁵

In line with his diagnosis of the shortcomings of his predecessors’ management of operations, Grant developed a plan for 1864 that called for Maj. Gen. George Gordon Meade's Army of the Potomac, Maj. Gen. Franz Sigel's command in the Shenandoah Valley, and Maj. Gen. Benjamin F. Butler's Army of the James to commence offensive operations in Virginia simultaneously. The principle of simultaneous advances was not, however, just to be applied within the Virginia theatre. At the same time Meade, Sigel, and Butler began operations, three armies under Maj. Gen. William T. Sherman would take the offensive against Confederate forces in Georgia. By exerting pressure simultaneously on multiple fronts, Grant sought to deny the Confederates the ability, which they had taken advantage of the previous year to achieve a major battlefield victory at Chickamauga, to shift forces from one point to another. At some point somewhere, it was presumed, Federal superiority in numbers and material had to create an overmatch. When Grant presented his concept to Lincoln the latter was naturally delighted and felt no little sense of personal gratification—and vindication. ‘The President has been powerfully reminded’, wrote one of Lincoln's secretaries, ‘by General Grant[‘]s present movements and plans, of his old suggestion so constantly made and as constantly neglected … to move at once upon the enemy's whole line so as to bring into action our great superiority in numbers’. ‘Oh yes!’ Grant later recalled Lincoln exclaiming on hearing his ideas, ‘I see that. As we say out West, if a man can’t skin he must hold a leg’. Grant liked the president's analogy so much that he also used it in a letter to Sherman, remarking, ‘if Sigel can’t skin himself he can hold a leg while someone else skins’. ⁶

Of course, it would take until April 1865 for Grant's grand plan to bring about the capture of the Confederate capital and surrender of the most important rebel armies—and at a heavy cost in Northern blood and treasure. That this was the case has by no means diminished the enthusiasm with which students of the Civil War have endorsed his and Lincoln's concept of simultaneous advances and accorded it a hallowed place among the received wisdoms, the big takeaways, of Civil War operational history. Indeed, Lincoln's grasp of the virtues of simultaneous advances early in the war figures significantly in the enthusiastically positive portrayal of his performance as commander in chief that dominates literature on the military history of the Civil War. In his 2008 study of Lincoln's management of the war, James M. McPherson approvingly proclaimed appreciation of the value of simultaneous advances one of the ‘hallmarks of Lincoln's conception of military strategy’, but one that lamentably remained ‘unfulfilled until he had the team of Grant, Sherman, [George H.] Thomas, and [Philip H.] Sheridan in place’. ‘Lincoln was right’, declared Michael Burlingame in his massive 2009 two-volume biography of Lincoln, ‘the North's advantages in manpower and economic strength would secure victory only if the military applied pressure on all fronts simultaneously’. In 2010 Donald Stoker argued the idea of ‘multiple, concurrent movements against the enemy’ that Lincoln laid out in his correspondence with Buell and Halleck ‘one of the best methods of fighting the war … proposed’ and joined McPherson and Burlingame in lamenting, ‘The implementation of a Union strategy along the lines of Lincoln's idea would be plagued by generals unwilling or incapable of carrying it out’. The president's recognition of the advantage of simultaneous advances, according to T. Harry Williams, was one of the principle qualities that made him ‘a great natural strategist … a better one than any of his generals’, ‘He grasped immediately’, declared Williams, ‘the advantage that numbers gave the North and urged his generals to keep up a constant pressure on the whole strategic line of the Confederacy’. ⁷ Fortunately, in 1864 Lincoln found his man in Grant, the disjointed offensives ended, and the North was finally put on the path to victory. It was not Grant's brand of whiskey the men on the North's long list of failed generals lacked, but his Lincoln-endorsed simultaneous advances brand of operations.

