Soldiers from Experience: The Emergence of Tactical Culture in Sherman's Fifteenth Army Corps, 1862-63

This study examines the organic emergence and evolution of discernible patterns in the tactical behavior of Major General William T. Sherman's Fifteenth Army Corps of the Army of the Tennessee across its first year operating within the western theater of the American Civil War. It analyzes the ways in which specific experiences and patterns of meaning-making within the corps's regiments and batteries led to the emergence of a distinctive corps-level “tactical culture.” This concept, introduced for the first time within the dissertation, is defined as a collection of shared, historically-derived, normative ideas, beliefs, assumptions, and habitual behaviors that inform a subordinate military command’s particular approach to the prosecution of its assigned objectives on or off the battlefield. The dissertation employs the research methodologies of “new military history” to inform an older “traditional” historiography in an effort to frame what might be called a “new operational history.” While historians frequently assert that generals somehow impart their character to their commands, this dissertation argues that the reverse was the case within Sherman's corps. Although Sherman habitually sought a frontal penetration of entrenched Rebel lines, a combination of factors – most especially the heavily wooded terrain of the Mississippi Valley – repeatedly prevented his corps from achieving such objectives. As a result of their perpetual failure, those in the ranks lost confidence whenever called upon to assault enemy lines, leaving Sherman with “no troops that can be made to assault.” Instead, heavily cluttered Western battlefields rewarded the employment of open-order “clouds” of skirmishers. While these “clouds” could not breach fortified Rebel positions, they could suppress enemy units and allow for maneuver elsewhere. Simultaneously, repeated experiences of success in raiding operations inspired an embrace of “war in earnest” tactics among those in the ranks traumatized from bloody repulse on the battlefield. By 1864, the corps reliably displayed a tactical culture borne of its particular past experiences which helped to shape its behavior during the campaigns for Atlanta, Savannah, and the Carolinas. An awareness of this tactical culture informed Sherman's employment of the command, as well as his larger operational art during his famous late war campaigns.Doctor of Philosoph