Caught One Handed

One Hand Behind The Back


TFSmith is fond of the idea that the Union fought the Civil War with "one hand behind its back", a phrase coined by Shelby Foote and repeated by TFSmith something in the vicinity of thirty times in the marginalia.

Examining what Shelby Foote actually meant, however, makes it clear that TFSmith does not understand what was meant - certainly not in the context of the Trent War.



Foote's original statement was made in the context of there being men of military age at an American college who had not yet joined the army, and who were able to instead take part in a boat race. This indicates nothing about industry or indeed willingness to fight - it simply makes clear that the Union has not yet resorted to universal conscription.
This kind of universal compulsory service was effectively unknown in the 19th century, except for Napoleonic France after two decades of constant war - or the Confederacy, during the final process of collapse. In both cases it represents a final burst from a nation otherwise defeated.
Instead, in reality, the limits on the Union army were related to logistics as much as anything - the ability to equip, feed, supply and move the men already in the army was the limiting factor, and the Union was seriously lacking in military small arms in the first two years of the war (and money throughout, though not quite to the level of an actual financial crisis). There were also serious problems with desertion, with roughly three hundred thousand men absent from the Union army at some points in the middle of the war (i.e. a third of those on the muster rolls).
TFSmith likes to point to the scale of the response to calls for volunteers as proof that there was "one hand behind the back", but in reality these were often only just met - and that under threat of conscription - while even conscription failed to produce a million-man Union army unless one counts those absent with or without leave.

The way TFSmith uses it is essentially that the Union can double their army over the historical Union army at will (and make the whole of the result better trained and motivated than the actual Union army), and that every single person with any kind of experience (relevant or otherwise) jumps into the army and becomes an unsung genius. (Indeed, as we have seen, literally insane men are considered to be fine and talented diplomats.)


The best way to highlight this is to compare it with the British. The Union with "one hand behind their back" produced an army peaking at 680,000 Present, and in this timeline push that up to nearly a million by taking out the other hand; the British, straining every sinew, produce a little under 190 battalions of infantry (which roughly equates to an army of 280,000 total) with both hands out from behind their back and about to suffer a heart attack.
Anyone comparing these would conclude that the Union had three times the population and industrial power as the British - where, in fact, the British population at the time was 30% greater than that of the Union (28 million in the British Isles plus about 2.5 million in Canada, versus 23 million in the Union) and the British industrial capacity was around three times that of the Union.
If the Union could produce an army of nearly 700,000 with "one hand behind their back", then the British should be able to produce an army of a million without undue strain; instead the Union achieves a million merely by trying, and the British give up before reaching 300,000.

This is simply a pat phrase used to justify all kinds of American Exceptionalism. What logic exists beside the phrase is vacuous at best - the Union did a certain level of mobilization historically, and therefore it could do more. (This logic is not applied to the British, of course.)