One of the appeals of the simultaneous advances concept is that it offers a fairly simple test of merit for commanders and for assessing and explaining the conduct and outcome of operations—and one that has the virtue of being validated by Lincoln and Grant, two towering figures in American military history—Was the principle applied or not? It also contains a seemingly easily digestible lesson from history for the not inconsiderable audience that turns to the past in search of practical guidance for dealing with problems. To cater to this audience, a ‘lessons learned’ approach to history informs much historical study, which is evident in the extensive ‘lessons on leadership’ genre of literature that purports to provide modern leaders with models to follow from the past. ⁸ Underlying these works is the presumption that if a leader in the past was successful, then the thing for today's or tomorrow's leader to do is to follow their formula for success, whether in managing men, dealing with colleagues, or planning or conducting operations.

Of course, a problem with this is that ‘solutions to problems are not’, historian Jay Luvaas observed in the course of an insightful and compelling consideration of the value of proper study of military history, ‘interchangeable parts’. In a 1986 critique of the U.S. Army's endeavour to draw lessons from the Vietnam War, David H. Petraeus lamented that too often when leaders seek guidance from history ‘the result is lessons that are superficial and overgeneralized, analogies applied to a wide range of events with little sensitivity to variations in the situation’. ⁹ In this, Luvaas and Petraeus echoed a compelling observation the celebrated Prussian military theorist Carl von Clausewitz made when he reflected, ‘On Historical Examples’. Clausewitz made clear (undoubtedly with Antoine Henri de Jomini in mind) that he had little use for those who approached the study of history in search of universal truths and ‘lessons learned’ that provided simple prescriptions for action that could be applied universally. Nor did he have much sympathy for those who sought to, in the words of Luvaas, ‘let doctrine sit in judgment of historical events … on the assumption that battles and campaigns, ancient as well as modern, have succeeded or failed to the degree that they adhered to the principles of war as explained by Jomini’. Indeed, it was undoubtedly such people that Clausewitz had in mind when he warned that ‘superficial, irresponsible handling of history leads to hundreds of wrong ideas and bogus theorizing’. ‘If anyone’, he bluntly declared, ‘lists a dozen defeats in which the losing side attacked with divided columns, I can list a dozen victories in which that very tactic was employed’. ¹⁰

In addition to the problem of the prescriptive and dogmatic nature of the insistence on the invariable wisdom of simultaneous advances during the Civil War, ¹¹ there is also the fact that the much-maligned method of undertaking offensive operations sequentially instead of simultaneously could in fact be very effective. Indeed, its effectiveness has been demonstrated on many occasions in military history by leaders facing the challenge of conducting offensive operations. The concept and thinking behind it is fairly simple: the initial attack (or attacks) focuses the defender's attention on one part of his line and induces him to commit his reserves there and/or weaken other points on his line, thus enhancing the potential for decisive success through subsequent attacks on those points.

The logic of sequencing attacks was evident in the ‘wearing battle’ concept that shaped British operational thinking in dealing with the problem presented by the Western Front in the First World War. Initial attacks, commanders believed, would induce the enemy to commit their reserves to points of secondary importance and thus enable a mass assault to succeed at a point on the line that would allow decisive success. ¹² The logic behind sequencing attacks, rather than making them simultaneous, can also be seen in the communist offensive of 1967–1968 in South Vietnam. By conducting operations against Khe Sanh in 1967, communist forces created the impression in the minds of American commanders that they were attempting to replay Dien Bien Phu and induced them to reinforce the base, which left other parts of South Vietnam vulnerable to communist attacks that, though ultimately unsuccessful tactically and operationally, did have profound consequences strategically. ¹³

Indeed, one can look to the Civil War itself to find instances where the sequencing of offensive actions proved effective—and the general employing this method was none other than Lt. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant.

