The Personal Memoirs of U.S. Grant
and
Napoleon
by Paul Johnson (in the Penguin Lives series)
It's long been common to deny that history is "made" by great men. Here are a couple of works that show great men gaining victories that persisted (in some sense) well over a century each, and it is genuinely hard to argue that the consequences would have followed without their achievements.
Consider the Civil War as Grant analyzed it. Army for army, the United States can defeat the rebellion. But there's beating, and then there's beating. Any outcome short of a comprehensive Southern surrender means that the Union does not survive, and there are lots of ways to get to such a partial victory, maybe only a few to attain a complete one. If the national forces don't get control of the Mississippi, a rump Confederacy may continue in Arkansas and Texas. That implies to this strategist that you must destroy Pemberton, run Johnston off and capture Vicksburg, and further, you must do it promptly even if your material, institutional and political support has gone all mushy.
In the last autumn to spring of the war, Lee's army must stay in front of Richmond even if detached corps have the capacity to threaten Washington. The fall of 1864 sees not only a terrific political struggle but also growing fatigue among the people, and getting through the winter may be all the U.S. army can do before its numbers and its political power base commence to shrink. So the strategist now sees that a new summer campaign will be a failure, quite possibly leading to a negotiated peace --- again, the breaking of the Union. Lee's forces must be beaten, not weakened or dispersed but beaten, and it must happen no later than early spring.
The country had plenty of generals, many well-trained, some experienced in battle, a few smart and diligent enough to win campaigns. Could a Grantless United States have brought the rebellion down? Better than even odds, if you leave some external factors out of account. What the reader gets from Grant's memoirs, however, is insight into how military aims and events have to be understood as flowing from political ones. This war more than any other American war ran with our four-year election cycle: Breckinridge outdraws Lincoln in 1860 and South Carolina rebels don't fire on Fort Sumter; come 1864, Northern Democrats triumph and the war crashes to an end, a reduced Union edgily making nice with a poor but vindicated Confederacy.
As a commander over several armies in the "West" (then extending from the Appalachian Mountains to Missouri), Grant conceived a strategy for gaining control of the Mississippi. Anybody with a large-scale map could have done that. Get solidly on both banks of the Ohio, take New Orleans and the mouths of the Cumberland and Tennessee, spend a little effort on Memphis, and pinch out the rebel centers in Arkansas and Mississippi. In his account, Grant stands apart from other generals in the theater in seeing the strategic need to finish the job quickly even if that means taking big risks. It's in the campaign from Cairo to Fort Donelson that he first makes clear what pain it caused him --- and what advantages he lost --- when others were slow to move. There was certainly a political aspect to the leadership of U.S. forces in the Civil War: State governors had a say in the appointment of senior officers, and to seem to punish a general for anything short of gross dereliction was foreign to the volunteer system. Tardiness and caution in committing troops could not justify removal or reassignment. There must have been something like rule by committee going on, and everybody knows how effective committees can be in making bold, effective decisions.
Grant succeeded at Vicksburg, in his telling, by taking direct control of the expeditionary force, picking subordinates who would respond promptly to his orders, and discarding military doctrines that promised a drawn-out campaign. He repeated the process at Chattanooga and before Richmond, and he taught it to Sherman, who would become a pioneer in "total war" as he marched through Georgia cutting off resources from Lee.
Some would claim that total war --- not just seeking to defeat armies but also attacking the people and the infrastructure that support them --- goes back to Napoleon or even the revolutionaries he supplanted. Paul Johnson, in his concise biography of the French emperor, argues on a different line. Bonaparte (who seldom used his given name) learned everything there was to know about military science as it existed around 1790, but he hated innovation. He won victories by practicing an art rather than advancing it. The novelty of his empire lay in how he governed it more than how he won it.
In the 1970s we would have called Bonaparte a control freak, though at the same time we would have acknowledged his talent for it. He knew --- and enforced --- the best way to do anything, from ordering next Tuesday's advance to establishing the new country of Westphalia. It was natural that he would run an empire the way a robber baron ("a Napoleon of finance," anybody remember that epithet?) would run his bank, from the center out and down. His claim to exercise all power and his success in the outcome taught the world a new model of the state; it wouldn't be hard to list half a dozen imitators from the time since, even if some have blamed national survival or historical inevitability for their reluctant seizure of absolute power.
Bonaparte made no such pretense, says Johnson. He loved power and spent his life getting it and exercising it. He lived in an ideology-free world. Now you may think that the worst features of modern times have grown out of philosophies, religions, movements, big ideas. (The six most terrifying words in English are "It's the principle of the thing," which someone always seems to utter just before a lot of people get hurt.) The Corsican's story refutes that position at least in part. His empire pursued no philosophy; it could take religion or leave it alone; its "people's movements" were phony; the big idea was winning wars. Bonaparte taught the world that it doesn't matter why you want to be in charge; what matters is whether you can create effective tools to exercise your tyranny.
Those tools weren't invented by Bonaparte, but he did much to perfect them and leave them behind for future dictators: the mass army, the efficient secret police, the ministry of information, and so forth.
Perhaps it's to Bonaparte's credit, though probably not, that he taught one final lesson to authoritarian rulers: Force can raise you but force can bring you down too.
If, as Grant believed, his strategic ideas and his leadership spelled the difference between a perpetual Union and collapse, then we are still building on his success. In the couple of generations' time it would have taken an independent South to wither and die, our united country gained hugely in population, standard of living, and economic and political influence. And if, as Paul Johnson suggests, Bonaparte's legacy survived in every totalitarian regime of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries . . . it may be that what the world needed to get over Bonaparte was just what Grant delivered.
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Grant and Napoleon