The United States Civil War pitted Americans against Americans,
leaving nearly 600,000 dead. Many of these deaths were in vain. Here are
some of the most deadly blunders of the War between the States.
The Civil War in and of itself can be accurately described as a Confederate blunder. It's unclear
whether Lincoln wanted a war, but his actions suggest that he may have hoped to bait the
Confederates into starting one. Lincoln had been repeatedly advised to evacuate Fort Sumter,
a federal installation in Charleston, South Carolina, unless he wanted war,
but he left the troops in place. When U.S. ships attempted to resupply them, the Confederates took
the bait, accusing Lincoln of conducting hostile operations in Confederate waters.
"Rather than submit to Northern rule, the South decides to fight. They want a separate nation."
On April 10, 1861, the Confederate government declared war on the United
States. Only Secretary of State Robert Toombs objected. He called the war a suicidal blunder
that would doom the Confederacy and begged President Jefferson Davis to
reconsider. The Confederacy could not be the aggressor in such a war. Such
a posture would not win it any friends and would very likely unleash a "hornet's nest"
of hostility by the much more numerous U.S. forces. The South had no hope of winning.
Despite Toombs' warnings, the war hawks won out. On April 12, 1861, Confederate guns under General
Pierre Gustave Toussaint Beauregard shelled Fort Sumter until it surrendered the following day.
The Civil War had officially begun, and the Confederacy's fate had been sealed.
When the Civil War began, both sides expected a short conflict. They quickly mustered up
volunteer armies, setting the stage for the fiasco that was the war's first big battle.
President Lincoln had no fit commanders, so he promoted Ohio major Irvin McDowell
three full ranks to brigadier general and gave him 30,000 inexperienced volunteers with which
to make an army. McDowell objected, saying building an army from farmers, fishermen,
and felons was impossible. Lincoln's response? The Confederate forces were just as motley.
Without experienced officers, McDowell could only deploy a little over half his army. Nevertheless,
his forces drove back Beauregard's men before Stonewall Jackson rallied and Confederate
reinforcements repelled them. The Union retreat started out orderly. But the American political
class, who had been observing the battle like a sporting event, blocked the main line of
retreat with their carriages. Trapped between the spectators and attacking Confederates,
Union forces panicked and rushed back to D.C. in the "Great Skedaddle." Lincoln realized he
was going to need a real army to win — without interference from politicians.
In 1862, the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia under General Robert E. Lee invaded Maryland,
where they ran into General George McClellan's Army of the Potomac. Ambrose Burnside, one of
McClellan's subordinates, was tasked with crossing Antietam Creek at the Lower Bridge. Due to a
mix-up in orders, however, Burnside's forces made three uncoordinated attacks across the bridge,
which was defended by a mere 500 Confederates under Toombs. Toombs' men held off Burnside's
numerically superior forces for four hours, and were still standing by 1 p.m. that afternoon.
"The art of war is simple enough. Fight it out till the end."
The tragedy of this situation isn't just that Union forces achieved virtually nothing in
their attacks, but that they could have achieved everything with more patience. Before attacking,
Burnside sent Isaac Rodman to locate another crossing downstream. Eventually, he found one
at Snavely Ford. Had Burnside waited, many Union lives might have been saved. What did his assaults
achieve? Not much. Toombs simply withdrew his men to avoid being flanked, losing just 120 men.
Burnside's failure became immortalized in the name "Burnside Bridge." Nevertheless,
Lincoln later appointed him commander of the Army of the Potomac. He would lead his
men to the disaster at Fredericksburg in December 1862. On the Confederate side,
Toombs resigned his commission out of frustration with Jefferson Davis and his government. He would
eventually flee to France to escape an indictment for treason after the war.
Confederate Brigadier General Gideon Pillow owed his position to his role as former President James
Polk's legal partner. From a court-martial in Mexico to a failed political career in America,
he was hardly someone to trust with an army. Despite his history, Pillow was
tasked with defending Fort Donelson, Tennessee, against Ulysses S. Grant's advancing forces.
As it became clear that Donelson would fall, Pillow and his superior, General John Floyd,
massed their forces for a breakout. Pillow's men drove back the Union forces, but then
decided to withdraw to trenches to resupply instead of pushing forward, thereby throwing
away their advantage. A Union counterattack forced the Confederates back into the fort.
In a farcical series of events, Floyd transferred command to Pillow and fled across the Tennessee
River. Pillow then transferred command to Brigadier General Simon Bolivar Buckner and fled,
too, declaring himself too important to be captured. Buckner surrendered
the fort and was thus held responsible for the defeat, despite Pillow and Floyd's cowardice.
Grant commented to Buckner that, had he captured Pillow, he would have released him. He was too
much of a liability to his own side to waste in captivity. Grant's assessment was dead-on. At
Stones River in 1862, Pillow was caught hiding behind a tree instead of leading his troops.
In 1862, the first major battle of the Western Front pitted Ulysses Grant against veteran
Confederate General Albert Sidney Johnston. At Shiloh, a small Tennessee town, the Confederates
looked to smash the Union advance in Mississippi, using speed and surprise to their advantage.
In a series of rapid and brilliant maneuvers, Johnston's forces outflanked Grant's men, pushing
the U.S. Army onto the banks of the Tennessee into an area called the Hornet's Nest. Grant's men
hunkered down and held off repeated Confederate charges, shooting and killing Johnston.
General P.G.T. Beauregard, transferred away from Virginia, took command after
Johnston's death. Although Union forces were stretched to their limit, his own army had
suffered 10,000 casualties. Darkness and faulty intelligence persuaded Beauregard
to telegraph Richmond declaring victory while postponing the final attack to the next morning.
Although historians disagree on the correctness of Beauregard's actions, the battle wasn't over.