By the end of June 1864, Grant had seen his grand plan for simultaneous advances in the Shenandoah Valley, along the James River, and against Lee's army fail to deliver a decisive ‘skinning’ to the Confederate cause in Virginia. It started out well enough. During the first week of May, Sigel's command pushed south up the Shenandoah Valley with every indication that it would fulfil its mission of holding Confederate forces there in place and thus facilitate the skinning that was to take place elsewhere. Meanwhile, Butler's command advanced with little difficulty to the peninsula formed by the the James and Appomattox Rivers known as Bermuda Hundred, which placed it within striking distance of Richmond, Petersburg, and the railroad that connected the two towns. To the north, Federal forces operating under Grant's direct supervision fought and maneuvered against Lee's army at the Wilderness and Spotsylvania. In mid-May, though, Butler's Army of the James suffered a tactical and operational setback at the Second Battle of Drewry's Bluff and Sigel's command was routed at the Battle of New Market. Despite these setbacks Grant had been able by the end of May to drive Lee's army to the outskirts of Richmond, though the forces under his command suffered tremendous casualties in the process. Grant was then able to link up with Butler's command and cross the James in an attempt to capture Petersburg, but the First Petersburg Offensive failed on 15–18 June. As if this were not bad enough, in mid-June, Confederate forces commanded by Maj. Gen. Jubal Early defeated Sigel's successor, Maj. Gen. David Hunter (whose operations had opened promisingly with a victory at Piedmont on 5 June), at Lynchburg and induced Hunter to retreat to West Virginia. This enabled Early to push north down the Shenandoah Valley and cross the Potomac River into Maryland. During the second week of July, Early's command reached the outskirts of Washington, then fell back to the Shenandoah Valley, where it closed the month by defeating a Federal force at the Battle of Second Kernstown and burning Chambersburg, Pennsylvania. ¹⁴

Grant's first significant effort after the failure of the First Petersburg Offensive came in the form of an attempt by two of Meade's corps to ‘move … to the left and endeavour to stretch to the Appomattox’ west of Petersburg. Somewhat hastily conceived, overly optimistic in its goals, and poorly managed, this operation produced what became known as the Battle of the Jerusalem Plank Road on 22 June, which ended with Union forces losing over 1,700 prisoners and failing to achieve Grant's objective. ¹⁵

As a consequence of the Bermuda Hundred and Overland Campaigns and the First and Second Petersburg Offensives, Grant found himself with elements from Butler's command occupying the lines at Bermuda Hundred and a bridgehead on the north side of the James at what was known as Deep Bottom. South of Bermuda Hundred and the Appomattox River, Grant had one corps from Butler's army and the four corps of Maj. Gen. George G. Meade's Army of the Potomac confronting the Confederates’ fortified positions defending Petersburg. Grant's forces were superior in numbers, but for the Confederate defenders, the railroad that connected Richmond and Petersburg gave Lee the ability to shift forces back and forth between the Richmond and Petersburg fronts—exactly the sort of operational scenario that Lincoln had in mind when he laid out his ‘general idea’ of simultaneous advances in January 1862.

Much of Grant's attention in the weeks after the setback at the Jerusalem Plank Road was devoted to working with Washington to coordinate a response to Early's operations. Nonetheless, during this time the seeds for another operational offensive at Richmond and Petersburg were planted when soldiers in Maj. Gen. Ambrose Burnside's Ninth Corps hatched the idea of digging a mine that would reach under Confederate lines south and east of Petersburg and then blowing a hole in the Confederate defences that would enable an assault to succeed tactically that could be quickly exploited to achieve a decisive operational success at Petersburg. Grant, though sceptical of the scheme, gave Burnside authorization to dig the mine and then developed a plan for placing this tactical action in the context of a larger operational offensive that would see offensive action against the Confederate lines both north of the James and south of the Appomattox. ¹⁶ In what would become known as the Third Richmond-Petersburg Offensive, Grant confronted the challenge of engaging the Confederates at two separate points on their line. Contrary to Grant's image as the champion of simultaneous advances, though, the operations north and south of the James and whatever tactical actions resulted would take place not simultaneously, but sequentially. ¹⁷

