The MagazineTactical ExerciseThe Civil War was a contest between two sets of West Pointers.Apr 19, 2010, Vol. 15, No. 29
• By BARTON SWAIM
 West Pointers  The Old Army If we mean to play at war as we play a game of chess—West Point tactics prevailing—we are sure to lose the game. They have every advantage. They can lose pawns ad infinitum—to the end of time—and never feel it. So remarked Wade Hampton, a brigadier general in the Army of Northern Virginia, in the bloody summer of 1862. Hampton was one of the war’s few important leaders who hadn’t attended West Point, and perhaps for that reason he could see more clearly that unless the Confederate armies found an imaginative way to annihilate their enemies, the war would become a contest of endurance—a contest the South could not win. In this excellent new study Wayne Hsieh, an assistant professor at the U. S. Naval Academy, surveys what Hampton deprecated as “West Point tactics” from the end of the War of 1812 through the Civil War. His broad military-historical treatment allows him to make an intelligent answer to the question which every Civil War historian has to answer: Why did it grind on for so long? To read more, you must be a Weekly Standard Subscriber We're Sorry,
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