a dark night, or through a dense fog, when her smoke might sometimes be conned from the tops. Occasionally, too, a foreigner would try to run in, and not seldom succeed, because only the fastest vessels tried to run the blockade after the first few months. But the general experience was one of utter boredom rarely relieved by a stroke of good luck.
The South could not break the blockade. But the North could tighten it, and did so repeatedly, not only at sea but by establishing strong strategic centers of its own along the Southern coast. We have seen already how Hatteras Island was taken in ’61, five weeks after Bull Run. Within another three weeks Ship Island was also taken, to the great disadvantage of the Gulf ports and the corresponding advantage of the Federal fleet blockading them; for Ship Island commanded the coastwise channels between Mobile and New Orleans, the two great scenes of Farragut’s success. Then, on the seventh of November, the day that Grant began his triumphant career by dealing the Confederates a shrewd strategic blow at Belmont in Missouri, South Carolina suffered a worse defeat at Port Royal (where she lost Forts Beauregard and Walker) than North Carolina had suffered at Hatteras Island. Admiral S. F. Du Pont managed the naval part of the Port Royal expedition with consummate skill, especially the fine fleet action off Hilton Head against the Southern ships and forts. He was ably seconded by General Thomas West Sherman, commanding the troops.
North Carolina’s turn soon came again, when she lost Roanoke Island (and with it the command of Albemarle Sound) on February 8, 1862; and when she also had Pamlico Sound shut against her by a joint expedition that struck down her defenses as far inland as Newbern on the fourteenth of March. Then came the turn of Georgia, where Fort Pulaski, the outpost of Savannah, fell to the Federals on the eleventh of April. Within another month Florida was even more hardly hit when the pressure of the Union fleet and army on Virginia compelled the South to use. as reinforcements the garrison that had held Pensacola since the beginning of the war.
These were all severe blows to the Southern cause. But they were nothing to the one which immediately followed.
The idea of an attack on New Orleans had been conceived in June, ’61, by Commander (afterwards Admiral) D.D. Porter, of the U.S.S. Powhatan, when he was helping to blockade the Mississippi. The Navy Department had begun thinking over the same idea in September and had worked out a definite scheme. New Orleans was of immense strategic importance, as being the link between the sea and river systems of the war. The mass of people and their politicians, on both sides, absurdly thought of New Orleans as the objective of a land invasion from the north. Happily for the Union cause, Gustavus Fox, Assistant Secretary of the Navy, knew better and persuaded his civilian chief, Gideon Welles, that this was work for a joint expedition, with the navy first, the army second. The navy could take New Orleans. The army would have to hold it.
The squadron destined for this enterprise was commanded by David Glasgow Farragut, who arrived at Ship Island on February 20, 1862, in the Hartford, the famous man-of-war that carried his flag in triumph to the end. Unlike Lee and Jackson, Grant and Sherman, the other four great leaders in the Civil War, Farragut was not an American whose ancestors on both sides had come from the British Isles. Like Lee, however, he was of very ancient lineage, one of his ancestors, Don Pedro Farragut, having held a high command under the King of Aragon in the Moorish wars of the thirteenth century. Farragut’s father was a pure-blooded Spaniard, born under the British flag in Minorca in 1755. Half Spanish, half Southern by descent, Farragut was wholly Southern by family environment. His mother, Elizabeth Shine, was a native of North Carolina. He spent his early boyhood in New Orleans. Both his first and second wives came from Virginia; and he made his home at Norfolk. On the outbreak of the war, however, he immediately went North and applied for employment with the Union fleet.
Farragut was the oldest of the five great leaders, being now sixty years of age, while Lee was fifty-five, Sherman forty-two, Grant forty, and Jackson thirty-eight. He was, however, fit as an athlete in training, able to turn a handspring on his birthday and to hold his own in swordsmanship against any of his officers. Of middle height, strong build, and rather plain features, he did not attract attention in a crowd. But his alert and upright carriage, keenly interested look, and genial smile impressed all who ever knew him with a sense of native kindliness and power. Though far too great a master of the art of war to interfere with his subordinates he always took care to understand their duties from their own points of view so that he could control every part of the complex naval instruments of war–human and material alike–with a sure and inspiring touch. His one weakness as a leader was his generous inclination to give subordinates the chance of distinguishing themselves when they could have done more useful service in a less conspicuous position.