First, Grant decided to have Maj. Gen. Winfield Scott Hancock's corps from the Army of the Potomac cross to the north side of the James. There it would be joined by two divisions of cavalry under the command of Maj. Gen. Philip Sheridan. Hancock's command would then undertake offensive operations against Confederate defences at New Market Heights and Fussell's Mill and support the cavalry as it made a stab at the railroads that ran north of Richmond. Grant wanted Hancock to see if he could advance at least to Chaffin's Bluff on the James and thought it ‘barely possible that by a bold move this expedition may surprise the little garrison of citizen soldiery now in Richmond and get in’. If this did not happen, Grant hoped operations north of the James and whatever tactical actions resulted from them would at the least draw Lee's attention to that front and induce him to shift forces from elsewhere along his lines to deal with Hancock's and Sheridan's movements. Grant then intended to ‘take advantage of his necessary withdrawal of troops from Petersburg to explode a mine … and assault the enemy's lines at that place’. ¹⁸

Hancock's three divisions finished crossing the James early on the morning of 27 July just downstream from Deep Bottom. Hancock's men then advanced and drove the Confederates from their advanced positions along the New Market Road. Upon encountering the main Confederate line on New Market Heights, though, Hancock prudently halted his advance. Given the strength of the Confederate position, it did not take long for him to determine that ‘the chances of successful assault were unfavourable’ tactically. During the afternoon of the twenty-seventh, Grant arrived on the scene to see what was going on. Though he did not meet personally with Hancock, Grant quickly came to share his assessment of the prospects for tactical success that could be taken advantage of to produce significant operational results from a direct assault. He left a note with Hancock advising him simply to try, ‘if possible’, to exert pressure on the enemy in front of him. At the least, Grant hoped, this would have the operational effect of enabling Sheridan's cavalry, which had halted in order to cover Hancock's right, to be released from this duty so it could conduct its raid against the railroads. The following morning, Hancock endeavoured to fulfil Grant's hopes that he could advance to Chaffin's Bluff, but to his consternation found the Confederate position even stronger tactically than it had been the previous day and no way to accomplish anything tactically that would set the conditions for attainment of his operational objectives. ¹⁹

This was the case in part because Lee responded operationally to the Federal offensive as Grant had hoped. When Hancock's offensive began, Confederates defences north of the James consisted of about 6,000 second-rate and auxiliary troops from Lt. Gen. Richard S. Ewell's Department of Richmond, two brigades from Maj. Gen. Cadmus Wilcox's division, and the four brigades of Maj. Gen. Joseph Kershaw's division. Kershaw's command had been sent north of the James only a few days earlier with Lee hoping they could ‘endeavour to dislodge the enemy’ and ‘break him upon the north side of the James River’. When reports reached Lee of the Federal advance on 27 July, he made the operational decision to order the cavalry divisions of Maj. Gen. Fitzhugh Lee and Maj. Gen. William H.F. Lee, along with Maj. Gen. Henry Heth's division, to cross to the north side of the James and directed First Corps commander and ‘temporary’ Lt. Gen. Richard H. Anderson to provide overall direction to operations on that front. ²⁰

Well aware of the risks he was running in doing this and long hopeful that he could somehow eliminate the ability of the Federals to cause mischief north of the James, Lee wanted offensive action. Early on 28 July his subordinates obliged. Sheridan's men, their raiding mission called off by Grant and Meade, were, however, able to successfully fight off the Confederates, but the tactical engagement fought around Gravel Hill and the Long Bridge Road in which they did so effectively brought an end to whatever hopes the Federals had that they might achieve anything more operationally north of the James. With the attack by Burnside's command at Petersburg scheduled for 30 July, Grant nonetheless decided to keep most of Hancock's command and Sheridan's cavalry north of the James another day in order to hold the Confederates there. He did so with reports indicating that an additional division from the Army of Northern Virginia, Maj. Gen. Charles Field's, had been shifted north of the James, leaving less than 20,000 Confederates to defend the rest of the Richmond-Petersburg front. ²¹

As Hancock held his position on 29 July, Anderson planned a major attack for the following day. Unfortunately for the Confederates, the gamble they took in massing for an attack north of the James came to naught, for Hancock's men were able to recross the James successfully during the night of 29–30 July. Grant and Meade ordered them to do so hoping to employ them to support Burnside's assault. They were hardly needed, as the Federals not only had a scheme for blowing a hole in the Confederate lines that would succeed spectacularly, but a massive advantage in manpower south of the Appomattox River because, as Grant later wrote, ‘We were successful in drawing the enemy's troops to the north side of the James as I expected’. Unfortunately, the Federals were unable to take advantage of the fruits of Grant's well-conceived scheme of sequential operational offensives. Such gross incompetence was displayed tactically in the execution of the follow-up assault on the Crater on 30 July that Burnside's military career was brought to an effective end and the entire affair gained a well-deserved place of prominence on the long list of operations in the Civil War whose distinguishing characteristic was incompetent generalship. ²²

