"Bombproof Officers" or Backbone of the Army: A Look at Confederate Staff Officers in the Army of Northern Virginia

By Robert E. L. Krick

Presentation to CCWRT on 16 September 2010, Summarized by Mike Rhein

Photography by Mike Rogers

©Cincinnati CWRT, 2010

Robert E. L. Krick, chief historian of the Richmond National Military Park, spoke on a topic not previously dealt with in the annals of the Cincinnati Civil War Round Table: staff operations.

Mr. Krick began his talk with an overview of the evolution of staff operations in terms of the lack of technical development in the decades prior to the Civil War. He emphasized that there was no staff school as such and that there had not been much progress in the performance of staff work dating back to the Mexican War and before. He alluded to a comment by a Confederate staff officer, John Pickett, under Gen. John C. Breckenridge, in deriding qualifications for staff operations: “The duties of this office can be discharged by any schoolboy who possessed common sense.”

According to Mr. Krick, even Gen. Lee “felt that the staff system was insufficient”. As evidence of Lee’s frustration, Krick included a comment of Lee directed to President Jefferson Davis in which Lee wrote “the greatest difficulty is in causing orders and regulations to be obeyed.” Krick noted that Lee did not have intelligence and operations officers assisting him in planning troop movements and divining enemy intentions. In contrast, the speaker stressed that in the latter part of the war, Gen. U.S. Grant had the benefit of excellent work by Gen. A. A. Humphreys in operations and George Sharpe in intelligence in expediting the efficiency of the Army of the Potomac’s movements.

Mr. Krick delivered an interesting overview of the makeup of the ANV staff composed of 2300 staff officers. His statistical research revealed such facts as these: the average age of a staff officer was 30; four percent of staff were killed in battle as opposed to 22 percent of field officers; 42 percent attended college and that they tended to come from a “professional class” including “bankers, lawyers, merchants.” Generally, during the Civil War, the staff saw itself as a “military family.” Confederate generals such as James Longstreet, Jubal Early, Cadmus Wilcox and Richard Ewell had staffs that stayed together for the four years of the conflict. The speaker said that the record for the general who had the most staff officers in the ANV in a short period of time was John B. Magruder: 57 officers in 56 weeks.

Mr. Krick said that the most important staff position was assistant adjutant general which usually required “the brightest man on the staff,” citing Walter Taylor (Lee’s staff) and Sandie Pendleton (Gen. T. J. Jackson’s staff) as examples, alluding to their monumental paperwork duties (“writing morning, noon and night”). He also referred to other aspects of staff operations such as assistant inspector general (for “discipline offenses”), engineers, judges, ordnance officers, commissary officers, and quartermaster officers. The speaker said that typically staff officers possessed “an inordinately high level of education” and “in most cases had unlimited authority.” Mr. Krick also emphasized that “staff affected army morale and discipline” and that the staff was “an extension of the general himself.”

“Many classic accounts of the war,” according to Mr. Krick, “were written by staff officers” who “helped to define the view of the army.” He referred to such authors as W.W. Blackford, Jedediah Hotchkiss, H. Kyd Douglas, Moxley Sorrel (right), Walter Taylor, H.B. McClellan, William Allan, E. Porter Alexander, Armistead Long, and Campbell Brown.

For an Ohio angle to the topic, Mr. Krick referred to the number of ANV officers with Buckeye state connections: 25, including Jackson Warner (born on a flatboat on the Ohio River in 1815) who was in charge of commissary for Union prisoners in Richmond; James Power Smith (Jackson’s staff) born in Harrison County, Oh. and Henry Handerson from Cuyahoga Co. who wrote Yankee in Gray.

Mr. Krick presented an insightful look at the behind-the-scenes staff framework of the Army of the Northern Virginia, delineating the thankless tasks and attendant criticism that dogged the overworked officers, highlighting the question as to whether they were viewed as “the backbone of the army or ‘bombproof officers.’”

Biographical sketches for 21 ANV staff officers with Ohio connections are available in the Articles section of this website here.