Farragut’s base at Ship Island was about a hundred miles east from the Confederate Forts Jackson and St. Philip. These forts guarded the entrance to the Mississippi. Ninety miles above them stood New Orleans, to which they gave protection and from which they drew all their supplies. The result of a conference at Washington was an order from Welles to “reduce the defenses which guard the approaches to New Orleans.” But Farragut’s own infinitely better plan was to run past the forts and take New Orleans first. By doing this he would save the extra loss required for reducing the forts and would take the weak defenses of New Orleans entirely by surprise. Then, when New Orleans fell, the forts, cut off from all supplies, would have to surrender without the firing of another shot. Everything depended on whether Farragut could run past without too much loss. Profoundly versed in all the factors of the problem, he foresaw that his solution would prove right, while Washington’s would as certainly be wrong. So, taking the utmost advantage of all the freedom that his general instructions allowed, he followed a course in which anything short of complete success would mean the ruin of his whole career.
The forts were strong, had ninety guns that would bear once fleet, and were well placed, one on each side of the river. But they suffered from all the disadvantages of fixed defenses opposed by a mobile enemy, and their own mobile auxiliaries were far from being satisfactory. The best of the “River Defense Fleet,” including several rams, had been ordered up to Memphis, so sure was the Confederate Government that the attack would come from the north. Two home-made ironclads were failures. The Louisiana’s engines were not ready in time; and her captain refused to be towed into the position near the boom where he could do the enemy most harm. The Mississippi, a mere floating house, built by ordinary carpenters, never reached the forts at all and was burnt by her own men at New Orleans.
Farragut felt sure of his fleet. He had four splendid new men-of-war that formed a homogeneous squadron, four other sizable warships, and nine new gunboats. All spars and rigging that could be dispensed with were taken down; all hulls camouflaged with Mississippi mud; and all decks whitened for handiness at night. A weak point, however, was the presence of mortar-boats that would have been better out of the way altogether. These boats had been sent to bombard the forts,which, according to the plan preferred by the Government, were to be taken before New Orleans was attacked. In other words, the Government wished to cut off the branches first; while Farragut wished to cut down the tree itself, knowing the branches must fall with the trunk.
On the eighteenth of April the mortar-boats began heaving shells at the forts. But, after six days of bombardment, the forts were nowhere near the point of surrendering, and the supply of shells had begun to run low.
Meanwhile the squadron had been busy preparing for the great ordeal. The first task was to break the boom across the river. This boom was placed so as to hold the ships under the fire of the forts; and the four-knot spring current was so strong that the eight-knot ships could not make way enough against it to cut clear through with certainty. Moreover, the middle of the boom was filled in by eight big schooners, chained together, with their masts and rigging dragging astern so as to form a most awkward entanglement. Farragut’s fleet captain, Henry H. Bell, taking two gunboats, Itasca and Pinola, under Lieutenants Caldwell and Crosby, slipped the chains of one schooner; whereupon this schooner and the Itasca swung back and grounded under fire of the forts. The Pinola gallantly stood by, helping Itasca clear. Then Caldwell, with splendid audacity and skill, steamed up through the narrow gap, turned round, put on the Itasca’s utmost speed, and, with the current in his favor, charged full tilt against the chains that still held fast. For one breathless moment the little Itasca seemed lost. Her bows rose clear out, as, quivering from stem to stern, she was suddenly brought up short from top speed to nothing. But, in another fateful minute, with a rending crash, the two nearest schooners gave way and swept back like a gate, while the Itasca herself shot clear and came down in triumph to the fleet.