Yet, whatever the flaws in their execution, it is clear that the value of sequential advances had lost none of its appeal to Grant as a consequence of the events of July 1864. When he next conducted offensive operations around Richmond and Petersburg, Grant did not undertake simultaneous advances north and south of the James, but, once again, sequenced his attacks operationally. On the night of 13–14 August, Grant opened the Fourth Richmond-Petersburg Offensive by having Hancock's command once again cross to the north side of the James near Deep Bottom. As he had a few weeks earlier, Lee found himself compelled to withdraw forces from the Petersburg front in an attempt to contain the Federal offensive and then scrambled to respond as ‘the enemy’, in Lee's words, ‘availed himself of the withdrawal of troops from Petersburg to the north side of James River’. ²³

Four days after Hancock completed crossing of the James, Grant and Meade pushed Maj. Gen. Gouverneur Warren's Fifth Corps south and west in the direction of the Weldon Railroad with orders to tear up the tracks. So diminished, though, was the Confederate force around Petersburg as a consequence of the need to counter Hancock's operations, that Warren's men had an easy time reaching the railroad. Indeed, they encountered such feeble resistance that it did not take long for Grant and Meade to decide they would not be content operationally just to tear up track but instead endeavour to maintain a permanent lodgement on the railroad. Lee's subordinates attempted to drive them away in vicious fighting on 18, 19, and 21 August that led one Union staff officer to declare, ‘It is touching a tiger's cubs to get on that road!’ However, due the menace north of the James, the Confederates were unable to marshal sufficient strength to drive the Federals off. Consequently, Warren was able to fight off the rebel attacks and win a clear tactical and operational victory in what became known as the Battle of the Weldon Railroad. ²⁴

Grant employed sequential operations yet again in late September and early October in planning and executing what became known as the Fifth Richmond-Petersburg Offensive. First, north of the James Federal forces assaulted New Market Heights and Fort Harrison on 29 September, which once again compelled Lee to accept operational risk by weakening the lines around Petersburg. Grant and Meade then shifted their energy south of the Appomattox, pushing two corps from the Army of the Potomac west with an eye on extending the Union line toward the Boydton Plank Road and South Side Railroad. On 30 September, Union forces seized Fort Archer, one of the key points in the Confederate defensive line along the Squirrel Level Road. Although, like the other offensives around Richmond, the Fifth Offensive ultimately failed to achieve truly decisive operational success around Richmond and Petersburg on their own, their cumulative effect and the strain having to cope with the situation imposed on Lee as he found himself being pulled one way, then the other, operationally were decidedly beneficial to the Union cause. ²⁵

That sequencing offensives could be a fruitful method for advancing the Union war effort in Virginia was further illustrated by the fact that it was not at the same time as, but during the period between the Fourth and Fifth Petersburg Offensives that Union forces under Maj. Gen. Philip Sheridan undertook operations in the Shenandoah Valley that produced Union victories at Third Winchester and Fisher's Hill. After thwarting the Federal offensive at Deep Bottom and the Crater, Lee decided to use the breathing space to send a force under Anderson's command from Richmond and Petersburg to the Shenandoah Valley that consisted of an infantry division commanded by Maj. Gen. Joseph Kershaw, Maj. Gen. Fitzhugh Lee's division of cavalry, and an artillery battalion under Maj. Wilfred E. Cutshaw. News of the departure of this force for the Shenandoah Valley on 6 August, the same day Sheridan assumed command at Harpers Ferry, quickly reached the Union high command and, in combination with a 13 August raid on a wagon train at Berryville, led Sheridan to drop his plan to attack Early's command at Fisher's Hill and to act on the operational defensive. Consequently, unlike in May, there was no simultaneous operational advance in the Shenandoah Valley when the force under Grant's direction undertook the Fourth Offensive against Lee's command that resulted in the capture of the Weldon Railroad on 13–21 August. ²⁶

