Political general explained

A political general is a general officer or other military leader without significant military experience who is given a high position in command for political reasons, through political connections, or to appease certain political blocs and factions.

In the United States, this concept was demonstrated by commissions and appointments during the American Civil War, in both the Union and the Confederacy.

History

American Civil War

Most of the top generals on the Union and Confederate sides were graduates of West Point and were career military officers. In addition to military training, many of them had battlefield experience gained during the Mexican–American War or American Indian wars, such as the Third Seminole War in Florida. Due to the necessity of raising large-scale citizen armies, both presidents, Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis, for various reasons, appointed a number of the so-called political generals. Some of them, such as John A. Logan on the Union side or Richard Taylor on the Confederate, developed into competent military leaders and were respected by their subordinates and superiors alike. Others turned out to be "disastrously incompetent", according to historian James M. McPherson.[1]

Appeasement of political groups

The most important reason for appointing political generals was to appease important blocs of voters. U.S. President Abraham Lincoln used such appointments as a way to get the support of moderate Democrats for the war and for his administration ("War Democrats"). The first three volunteer generals whom Lincoln appointed, John Adams Dix, Nathaniel P. Banks, and Benjamin Butler, were all Democrats. They were the three most senior major generals in the Union Army. Republicans were also appointed, including Richard James Oglesby of Illinois.

Geopolitical

Other promotions were used to gain the support of the specific group they represented, especially in cases of foreign immigrants. One of the largest ethnic groups in the U.S. at the time was relatively recent German immigrants, who had arrived in the late 1840s and early 1850s after the German revolutions of 1848–1849. Prominent ethnic German civilian leaders, such as Franz Sigel and Carl Schurz, both of whose prior military experience before the Civil War was fighting on the losing side of the German revolutions, were appointed to high rank for their usefulness in rallying fellow immigrants to the cause.

Two prominent Irish immigrants were also given promotions, as many Irish had arrived following the famines in Ireland. Thomas F. Meagher and Michael Corcoran were promoted, who before the war had been a captain and a colonel, respectively, in the New York State Militia. Meagher resigned in May 1863, but when Corcoran died in December 1863, the Army revoked Meagher's resignation to keep at least one Irishman in command.

Other officers were highly successful in their attempts to rally large numbers of troops, whether they were native-born or foreign-born. For instance, Daniel Sickles recruited many soldiers from New York.

Border states

The Confederacy also appointed numerous political generals for the same reasons. They also used many such appointments to influence the Confederate sympathizers in the border states, which had not seceded from the Union. Former Vice President John C. Breckinridge was appointed as a general in the hopes that he would inspire the citizens of Kentucky to join the Confederate Army.

Other

Another reason for the appointment of political generals during the American Civil War was the significant expansion of the number of men in each army and many volunteer soldiers. Men who were prominent civilian leaders, such as businessmen, lawyers, and politicians, were chosen to continue their leadership in command of a volunteer regiment.

Evaluation

Ezra J. Warner noted that during the American Civil War, a large number of political generals, including Sigel and Banks for the Union and Breckinridge for the Confederacy, were undoubtedly popular with their men, primarily because of their ties to the specific groups they represented.[2] However, the vast majority were considered incompetent because they were amateur soldiers without prior training or knowledge. This was a particularly large problem for the Union, where such generals were typically given fairly important commands.[2]

Brooks D. Simpson claimed that the misdeeds of three particular political generals on the Union side, Butler, Banks, and Sigel, "contributed to a military situation in the summer of 1864 where the Northern public, anticipating decisive victory with Grant in command, began to wonder whether it was worth it to continue the struggle—something on voters' minds as they pondered whether to give Honest Abe another four years in office. Perhaps Lincoln would have been wiser to dismiss these three men and risk whatever short-term damage his actions might have caused."[3]

Addressing the phenomenon of the Union political generals, Thomas Joseph Goss wrote, "Though much contemporary and historical attention has been placed upon these amateur commanders in the field and highlights their numerous tactical shortcomings, their assignment patterns demonstrate that political factors outweighed any military criteria in the administration's judgment of their success. For the Lincoln administration, the risk of these tactical setbacks was exceeded by the political support amassed every day these popular figures were in uniform, revealing how political generals and their West Point peers were judged using different standards based on distinct calculations of political gain and military effectiveness."[4]

