The Civil War witnessed dramatic shifts of military momentum. As armies contended for supremacy on the battlefield, their successes and failures dramatically influenced politics and civilian morale on the home front. For nearly 150 years, many of the scholars who have written about the conflict—from members of the wartime generation to recent historians—have argued about when and where the war turned decisively toward a triumph for the United States. These debates, in turn, have sparked lively discussion in a reading public eager to identify the war’s most important military operations.
Among the candidates put forward as decisive moments in at least one book are:
- Ulysses S. Grant’s capture of Forts Henry and Donelson;
- Battle of Shiloh;
- Confederate loss of New Orleans;
- George B. McClellan’s victory at Antietam;
- George G. Meade’s repulse of Robert E. Lee at Gettysburg;
- Grant’s success at Chattanooga;
- Grant’s cornering Lee in Richmond and Petersburg as a result of the Overland Campaign;
- William T. Sherman’s capture of Atlanta;
- Philip H. Sheridan’s multiple triumphs in the 1864 Shenandoah Valley Campaign;
- George H. Thomas’ rout of the Army of Tennessee at Nashville.
Titles of notable books such as Larry Daniel’s Shiloh: The Battle That Changed the Civil War, Stanley Horn’s The Decisive Battle of Nashville and James McPherson’s Crossroads of Freedom: Antietam (a second subtitle on that book’s cover describes the contest as “The Battle That Changed the Course of the Civil War”) underscore a widespread affinity for turning points.
Gettysburg looms largest in the public imagination as the war’s grand turning point, the “High Water Mark of the Confederacy” that ended any realistic hope for Southern independence and pointed inexorably toward Appomattox. Yet Gettysburg affected the long-term shape of the war relatively little. Lee correctly predicted in its aftermath that the Army of the Potomac would be “as quiet as a sucking dove” for six months (in fact, 10 months elapsed before the next big battle in the Eastern Theater), and Abraham Lincoln expressed bitter disappointment with what he considered an incomplete victory that would allow the war to “be prolonged indefinitely.”
Neither did the other much-trumpeted Union win of July 1863 make much of a difference. Vicksburg’s surrender on the 87th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence sent joyful tremors through the loyal states, and in conjunction with the capture of Port Hudson, La., a few days later opened the entire Mississippi River to Union naval power. As the title of Michael Ballard’s excellent study of the campaign indicates, Vicksburg stood as The Campaign That Opened the Mississippi. The key to the river’s importance lay not in opening it to Northern control, however, but in closing it as a great artery of Confederate commerce—and that had been accomplished in April 1862, when Union forces took control of New Orleans. Grant’s famous success at Vicksburg, which undoubtedly surpassed Gettysburg in effect at the time, generated a greater emotional than military result.
What about Antietam? It rivals Gettysburg on most rosters of vital turning points, heralded as the moment when emancipation came to the fore as a central issue of the conflict and Great Britain and France backed away from some type of intervention. No one can gainsay Antietam’s importance, but it neither guaranteed that the war would end slavery nor settled the question of European involvement. As late as the summer of 1864, with Union forces bogged down outside Richmond and Atlanta and the loyal citizenry reeling from the Overland Campaign’s grisly casualties, Republican prospects in the looming elections looked dim. George McClellan in the White House and a Democratic Congress might have pushed on to Union victory, but they would have expended no effort to make certain the peace settlement included freedom for enslaved African Americans. Similarly, a series of Confederate victories after Antietam probably would have rekindled British interest in brokering an end to the war.
I believe the Seven Days’ did more to shape the future direction of the war than any of the more commonly discussed turning points. The climactic battles of McClellan’s Peninsula Campaign occurred when Confederate national morale had reached a crisis because of dazzling Union successes in the Western Theater between February and early June 1862. From Forts Henry and Donelson through Shiloh and the capture of the vital rail crossroads of Corinth, Miss., Confederates had suffered repeated disasters. Jefferson Davis and his government struggled with the loss of New Orleans, Nashville, Memphis, most of the Tennessee heartland, and any chance of maintaining a serious presence in Kentucky. Opposed by Joseph E. Johnston, whose retreating prompted widespread criticism among Confederates, McClellan reached the outskirts of Richmond by the end of May. It is difficult to imagine how the Confederacy could have survived the loss of their capital, which seemed imminent, on top of all the bad news from the Western Theater. The war would have ended with slavery almost completely intact and with McClellan, a staunch critic of forced emancipation, as the preeminent Union war hero.
Unfortunately for “Little Mac,” Johnston suffered a grievous wound at Seven Pines on May 31, and Robert E. Lee replaced him the next day. Within a month, the armies fought five bloody battles that culminated at Malvern Hill, McClellan abandoned offensive thoughts, Richmond remained defiantly in Confederate hands and Southern civilians took heart. Lee’s ascension to command of the Army of Northern Virginia prolonged the war for nearly three years. As time passed, Lee and his army became the most important national institution in the Confederacy. Their campaigns sustained belief in the possibility of independence among the Southern people and more than once spread despair across the loyal states.
Because of its striking reorientation of the strategic situation during the summer of 1862, as well as the long-term consequences of Lee’s generalship regarding morale, the possibility of emancipation and the duration of the war, the Seven Days’ Campaign belongs in the front rank of Civil War turning points.
Originally published in the April 2011 issue of Civil War Times. To subscribe, click here.