Grant launched the Fourth Offensive in part, in the words of historian William Feis, ‘to remind Lee that sending troops away [from Richmond and Petersburg] would be costly’. On 14 September, with Grant having made his point by seizing the Weldon Railroad and Sheridan still maintaining a defensive posture, Kershaw's division and Cutshaw's artillery left the Shenandoah Valley. When this force departed Winchester, Union intelligence reported it with remarkable alacrity to Sheridan. Both he and Grant, who had travelled to West Virginia to personally consult with Sheridan, immediately decided the opportunity had come to take the operational offensive in the Shenandoah Valley, which resulted in Sheridan winning crushing victories over Early's diminished command at Third Winchester on 19 September and Fisher's Hill on 21–22 September. Then, with the Federal forces at Richmond and Petersburg quiet, Lee responded on 23 September by making what historian Richard Sommers declares ‘one of the worst miscalculations he ever made’, directing Anderson to send Kershaw's and Cutshaw's commands back to the Shenandoah Valley. Consequently, after being absent when Grant launched the offensive that seized the Weldon Railroad, then being absent when Sheridan launched the offensive that defeated Early, they would also be absent when Grant launched the Fifth Offensive that captured Fort Harrison and Fort Archer. ²⁷

The purpose of this essay has been not to argue for the sequenced attack as an invariably superior alternative to simultaneous advances. After all, to paraphrase Clausewitz, just as there have been generals who employed sequential advances with success operationally, so too there have been commanders who encountered problems and failed employing them. Moreover, there was a great deal of undeniably sound, logical thinking behind Lincoln's and Grant's efforts to achieve simultaneous advances. This was compellingly illustrated in the western theatre in 1863. The inactivity of Maj. Gen. William S. Rosecrans's Army of the Cumberland during the Vicksburg Campaign enabled the Confederates to assemble a force under Gen. Joseph Johnston in Mississippi that, had its operations been better coordinated with Maj. Gen. John C. Pemberton's, could have severely complicated Grant's efforts to secure the capture of Vicksburg. Likewise, Grant's inactivity after Vicksburg and the difficulties Meade encountered conducting offensive operations in Virginia enabled the Confederates in September 1863 to reinforce Gen. Braxton Bragg's army in Georgia, which produced the bruising Union defeat at Chickamauga. Moreover, in light of the fact that few things are certain when it comes to military operations, it is by no means unreasonable to argue that Grant might well have achieved even greater success in his operations in Virginia in July‒September 1864 had he in fact chosen to make simultaneous attacks—and been able to pull it off.

This last consideration is, of course, an important one in assessing any operational method. It was all well and good to advocate for simultaneous advances, but in truth, with the exception of late 1862 and the opening of the 1864 campaigns—neither of which produced truly decisive results for the Union cause (at least not as quickly as Lincoln and the Northern public hoped for)—coordinating simultaneous advances often was not done because it simply proved unfeasible. In part, this was due to the limits of the tools strategists had at their disposal for coordinating operations. More important, practical problems that commanders in the field had to deal with—from logistical concerns to the condition of their army to the actions of enemy to political considerations—often proved far more compelling factors in determining the timing of offensive operations than the wishes of those endeavouring to impose a measure of coordination on their efforts. ²⁸

