| The Civil War has been called the first modern war, which saw the use of new technologies in weapons and communications and a mass mobilization of manpower and other resources. Engineers played an important but little-known part in the Union success by making surveys and constructing bridges, roads, railroads, and fortifications; as pioneers, they assisted the army on the march and in battle. Using General William T. Sherman's campaigns of 1864 and 1865 as a case study, this dissertation examines in detail their role in the conduct and outcome of Civil War operations. It also seeks to determine not just what the engineers did but how they learned to do it; and it examines how effectively the army engineers responded, individually and collectively, to the unprecedented technical and organizational challenges of the war.;This study therefore goes beyond the period 1864-65 to the early years of the war in the West, and examines also the general nature of the engineers' organization before and during the war. To help assess the engineer operations and mobilization it proposes a model of what it calls the "engineering system," which analyzes what might be considered the fundamental elements of military engineering: professional knowledge, labor, materiel, and doctrine. The study relies heavily upon primary sources, including the published and unpublished records of the Engineer Department and the individual armies, as well as on the personal and official papers of Sherman's chief engineer, Orlando Poe.;This study concludes that engineering was not only crucial to Sherman's success but was also very influential in his strategic planning: It provided his armies with the mobility and defensive strength (through fortifications) that were a key element of his march through Georgia and the Carolinas. However, the army engineers were neither particularly well-organized nor well-supported by the government, because of a general failure of leadership on the part of the Administration, Congress, and the Engineer Bureau. The key problem for the engineers was in developing an appropriate organization, and their successes in this area were largely achieved in spite of the Engineer Bureau in Washington, which never adapted to the war. |