The passage was made on the twenty-fourth, in line-ahead (that is, one after another) because Farragut found the opening narrower than he thought it should be for two columns abreast, at night, under fire, and against the spring current. Owing to the configuration of the channel the starboard column had to weigh first, which gave the lead to the 500-ton gunboat Cayuga. This was the one weak point, because the leading vessel, drawing most fire, should have been the strongest. The fault was Farragut’s; for his heart got the better of his head when it came to placing Captain Theodorus Bailey, his dauntless second-in-command, on board a vessel fit to lead the starboard column. He could not bear to obscure any captain’s chances of distinction by putting another captain over him. So Bailey was sent to the best vessel commanded by a lieutenant.
The Cayuga’s navigating officer, finding that the guns of the forts were all trained on midstream, edged in towards Fort St. Philip. His masts were shot to pieces, but his hull drew clear without great damage. “Then,” he says, “I looked back for some of our vessels; and my heart jumped up into my mouth when I found I could not see a single one. I thought they must all have been sunk by the forts.” But not a ship had gone down. The three big ones of the starboard column–Pensacola, Mississippi, and Oneida–closed with the fort (so that the gunners on both sides exchanged jeers of defiance) and kept up a furious fire till the lighter craft astern slipped past safely and joined the Cayuga above.
Meanwhile the Cayuga had been attacked by a mob of Mississippi steamers, six of which belonged to the original fourteen blessed with their precious independence by Secretary Benjamin, “backed by the whole Missouri Delegation.” So when the rest of the Federal light craft came up, “all sorts of things happened” in a general free fight. There was no lack of Confederate courage; but an utter absence of concerted action and of the simplest kind of naval skill, except on the part of the two vessels commanded by ex-officers of the United States Navy. The Federal light craft cut their way through their unorganized opponents as easily as a battalion of regulars could cut through a mob throwing stones. But the only two Confederate naval officers got clear of the scrimmage and did all that skill could do with their makeshift little craft against the Federal fleet. Kennon singled out the Varuna (the only one of Farragut’s vessels that was not a real man-of-war), raked her stern with the two guns of his own much inferior vessel, the Governor Moore, and rammed her into a sinking condition. Warley flew at bigger game with his little ram, the Manassas, trying three of the large men-of-war, one after another, as they came upstream. The Pensacola eluded him by a knowing turn of her helm that roused his warmest admiration. The Mississippi caught the blow glancingly on her quarter and got off with little damage. The Brooklyn was taken fair and square amidships; but, though her planking was crushed in, she sprang no serious leak and went on with the fight. The wretched little Confederate engines had not been able to drive the ram home.
The Brooklyn was the flagship Hartford’s next-astern and the Richmond’s next-ahead, these three forming the main body of Farragut’s own port column, which followed hard on the heels of the starboard one, so hard, indeed, that there were only twenty minutes between the first shot fired by the forts at the Cayuga and the first shot fired by the Hartford at the forts. Besides the forts there was the Louisiana floating battery that helped to swell the storm of shot and shell; and down the river came a fire-raft gallantly towed by a tug. The Hartford sheered off, over towards Fort St. Philip, under whose guns she took ground by the head while the raft closed in and set her ablaze. Instantly the hands on fire duty sprang to their work. But the flames rushed in through the ports; and the men were forced a step back. Farragut at once called out: “Don’t flinch from the fire, boys. There’s a hotter fire than that for those who don’t do their duty!” Whereupon they plied their hoses to such good effect that the fire was soon got under control. Farragut calmly resumed his walk up and down the poop, while the gunners blew the gallant little tug to bits and smashed the raft in pieces. Then he stood keenly watching the Hartford back clear, gather way, and take the lead upstream again. Every now and then he looked at the pocket compass that hung from his watch chain; though, for the most part, he tried to scan a scene of action lit only by the flashes of the guns. The air was dense and very still; so the smoke of guns and funnels hung like a pall over both the combatants while the desperate fight went on.
At last the fleet fought through and reached the clearer atmosphere above the forts; all but the last three gunboats, which were driven back by the fire. Then Farragut immediately sent word to General Benjamin F. Butler that the troops could be brought up by the bayous that ran parallel to the river out of range of the forts. But the General, having taken in the situation at a glance from a transport just below the scene of action, had begun to collect his men at Sable Island, twelve miles behind Fort St. Philip, long before Farragut’s messenger could reach him by way of the Quarantine Bayou. From Sable Island the troops were taken by the transports to a point on the Mississippi five miles above Fort St. Philip.
