The Right Hand of Command: Use and Disuse of Personal Staffs in the Civil War. By Steven R. Jones. Mechanicsburg, PA: Stackpole Books, 2000.
Given the scale of Civil War battlefields and armies, as well as the limitations of nineteenth century communication, it is difficult to conceive of how commanders could have stayed in contact with all of their forces during the chaos of battle. Complex battle plans requiring separate forces to link up at a specified time in a specified location only add to the difficulty of maneuvering forces in an effective manner. The general staff is the answer to this and other problems which arise from the logistics of modern armies. R. Steven Jones argues that the more effectively a general managed his personal staff, the more success he was likely to have, and that the use of personal staffs during the Civil War was sometimes used and sometimes ignored, to the peril of the general who misused or misunderstood this valuable resource.
The modern general staff was established with Napoleon Bonaparte's Grand Army, and arguably one of the most effective chiefs of staff in history, Louis Alexandre Berthier, was at the head of Napoleon's Great General Headquarters Staff. Berthier, himself not a superb strategist, but as a man whose specialty was organization and logistics, was ideally suited to such a position. As the chief of staff for Napoleon, Berthier supervised the menial tasks which would be too burdensome for one man to address alone. Berthier was an essential part of what made Napoleon so effective, and Berthier's ultimate estrangement hindered Napoleon's effectiveness in his later battles.
From the real Napoleon to the Young Napoleon, Jones traces the general history of the American use of staff officers during the Mexican War, the only main American conflict between the Napoleonic Wars and the American Civil War. General Winfield Scott used his personal staff with effectiveness and skill, including the brilliant young Robert E. Lee, who acted as Scott's eyes and ears for much of the campaign. It is clear that the understanding of the necessity of personal staffs was apparent to general officers in the Civil War, but many generals would either employ much larger or much smaller staffs as their personal preferences dictated. George B. McClellan is the first general which Jones studies in his work, which will ultimately examine the staffs of McClellan, Lee, Grant, and Sherman.
McClellan lost little time in appointing a chief of staff and staff members for himself, and many of them were wise choices, but McClellan also had a tendency to fill his staff with people whose personal experience wasn't superbly suited for the demands and skill set of a general staff. Of a dozen or so staffers, McClellan had great utility for three or four of them, and these men were probably too few for the workload required by the 100,000 man Army of the Potomac.
General Lee was also plagued with not enough bright staff officers, but for different reasons. Lee let a number of his best staff officers go into the ranks because he perceived the need of the ranks to be higher than the need of the commanding officer's staff. When Lee moved these men to the battle lines, however, he neglected to replace them, preferring to heap the additional work on his ever-dwindling supply of officers. From seven or eight personal staff in 1862 down to just three in 1865, Lee's dedicated personal assistants, though excellent, were worn down by war's end. This additional stress may have contributed to the Army of Northern Virginia's effectiveness in the last year of the war. Sherman, like Lee, preferred no more than three or four close adjutants at a time, and shouldered the extra load of work himself.
Of all Civil War generals, Ulysses Grant seemed to make the best use of his staff. Grant unwittingly emulated the general staffs used in the French and Prussian armies of Europe--the best of the age--by employing a large personal staff and a sizeable professional staff as well. Grant sometimes depended on coordinated attacks involving two columns of troops engaging the enemy almost simultaneously, and he was able to achieve this by effective use of personal staff officers, who kept subordinate field commanders adherent to Grant's plans. This simple expedient was an effective way to coordinate two forces which could not see one another and minimize the mistakes of subordinate commanders.
As important an element as the general staff is to modern armies, it strikes the reader that more use of them was not made by more Civil War generals on both sides. Jones makes a strong case that general staffs with intelligent, dedicated personnel enabled a general to be more effective, and are, indeed, a necessity to an effective modern command.
Stephen Edwards
The Right Hand of Command: Use and Disuse of Personal Staffs in the Civil War. By R. Steven Jones. (Mechanicsburg, PA: Stackpole Books, 2000. Pp. xvi, 266)
With The Right Hand of Command R. Steven Jones argues that leading Civil War generals on both sides did not deliberately attempt to follow existing modern European models of staff development and instead used their staffs in non-standardized ways that suited their personal management styles. The French and Prussian Armies on the other hand encountered difficulties at the staff level when directing large armies in complex battles and understood the need for trained staff officers to facilitate operations. Though they adopted different approaches, the French and Prussian militaries reorganized their staff structure during the Napoleonic Era to include a general office to serve nationally and schools to prepare staff members for duty. According to Jones, the United States maintained a small army during the early nineteenth century which increased only slightly during the War of 1812 and the Mexican War. Based on their experience, leaders required only a small staff to communicate in the field and no national office to provide oversight until the Civil War.
The author concentrates on four prominent generals to illustrate staff use at varied levels of command, and demonstrate how it evolved—or did not evolve—over the course of the war based on particular leaders’ needs. Though terminology differed, generals’ headquarters staff could be divided into two categories: special and personal. Special staff consisted of officers in charge of supply and transportation for the command such as the chief of engineers, chief of ordinance, quartermaster, chief of commissary, provost marshall, chief surgeon, and chaplain. A minimum of an assistant adjutant general and two aides-de-camp comprised a personal staff, but leaders often employed many more men to handle the records of the army and send orders to combat units. The United States government, recognizing the need for a chief of staff to coordinate all armies in 1862, appointed General Henry Halleck to manage a general staff, but his office assisted only with special staff duties and failed to organize national operational plans or supply trained staff members to generals in the field.
Jones’s case studies—George McClellan, Robert E. Lee, William T. Sherman, and Ulysses S. Grant—exercised considerable latitude in the selection of staff officers and their assignments. Noted organizer that he was, McClellan ran his headquarters in traditional ways with few exceptions. To his credit he gave his chief, his father-in-law who was a respected career army officer, partial authority to act on his behalf and created a specialized group to assess topography. On the other hand, he exhibited the same hesitancy that characterized his battlefield behavior by talking about delegating powers to junior staff members, but never following through. The author suggests that Lee instigated no innovations in staff development during his service to the Confederacy. His small staff completed the clerical work he disliked doing, and they carried communications both written and verbal on his behalf, but Lee retained full control and frequently consulted directly with his generals. Similarly, Sherman believed in a small, but efficient, traditional staff and handled the duties of a chief of staff himself. He rarely shared authority and worked with trusted commanders as his responsibilities grew. Of the generals in this study, Grant demonstrated the most inclination to expand his staff with specific assignments and allow them to serve as his representative in his absence. Jones contends that though Grant’s staff began as collection of men he considered loyal supporters, as his command grew he acknowledged that he could not manage the field in the manner he desired without an empowered team of officers to assist. As a result, he hired experienced military men in place of his civilian staff members who resigned or were reassigned. Out of necessity, rather than deliberate planning, Grant created an effective staff that greatly resembled the Prussian Army model that the United States military did not accept until after the Spanish-American War.
Jones presents his conclusions in a straightforward, well-organized style. He identified and tracked each staff officer who served the four generals in the Official Record and supplemented information gaps with memoirs and personal papers to establish the background and military duties of the men. Along the way he discovered that generals chose staff for diverse reasons such as family connections, political alliances, friendship, and occasionally skill. He offers a valuable analysis of staff work during the Civil War that provides a firm basis for future research.
Texas Christian University LeAnna Schooley