Railroads in the Civil War: The Impact of Management on Victory and Defeat by John E. Clark, Jr.
Railroads in the Civil War: The Impact of Management on Victory and Defeat by John E. Clark, Jr.
Despite popular depictions in film and print, soldiers in the American Civil War did not always travel by horse, wagon, or foot. Advances in railroad systems in the decade before the war allowed the movement of large numbers of troops via railway, even though railroads had not yet matured into a truly integrated transportation system. Gaps between lines, incompatible track gauges, and other vexing impediments remained in both the North and South. As John E. Clark Jr. explains in this compelling study, the skill with which Union and Confederate war leaders dealt with those problems and utilized the rail system to its fullest wartime potential reflects each side's overall war management ability as an essential ingredient for ultimate victory.
After providing an excellent overview of Union and Confederate railway capabilities and effectiveness at decision-making, Clark details two specific rail movements as case studies in logistical management -- the Confederacy's transfer of General James Longstreet's 13,000 men from the Army of Northern Virginia to the Army of Tennessee in the fall of 1863 and the Union's responding shift of 23,000 soldiers in the 11th and 12th Corps into the western theater, movements key to the battles at Chickamauga and Chattanooga. Using exciting stories found in diaries and letters as well as official records and telegrams, Clark explains how the Union wisely and confidently organized and directed the massive undertaking and how the Confederacy, having failed to properly mobilize its rail system for war did not.
The Confederacy is often credited with fighting the war effectively with limited resources, but Clark points out that a lack of central planning and the absence of established priorities for allocating scarce resources it did have. Indeed, he argues, the deterioration of southern railroads so slowed Confederate movement in a war of mobility that the South lost its perceived advantage of interior supply lines. With more capable logistical management, Clark concludes, the Confederacy might have won the war.
Certain to spark debate among Civil War enthusiasts and interest among business readers, Railroads in the Civil War demonstrates why railroads qualified as the first modern management systems in America.
Louisiana State University Press, Hardcover, 1st Edition, 1st Printing, 2001
THIS IS A BRAND NEW BOOK.