After a well-earned rest the whole fleet moved up to New Orleans on the twenty-fifth, turning the city’s lines five miles downstream without the loss of a man, for the simple reason that these had been built only to resist an army, and so lay with flanks entirely open to a fleet. General Lovell (the able commander who had so often warned the Confederate Government of the danger from the sea) at once evacuated the defenseless city. The best of the younger men were away with the armies. The best of the older men were too few for the storm. And so pandemonium broke loose. Burning boats, blazing cotton, and a howling mob greeted Farragut’s arrival. But after the forts (now completely cut off from their base) had surrendered on the twenty-eighth a landing party from the fleet soon brought the mob to its senses by planting howitzers in the streets and lowering the Confederate colors over the city hall. On the first of May a garrison of Federal troops took charge of New Orleans and kept it till the war was over.
New Orleans was a most pregnant Federal victory; for it established a Union base at the great strategic point where sea-power and land-power could meet most effectively in Mississippi waters.
But it was followed by a perfect anti-climax; for the Federal Government, having planned a naval concentration at Vicksburg, determined to put the plan in operation; though all the naval and military means concerned made such a plan impossible of execution in 1862. Amphibious forces–fleets and armies combined–were essential. There was no use in parading up and down the river, however triumphantly, so long as the force employed could only hold the part of the channel within actual range of its guns. The Confederates could be driven off the Mississippi at any given point. But there was nothing to prevent them from coming back again when once the ships had passed. An army to seize and hold strategic points ashore was absolutely indispensable. Then, and only then, Farragut’s long line of communication with his base at New Orleans would be safe, and the land in which the Mississippi was the principal highway could itself be conquered.
“If the Mississippi expedition from Cairo shall not have descended the river, you will take advantage of the panic to push a strong force up the river to take all their defenses in rear.” These were the orders Farragut had to obey if he succeeded in taking New Orleans. They were soon reinforced by this reminder: “The only anxiety we feel is to know if you have followed up your instructions and pushed a strong force up the river to meet the Western flotilla.” Farragut therefore felt bound to obey and do all that could be done to carry on a quite impossible campaign. So, with a useless landing party of only fifteen hundred troops, he pushed up to Vicksburg, four hundred miles above New Orleans. The nearest Federal army had been halted by the Confederate defenses above Memphis, another four hundred higher still.
There were several reasons why Farragut should not have gone up. His big ships would certainly be stranded if he went up and waited for the army to come down; moreover, when stranded, these ships would be captured while waiting, because both banks were swarming with vastly outnumbering Confederate troops. Then, such a disaster would more than offset the triumph of New Orleans by still further depressing Federal morale at a time when the Federal arms were doing none too well near Washington. Finally, all the force that was being worse than wasted up the Mississippi might have been turned against Mobile, which, at that time, was much weaker than the defenses Farragut had already overcome. But the people of the North were clamorous for more victories along the line to which the press had drawn their gaze. So the Government ordered the fleet to carry on this impossible campaign.
Farragut did his best. Within a month of passing the forts he had not only captured New Orleans and repaired the many serious damages suffered by his fleet but had captured Baton Rouge, and taken even his biggest ships to Vicksburg, five hundred miles from the Gulf, against a continuous current, and right through the heart of a hostile land. Finding that there were thirty thousand Confederates in, near, or within a day of Vicksburg he and General Thomas Williams agreed that nothing could be done with the fifteen hundred troops which formed the only landing party. Sickness and casualties had reduced the ships’ companies; so there were not even a few seamen to spare as reinforcements for these fifteen hundred soldiers, whom Butler had sent, under Williams, with the fleet. Then Farragut turned back, his stores running dangerously short owing to the enormous difficulties of keeping open his long, precarious line of communications. “I arrived in New Orleans with five or six days’ provisions and one anchor, and am now trying to procure others . . . . Fighting is nothing to the evils of the river–getting on shore, running foul of one another, losing anchors, etc.” In a confidential letter home he is still more outspoken. “They will keep us in this river till the vessels break down and all the little reputation we have made has evaporated. The Government appears to think that we can do anything. They expect, me to navigate the Mississippi nine hundred miles in the face of batteries, ironclad rams, etc.; and yet with all the ironclad vessels they have North they could not get to Norfolk or Richmond.”