On 27 January 1862, for instance, two weeks after he wrote to Halleck and Buell laying out his concept of simultaneous advances, Lincoln endeavoured to translate his operational vision into action, issuing an order directing that ‘22nd day of February 1862, be the day for a general movement of the Land and Naval forces of the United States’. ²⁹ Federal commanders west of the Appalachian Mountains, though, feeling compelled to respond to circumstances on their immediate fronts did not wait for 22 February to begin operations—with good reason and with eminently positive results for the Union war effort. Even before Lincoln issued his order a force from Buell's command had advanced into southeastern Kentucky under the direction of Brig. Gen. George H. Thomas. In early February, weeks before the date designated in the president's order, a joint army-navy force in Halleck's department under the command of Grant and Flag Officer Andrew Foote initiated operations against enemy strong points on the Tennessee and Cumberland rivers in response to reports of Confederate activity in the area. Elsewhere in Halleck's department, an advance simultaneous with Grant's and Foote's operations on Fort Donelson began in southern Missouri under the direction of Brig. Gen. Samuel Curtis on February 10. Mixing both sequenced and simultaneous advances in response to specific circumstances, events proved, turned out to be wise, for Halleck's and Buell's forces were able to win an important battlefield victory at Mill Springs in Kentucky on 19 January, capture Forts Henry and Donelson in Tennessee on 6 and 16 February, and expel pro-Confederate forces from Missouri by 17 February—all before the president's designated date for a simultaneous advance. Indeed, waiting for all offensives to take place simultaneously as Lincoln directed, could in this case have been positively harmful to the Union war effort. ³⁰

Grant's planning for the 1864 campaign also illustrates how the interaction between war and politics that was central to Clausewitz's analysis of war could impact the planning and execution of operations. Grant's initial plan included a force under Maj. Gen. Nathaniel Banks advancing from the Mississippi Valley to Mobile. The Lincoln administration, however, insisted, mainly for political reasons, that Banks first conduct operations in March along the Red River in Louisiana. When Banks's campaign came to grief, it killed Grant's hopes for an advance on Mobile that would complement Sherman's efforts in Georgia the way Sigel's and Butler's operations were intended to complement Meade's. ³¹

The virtues of any particular approach to dealing with problems are almost invariably situational. Thus, assessment of the appropriateness of any approach to any particular situation must take into account specific circumstances and context rather than be based on assumptions of the inherent superiority of any particular approach. Indeed, to present a ‘cookie-cutter’ single approach in almost any aspect of the conduct of war, a phenomenon that Clausewitz once aptly declared ‘a true chameleon’, with an eye on prescription and assumption that deviation from it dooms one to failure is folly. Moreover, it ignores Clausewitz's emphatic and compelling warnings regarding the use of history and its relationship to military theory and doctrine. ‘If,’ wrote Clausewitz, ‘some historical event is being presented in order to demonstrate a general truth, care must be taken that every aspect bearing on the truth at issue is fully and circumstantially developed. … [S]uperficial, irresponsible handling of history leads to hundreds of wrong ideas and bogus theorizing’. ³²

Not only is arguing for any one approach in judging and assessing past military operations and doctrine and insisting on its virtues over any other alternative intellectually problematic, it is a disservice to readers—especially to those seeking to use history and theory (which is rooted in study and reflection on past experience) properly. Rather, the purpose of study is to, in Clausewitz's words, ‘guide him in his self-education … just as a wise teacher guides and stimulates a young man's intellectual development, but is careful not to lead him by the hand for the rest of his life. … to provide a thinking man with a frame of reference for the movements he has been trained to carry out, rather than to serve as a guide which … lays down precisely the path he must take’. ³³

Indeed, a spirit of dogmatism in regard to the question of simultaneous advances or any particular approach to problems is in conflict with the spirit that animated the eminently pragmatic Lincoln's efforts as he steered the North to victory. Lincoln acknowledged the limits of principles and hazards of dogmatism in the very January 1862 letter to Halleck and Buell where he laid out his ‘general idea’. ‘In application of the … rule I am suggesting’, the president readily acknowledged, ‘every particular case will have its modifying circumstances’. ³⁴ While he and Lincoln were not always the smoothly operating team portrayed in much historical writing on the Civil War, on this point, the need for flexibility and pragmatism in how one approached problems, Grant was in full agreement with his commander-in-chief. ‘Some of our generals failed because they worked out everything by rule’, Grant declared as he reflected on the war during the 1870s, ‘I don’t underrate the value of military knowledge, but if men make war in slavish observances of rules, they will fail’. ³⁵