Winter maneuvers

[Saphroneth]

I think you underestimate the ruggedness of even the eastern US in this time frame. Northern Virginia was indeed small farms and towns, but the road network connecting them was still pretty poor. The Valley was good for transportation, which is why it was such a high speed avenue of approach. West and North of the Shenandoah, the mountains get impassable quickly. (See Jackson's Romney Campaign.) Central Virginia is pretty hilly too. Also, the Chickahominy Swamp southeast of Richmond was a dreadful hell for the Army of the Potomac. There was plenty of army arresting terrain in the East too. Also the constant marching and countermarching by these armies deluded them of crops, fences, houses, people and small timber. Northern Virginia was like a desert by the 3rd year of war.

As far as I'm concerned that's mostly a function of population density, rather than anything else - that is, the road network is the result of the population density.

Part of why I'm stressing this is that it's very much the case that - though of course unburdened by artillery - Roman armies did some pretty significant manoeuvring in the mountains of the Balkans. If you have a high population density you get better roads. There's a reason I brought up Switzerland as my comparator, as I don't think anyone could argue Switzerland didn't have big mountains!

The Chickahominy, in context, is a river with marshy areas to either side. A comparator in Europe would be the Low Countries, which saw plenty of manoeuvre (though the difference here is that the Low Countries are very high population density in the Napoleonic period).

 

[7thWisconsin]

I'm not really convinced here. Population VS trafficability seems like a chicken/ egg problem. Is the road network good because people are there, or are people there because the road network is good? I'm not sure the Low Countries are helpful here because they'd been inhabited and improved for centuries. Much of the theater of the Civil War was frontier less than 100 years earlier. The logistical tail of an ancient army is different than a mid-19th century army too, so I'm not sure the Roamns or Alexander in Illyria are going to be that informative either.

 

[Saphroneth]

I'm not really convinced here. Population VS trafficability seems like a chicken/ egg problem. Is the road network good because people are there, or are people there because the road network is good? I'm not sure the Low Countries are helpful here because they'd been inhabited and improved for centuries. Much of the theater of the Civil War was frontier less than 100 years earlier. The logistical tail of an ancient army is different than a mid-19th century army too, so I'm not sure the Roamns or Alexander in Illyria are going to be that informative either.

The answer is that the road network is good because people are there. People improve the terrain. There is to some extent a positive feedback situation going on, but Europe simply had that process running for much longer. In the US it was more common to have big farms growing for export, which are less efficient per acre but more efficient per person.

What usually happens as population rises is that those farms are split into smaller farms to allow family units to fission without throwing anyone off the land, and when this process has run to an end you have lots and lots of dense, small farming plots which are farmed intensively. But in the US that process did not have the many generations it takes to run and reach equilibrium.



As for the ancient army vice 19th century army, the main difference is cannon - horses haven't changed that much. There is a greater extent to which ACW armies use wagons rather than pack mules, but it's not like ACW armies couldn't have gone for pack mules if they wanted, it is not lost technology. In both cases (absent unusual situations) most of the supply consideration is the movement of food.

 

[7thWisconsin]

Hooker experimented with pack mules in the spring of 1863 and found them inadequate for an army's needs. I thoroughly agree that artillery is the big fly in the ointment. Worse than wagons for moving on bad roads.

 

[Saphroneth]

Hooker experimented with pack mules in the spring of 1863 and found them inadequate for an army's needs. I thoroughly agree that artillery is the big fly in the ointment. Worse than wagons for moving on bad roads.

The thing is, pack mules are a tradeoff - you gain rugged-terrain capability (which Hooker certainly did not need in the spring of 1863 - his problem was the Wilderness, which is a logistics desert because it's a forest) but you lose out on load carried per animal. I do know that for example during Wellington's campaigns in Spain there is a lot of concern about what roads are artillery roads and on more than one occasion a French army is in a situation where it has to ditch its artillery to get out of a trap.