Back from Washington came still more urgent orders to join the Mississippi flotilla which was coming down to Vicksburg from the north under Flag Officer Charles H. Davis. So once more the fleet worked its laboriously wasteful way up to Vicksburg, where it passed the forts with the help of Porter’s flotilla of mortar-boats on the twenty-eighth of June and joined Davis on the first of July. There, in useless danger, the joint forces lay till the fifteenth, the day on which Grant’s own “most anxious period of the war” began on the Memphis-Corinth line, four hundred miles above.
Farragut, getting very anxious about the shoaling of the water, was then preparing to run down when he heard firing in the Yazoo, a tributary that joined the Mississippi four miles higher up. This came from a fight between one of his reconnoitering gunboats, the Carondelet, and the Arkansas, an ironclad Confederate ram that would have been very dangerous indeed if her miserable engines had been able to give her any speed. She was beating the Carondelet, but getting her smoke-stack so badly holed that her speed dropped down to one knot, which scarcely gave her steerage way and made her unable to ram. Firing hard she ran the gauntlet of both fleets and took refuge under the Vicksburg bluffs, whence she might run out and ram the Union vessels below. Farragut therefore ran down himself, hoping to smash her by successive broadsides in passing. But the difficulties of the passage wasted the daylight, so that he had to run by at night. She therefore survived his attack, and went downstream to join the Confederates against Baton Rouge. But her engines gave way before she got there; and she had to be blown up.
Farragut was back at New Orleans before the end of July. On the fifth of August the Confederates made their attack on Baton Rouge; but were beaten back by the Union garrison aided by three of Farragut’s gunboats and two larger vessels from Davis’s command. The losses were not very severe on either side; but the Union lost a leader of really magnificent promise in its commanding general, Thomas Williams, a great-hearted, cool-headed man and most accomplished officer. The garrison of Baton Rouge, being too small and sickly and exposed, was withdrawn to New Orleans a few days later.
Then Farragut at last returned to the Gulf blockade. Davis went back up the river, where he was succeeded by D.D. Porter in October. And the Confederates, warned of what was coming, made Port Hudson and Vicksburg as strong as they could. Vicksburg was now the only point they held on the Mississippi where there were rails on both sides; and the Red River, flowing in from the West between Vicksburg and Port Hudson, was the only good line of communication connecting them with Texas, whence so much of their meat was obtained.
For three months Farragut directed the Gulf blockade from Pensacola, where, on the day of his arrival, the twentieth of August, he was the first American to hoist an admiral’s flag. The rank of rear-admiral in the United States Navy had been created on the previous sixteenth of July; and Farragut was the senior of the first three officers upon whom it was conferred.
Farragut became the ranking admiral just when the United States Navy was having its hardest struggle to do its fivefold duty well. There was commerce protection on the high seas, blockade along the coast, cooperation with the army on salt water and on fresh, and of course the destruction of the nascent Confederate forces afloat. But perhaps a knottier problem than any part of its combatant duty was how to manage, in the very midst of war, that rapid expansion of its own strength for which no government had let it prepare in time of peace. During this year the number of vessels in commission grew from 264 to 427. Yet such a form of expansion was much simpler than that of the enlisted men; and the expansion of even the most highly trained enlisted personnel was very much simpler than the corresponding expansion of the officers. Happily for the United States Navy it started with a long lead over its enemy. More happily still it could expand with the help of greatly superior resources. Most happily of all, the sevenfold expansion that was effected before the war was over could be made under leaders like Farragut: leaders, that is, who, though in mere numbers they were no more, in proportion to their whole service, than the flag as mere material is to a man-of-war, were yet, as is the flag, the living symbol of a people’s soul.
