WI: Clausetwitz available in antebellum US

[Roger II]

So one of the things that stands out to me reading Things About the Civil War is 1) both sides's commanders largely coming from the same West Point curriculum and 2) that curriculum largely relying on Jomini. Having read a bit more, it seems that Jomini was a lot more prominent mainly because 1) more direct/handbook-y and 2) was in French and thus got translated earlier/circulated faster than Clausewitz. My question is this: if Clausewitz was more widely circulated and taught at West Point in the antebellum period, how would this have changed the way both sides fought the war (assuming everyone was equally exposed to him). Would the war have necessarily been a shorter affair? Would command and control issues have played out differently for armies that were comfortable with "Fog of war" as a concept? Would thinking of war in essentially political terms have confirmed anyone's worst instincts or pushed them for a more strategic conception of the war?

 

[Stateless]

I would be interested in giving a deeper answer to this, but I won't get to doing so until later.

One thing I would say is that strategic thinking did not feature heavily at West Point for the majority of Civil War officers - you would have got 1 hour of instruction on alternate days only in the final year of a four-year course. They spent more time on drawing. Class rank was determined by performance in mathematics and engineering. So there's going to be a limit to the impact of putting Clausewitz on the curriculum.

 

[Roger II]

That seems roughly consistent with the antebellum army as essentially a glorified public works agency with an Indian Wars-fighting wing and not a body regularly concerned with wars against industrialized states.