By now, there has been more printer’s ink spilled about the causes for the North’s victory in the Civil War than blood was shed by the actual combatants. If you want to write about a new theory, the opportunities are few. Even as you read this, somewhere, some poor doctoral student is desperately trying to finish a dissertation citing as the definitive cause for the Southern defeat its lack of faith healers, bell-bottom pants, and Swedish meatballs.
Among the well-trodden topics is the North’s superior use of railroads to move men and supplies during the war.
When the Civil War broke out, the Union had something the Confederacy sorely lacked: a network of iron spaghetti stretching from Maine to Missouri. The North had about 22,000 miles of track compared to the South’s paltry 9,000—and while the Confederacy was trying to figure out how to fix broken rails with chewing tobacco and hope, the North was running military-grade logistics like a 19th-century Amazon Prime.
Trains let the Union move troops faster than you could say “General Sherman’s coming.” While Southern armies marched through swamps eating hardtack and despair, Union forces rolled into battle with fresh boots, bullets, and beans. While the North could reinforce a front in days, the South might need weeks—assuming the rails hadn’t been torn up, stolen, or repurposed into garden trellises.
Then there was the problem of standardized gauge. The North mostly used one track width, which meant one train could go from Pittsburgh to Atlanta without a layover. The South? A patchwork of gauges meant trainloads of supplies sometimes had to be unloaded and reloaded onto different trains, while the army prayed nothing spoiled. Spoiler: it spoiled.
By the time General Sherman started torching Georgia, he wasn’t just burning cities—he was turning Confederate railroads into twisted sculptures called “Sherman’s neckties.” Artful, yes. Useful? Not anymore.
So while the South had heart, grit, and generals with glorious beards, the North had trains—and in the end, steel wheels beat steel nerves. The Union ran a war on rails, but the Confederacy never really got out of the station.
Some of the credit for functional railroads should also go to Abraham Lincoln. Realizing that the various railroad companies would undoubtedly put profit before patriotism, Lincoln threatened to have the military take over the railroads if the companies did not voluntarily begin cooperating. This scared the railroad companies so thoroughly that they voluntarily cooperated through the entire war. In the South, the few companies that existed refused to deliver even vital military cargo without payment in advance.
The American Civil War should have been a “Road to Damascus” moment for every country’s military. The lessons were very obvious: The days of cavalry charges were absolutely over (at best, mounted troops should ride to battle and then dismount and act as infantry). The sword and lance were made obsolete by rifles. Artillery turned siege lines into slaughterhouses. And—I bet you are way ahead of me—railroads changed the way warfare was to be fought.
You can make an argument that the last point was only temporary. The war between Russia and Japan was actually started over a railroad and it didn’t play much of a role during the actual fighting. And railroads were not pivotal in World War I. But, for the remainder of the 19th century, it was obvious that the effective use of railroads was crucial in warfare so that every country with an intelligent military began making plans in case of war.
Naturally, this did not include France. The French military does best when it is led by someone who isn’t French. Or is a schizophrenic teenage girl. By the time the American Civil War was over, France was led by Emperor Napoleon III, the nephew of Napoleon Bonaparte.
France’s failure to study the use of railroads in the American Civil War led directly to World War I. Let me explain.
Napoleon had declared himself emperor in 1852, after a coup in 1851. Though this made him technically commander-in-chief, the Emperor was just smart enough to leave the military to his military leaders…at least for a while. He had almost nothing to do with the army when England and France fought Russia during the Crimean War (where a British-built seven-kilometer railroad leading from the docks to the Sevastopol front lines was key for the Allied victory.)
When he led France to war against Italy in 1859, he personally commanded the French army during the Second Italian War of Independence against Austria, even being present at the Battle of Solferino, where sheer dumb luck gave him an exaggerated view of his own tactical skills. Over time, he became more hands-on with military affairs, appointing loyalists and shaping doctrine, but not overhauling the system. By overhauling, I mean he ran off all the good men, appointed sycophants and toadies, and generally created an army that his uncle would have proud of in 1805, but was practically useless in 1870.
In 1870, Napoleon III was increasingly unpopular in France and thought the best way to boost his ratings was to engage in a little ‘wag the dog’ action: start a small easy to win war and depend on nationalism to rally the people to the flag. At the same time, Otto von Bismarck was trying unify the Southern German People into a united Germany and knew that if there was a war, the people in those small German states would also respond patriotically.
With each side believing the war would benefit itself, it wasn’t surprising that in July 1870, both countries eagerly went to war. Prussia had an extensive battle plan, prepared and practiced, and began moving troops toward France.
France on the other hand—despite having a better railroad system—had no plan, had no central authority and far worse, had Napoleon III leading the army. Gunners arrived at the front with no artillery, Infantry trains were sent in the wrong direction, cavalry arrived at the front with no horses, and train cars were loaded and unloaded several times without even leaving Paris because there were multiple people giving conflicting orders simultaneously. When train cars did reach the front, they couldn’t be sent back because the tracks were too crowded with incoming trains. And, despite the distance from the French capital being relatively short, some troop trains did not even arrive until days after the battle.
Not surprisingly, the Germans advanced easily, capturing French trains and supplies as they went. The war lasted only six months and ended with both Napoleon III being captured and the Prussian Army shelling Paris. France lost its last emperor (so far, anyway ) and a united and stronger Germany was created.
France was humiliated by the peace treaty, having to pay billions of francs in indemnities and having to give up Alsace and parts of Lorraine. The desire to recoup those territories was one of the main reasons France entered World War I.
Émile Zola wrote La Débâcle (The Collapse) in 1892, to capture the catastrophic unraveling of the French Second Empire during the Franco-Prussian War and to expose how corruption, incompetence, and blind nationalism led to national humiliation.
Zola was politically engaged and deeply disturbed by France’s collapse in 1871. Like many liberals of the time, he believed that the Second Empire under Napoleon III had decayed from within. Its aristocratic rot, administrative bloat, and militaristic posturing had fatally hollowed the state. Zola wanted to show that France didn’t simply lose a war—it imploded from a long buildup of arrogance and dysfunction.
In the final chapter of his book, Zola writes of a French train full of eager young troops that is speeding towards the front. Unbeknown to the passengers, both the engineer and the fireman have fallen from the train, which is hurtling towards disaster.
Zola’s runaway train in La Débâcle is symbolic: the French army was a machine in motion with no one in control, racing toward disaster. The scenario is not based on a single real incident, but it’s rooted in the widespread logistical chaos of the French war effort.
Now that summer is here, I recommend Zola’s book. If you have a Kindle, Amazon will sell you the complete works of Zola for only $3.