Ryan McMaken has an interesting review of a book on guerrilla warfare on the site today by neocon warmonger Max Boot of all people. He argues that the American Revolution was successful because of its reliance on guerrilla warfare, but the Southern secession of the 1860s was not because of the scarcity of such tactics. Hardly any student of the “Civil War” would disagree with this. Grady McWhiney and Perry Jamieson’s book, Attack and Die, makes the same point about how the West Point-ization of both armies, which led to all those head-on attacks with tens of thousands of men, were so suicidal. (Napoleonoic tactics were taught at West Point to all the top generals in the war on both sides). These authors argue that the South stuck with these head-on-assault tactics because of their Celtic heritage (think the movie “Braveheart”).
There were some spectacularly-successful guerrilla fighters in the South, but were almost non-existent in the North. Next to Lee and Jackson, Southerners revered the guerrilla fighters John Singleton Mosby and Nathan Bedford Forrest the most. After the war, when General Lee was asked who his most effective subordinate was, he said Forrest. (Mosby was later shunned, along with General Longstreet, for becoming a Republican and working in Republican administrations).
The early effectiveness of such fighters, along with the leadership of Lee and Jackson and others, is what led the majority of British opinion makers, especially the great liberal historian of liberty, Lord Acton, and Charles Dickens, to side with the South, as Sheldon Vanauken showed in his book, The Glittering Illusion. That, and the fact that these men, and other Europeans, thought Lincoln was a tyrant who was waging war over money and empire and not slavery, as Charles Adams showed in his book of readings on foreign views of the Civil War. There were a few exceptions like Richard Cobden, but the books by Vanauken and Adams quote many dozens of prominent European opinion makers who voiced support for the South.
8:35 am on July 21, 2016