Unbeknownst to Beauregard, Gen. Don Carlos Buell arrived at 6 a.m. with
20,000 reinforcements. The outnumbered Confederates had now no chance of winning
and retreated to Corinth, Mississippi. The blow to the Confederacy was enormous:
Grant now had a clear path into Mississippi, and the Confederacy had lost its best general.
From 1862 into 1863, the Confederacy managed to put together a new army, the Army of Tennessee
under General Braxton Bragg. Bragg led his army to a series of tactical victories in Tennessee but
didn't follow up on them, allowing Union General William Rosecrans to march on the railroad hub of
Chattanooga on the Georgia-Tennessee state line. Bragg decided to encircle his enemy,
but friction with his subordinates, who hated him – and vice versa – doomed the plan.
"But his personality was such that he couldn't get along with people."
But Bragg didn't simply retreat into Georgia as Rosecrans expected. Instead,
he concentrated his forces along Chickamauga Creek and made a stand,
forcing the federal army into a fight it didn't expect.
"For the men who survived, Chickamauga would be remembered as one gigantic brawl."
At Chickamauga, the two sides battered away at each other in a horrendous battle
that saw a lot of close combat with bayonets. Despite bloody assault after bloody assault,
Rosecrans' lines held. Then, inexplicably, the normally competent Union general made a colossal
error that cost him the battle and nearly destroyed his army. As the battle progressed,
Rosecrans believed a gap had developed in his line. He pulled back a division to plug
it. The only problem? The gap didn't exist. In pulling back men to plug his nonexistent gap,
he opened up a real one. Confederate forces, incredulous at their luck,
charged through and broke Rosecrans' army, which retreated to Chattanooga. Fortunately,
Bragg did not pursue him, allowing Union forces to rally two months later.
Missouri was one of the four slave-holding border states that opted to remain part of
the Union in 1861, but it had a significant population of Confederate sympathizers,
who rose up against Union forces there. The war in Missouri, unlike the main theaters,
was a no-holds-barred guerrilla conflict that saw horrific massacres.
Among the most notorious was the 1864 Centralia Massacre, when untrained,
unarmed Missouri farm boys were sent to fight veteran Confederate guerrillas and lost.
"We've had the devil's own day, haven't we."
There, "Bloody Bill" Anderson lived up to his name. His pro-Confederate raiders terrorized
towns, robbed civilians, and raped and killed slaves. After his men massacred a train full
of unarmed Union recruits at Centralia, local Union commanders sent the 39th Missouri Mounted
Infantry to stop the veteran guerrilla force. But in their haste, the commanders hadn't bothered to
properly equip the men, let alone train them. Anderson's men left Centralia and hid behind
a hill outside town. The unsuspecting Union recruits were promptly massacred.
Centralia was no ordinary massacre. While commanders often respected dead soldiers'
bodies, Confederate guerrillas observed no such niceties. Anderson, who had earned his stripes
fighting Native Americans on the frontier, had picked up the practice of scalping enemy dead,
ensuring his place in Civil War history as the most brutal commander.
In 1864, the Confederate Army of Tennessee abandoned Atlanta and the Confederate war
industries to General Sherman's army and retreated into Tennessee. Double amputee
General John Bell Hood's depleted army now attempted to trap Union forces near
Nashville in a bid to raise Confederate morale. After failing to encircle the Union forces,
an embarrassed Hood's desire for revenge resulted in the war's worst blunder bar none,
one which permanently broke the Army of Tennessee.
Confederate soldier Sam Watkins described the horror of the battle, which he called
the "grand coronation of death." Hood threw 23,000 men against Union hilltop positions near Franklin,
Tennessee. Confederate forces, without artillery support and armed with single-shot muskets and
rifles, stood no chance against the Union forces on high ground, who were armed with
16-shot repeating rifles. Hood's men would pay for their commander's rash decision with their lives.
"What made it particularly tragic was modern technology meeting much more ancient tactics,
so the death rates were truly appalling."
Unsurprisingly, the battle was a massacre. Hood's outgunned and outnumbered soldiers suffered over
6,000 casualties, including seven generals and an astonishing 63 regimental commanders. Even
by Civil War standards, this was catastrophic. As a result, lower-ranking officers were forced
to take charge of larger divisions. And the Army of Tennessee was reduced to a mob of 20,000 men,
a sad end for an army that had fought so hard and so well despite its commanders.
In 1864, General Grant's army marched on Richmond looking to end the war. General
Beauregard barred the road at Petersburg. There, a unit of Pennsylvania coal miners
blew up the Confederate fortifications by digging under them and planting explosives,
leaving behind a massive breach that Union forces could rush. The chance to win the
war was at hand. However, lackadaisical generals and unclear orders doomed the
attack and sent thousands of mainly Black Union soldiers to their graves.
General Ambrose Burnside had originally planned to send Black regiments under General Edward
Ferrero into the breach. However, their superior, General Meade, nixed the plan. The white troops
had more battlefield experience, so Burnside's men drew lots to decide who would get the
unenviable job of leading the attack. Brigadier General James Ledlie drew the short straw.
Ledlie's forces entered the crater and milled about at the bottom awaiting orders.
A Confederate counterattack slaughtered the Union soldiers like sitting ducks.
"It's a turkey shoot!"
Inexplicably, Burnside sent Ferrero's Black regiments into the crater,
where they received no quarter from Confederate forces. So bloody was the massacre that even
some Confederate commanders questioned the brutality meted out to the Black regiments.
To add insult to injury, neither Ledlie nor Ferrero actually led their units. Both generals
stayed behind the lines in a bunker drinking rum while thousands of their men were slaughtered in
vain. Grant was forced into a nine-month siege of Petersburg that would drag the war into 1865.