Operational Mind

Timothy B. Smith teaches history at the University of Tennessee at Martin. His many books on the Civil War include Napoleon’s Long Shadow: How French Military Genius Shaped the American Civil War, a five-volume history of the Vicksburg campaign, Shiloh: Conquer or Perish, and Corinth 1862: Siege, Battle, Occupation, all published by Kansas.

"This welcome study examines the degree to which Civil War-era officers applied the military principles of Antoine Henri Jomini and Carl von Clausewitz. Using selected Union and Confederate generals, Smith provides the best treatment to date of Jominian and Clausewitzian influences across the arc of the conflict from Forts Henry and Donelson in 1862 through William Tecumseh Sherman’s March to the Sea in late 1864."—Gary W. Gallagher, John L. Nau III Professor in the History of the American Civil War Emeritus, University of Virginia, and author of The Enduring Civil War: Reflections on the Great American Crisis"Napoleon casts a gossamer shadow over Timothy Smith’s penetrating new operational study of the conduct of Civil War campaigns, yet it is not the ‘Little Corporal’ himself that dominates these pages, but the tug-of-war between conflicting lessons derived from ‘Boney’s’ operations by his preeminent interpreters, the Swiss General Antoine Henri Jomini and the Prussian General Carl von Clausewitz. Almost relentlessly, Smith uses the decisions and actions of Union and Confederate commanders to separate the Jominians from the Clausewitzians. In so doing, he fashions a convincing case for the preeminence of the maxims of the Prussian over the Swiss in deciding the outcome of the war, though ironically hardly any commanders North or South had read Clausewitz since his work was not available in English. This is arguably the most interesting and original work on Civil War operational strategy in half a century."—William C. Davis, formerly director of the Virginia Center for Civil War Studies, and author of Crucible of Command: Ulysses S. Grant and Robert E. Lee—The War They Fought, the Peace They Forged