David Work made a cross-section selection of Union political generals appointed by Lincoln, eight Republicans, and eight Democrats, including Francis Preston Blair, Jr., John Adams Dix, John A. Logan, and James S. Wadsworth, among others, and scrutinized their performances during the war. He concluded that Lincoln's appointments were mostly successful as they cemented the Union and did not result in critical or unrecoverable battlefield failures. In addition, all Lincoln's appointees, even including such controversial figures as Nathaniel P. Banks, Franz Sigel, and Benjamin F. Butler, demonstrated promising results as logistical, recruitment and political managers in the war's tumultuous times.[5]

Benton R. Patterson emphasized that Union political generals who understood their shortcomings regarding military education and experience, i.e., former congressman John A. Logan, who rose through the war from a regimental commander to the commanding general of the Army of the Tennessee, did rather well; some, who thought that common sense, practicality, and life experience are enough to wage war, i.e., Major General Nathaniel Banks, wrought havoc on the battlefield, causing unnecessary loss of lives. Patterson cited Major General Henry Halleck, a West Pointer, who wrote in April 1864 to General William Tecumseh Sherman commenting on Banks's exploits in Louisiana, "It seems but little better than murder to give important commands to such a man as Banks, Butler, McClernand, Sigel, and Lew Wallace, and yet it seems impossible to prevent it."[6] To all political generals, Patterson attributed a tendency of insubordination, as they frequently used their political connections to overwrite particular orders from their superiors. In addition, several generals, including Logan and Blair, left their commands to participate in the 1864 presidential campaign on behalf of Lincoln, to the displeasure of professional soldiers.

Lincoln, as commander-in-chief, experienced problems not only with political generals but with professional West-Pointers as well, as all were unable to realize on the battlefield the decisive Union's advantage regarding manpower and military resources until Ulysses S. Grant became the general-in-chief in March 1864. Despite all of that, Lincoln, who possessed a limited military background as a captain of a militia during the Black Hawk War,[7] did not succumb to a temptation to become involved in a war on a tactical level; instead, as James M. McPherson put it, he chose to persist "through a terrible ordeal of defeats and disappointments".[8] On the other side, President Jefferson Davis, who was a West Point graduate, served competently as a regimental commander during the Mexican War, and was an able United States Secretary of War under Franklin Pierce in 1853–1857, frequently intervened into the conduct of war below strategic level and made appointments based on political necessity and personal attachments; these war-making approaches did not serve him well.[9]

North Korea

United States

List of prominent political generals

The following is a partial list of some of the more prominent political generals on both sides, and a brief sketch of their war service.

War of 1812

Mexican–American War

American Civil War

Union
Confederate

Spanish–American War

Further reading

Notes and References

  1. [James M. McPherson]
  2. [Ezra J. Warner (historian)|Warner, Ezra J.]
  3. Simpson, Brooks D. Lincoln and his political generals. Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association, Volume 21, Issue 1, Winter 2000, pp. 63-77. ISSN 0898-4212
  4. Goss, Thomas J. The War Within the Union High Command: Politics and Generalship During the Civil War. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2003.
  5. Work, David. Lincoln's Political Generals. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009.
  6. Patterson, Benton R. Lincoln's Political Generals: The Battlefield Performance of Seven Controversial Appointees. Jefferson, North Carolina, Mcfarland Publishers, 2014.
  7. http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/lincoln-as-commander-in-chief-131322819/?no-ist Lincoln as Commander in Chief: A self-taught strategist with no combat experience, Abraham Lincoln saw the path to victory more clearly than his generals
  8. McPherson, James M. Tried by War: Abraham Lincoln As Commander in Chief. New York: Penguin Press, 2008, p. 8.
  9. Woodworth, Steven E. Jefferson Davis and His Generals: The Failure of Confederate Command in the West. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1990.
  10. McPherson, James M., Abraham Lincoln and the Second American Revolution New York: Oxford University Press, 1991. . p. 71
  11. Eicher, John H., and David J. Eicher, Civil War High Commands. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001. . p. 440
  12. http://www.civilwar.org/education/history/untold-stories/postwarlives/post-war-lives.html Post War Lives: Joseph Wheeler (1836–1906)

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