Commerce protection on the high seas was an exceedingly harassing affair. A few swift raiders, having the initiative, enjoyed great advantages over a far larger number of defending vessels. Every daring raid was trumpeted round the world, bringing down unmeasured, and often unmerited, blame on the defense. The most successful vigilance would, on the other hand, pass by unheeded. The Union navy lacked the means of patrolling the sea lanes of commerce over millions and millions of desolate square miles. Consequently the war-risk insurance rose to a prohibitive height on vessels flying the Stars and Stripes; and, as a further result, enormous transfers were made to other flags. The incessant calls for recruits, afloat and ashore, and to some extent the lure of the western lands, also robbed the merchant service of its men. Thus, one way and another, the glory of the old merchant marine departed with the Civil War.
Blockade was more to the point than any attempt to patrol the sea lanes. Yet it was even more harassing; for it involved three distinct though closely correlated kinds of operation: not only the seizure, in conjunction with the army, of enemy ports, and the patrolling of an enemy coastline three thousand miles long, but also the patrolling of those oversea ports from which most contraband came. This oversea patrol was the most effective, because it went straight to the source of trouble. But it required extraordinary vigilance, because it had to be conducted from beyond the three-mile limit, and with the greatest care for all the rights of neutrals.
By mid-November Farragut was back at New Orleans. A month later General Banks arrived with reinforcements. He superseded General Butler and was under orders to cooperate with McClernand, Grant’s second-in-command, who was to come down the Mississippi from Cairo. But the proposed meeting of the two armies never took place. Banks remained south of Port Hudson, McClernand far north of Vicksburg; for, as we shall see in the next chapter, Sherman’s attempt to take Vicksburg from the North failed on the twenty-ninth of December.
The naval and river campaigns of ’62 thus ended in disappointment for the Union. And, on New Year’s Day, Galveston, which Farragut had occupied in October without a fight and which was lightly garrisoned by three hundred soldiers, fell into Confederate hands under most exasperating circumstances. After the captain and first lieutenant of the U.S.S. Harriet Lane had been shot by the riflemen aboard two cotton-clad steamers the next officer tamely surrendered. Commander Renshaw, who was in charge of the blockade, amply redeemed the honor of the Navy by refusing to surrender the Westfield, in spite of the odds against him, and by blowing her up instead. But when he died at the post of duty the remaining Union vessels escaped; and the blockade was raised for a week.
After that Commodore H.H. Bell, one of Farragut’s best men, closed in with a grip which never let go. Yet even Bell suffered a reverse when he sent the U.S.S. Hatteras to overhaul a strange vessel that lured her off some fifteen miles and sank her in a thirteen-minute fight. This stranger was the Alabama, then just beginning her famous or notorious career. Nor were these the only Union troubles in the Gulf during the first three weeks of the new year. Commander J.N. Matt ran the Florida out of Mobile, right through the squadron that had been specially strengthened to deal with her; and the shore defenses of the Sabine Pass, like those of Galveston, fell into Confederate hands again, to remain there till the war was over.
In spite of all failures, however, Farragut still had the upper hand along the Gulf, and up the Mississippi as far as New Orleans, without which admirable base the River War of ’69. could never have prepared the way for Grant’s magnificent victory in the River War of ’63.
CHAPTER IV. THE RIVER WAR: 1862
The military front stretched east and west across the border States from the Mississippi Valley to the sea. This immense and fluctuating front, under its various and often changed commanders, was never a well coordinated whole. The Alleghany Mountains divided the eastern or Virginian wing from the western or “River” wing. Yet there was always more or less connection between these two main parts, and the fortunes of one naturally affected those of the other. Most eyes, both at home and abroad, were fixed on the Virginian wing, where the Confederate capital stood little more than a hundred miles from Washington, where the greatest rival armies fought, and where decisive victory was bound to have the most momentous consequences. But the River wing was hardly less important; for there the Union Government actually hoped to reach these three supreme objectives in this one campaign: the absolute possession of the border States, the undisputed right of way along the Mississippi from Cairo to the Gulf, and the triumphant invasion of the lower South in conjunction with the final conquest of Virginia.
We have seen already how the Union navy, aided by the army, won its way up the Mississippi from the Gulf to Baton Rouge, but failed to secure a single point beyond. We shall now see how the Union army, aided by the navy, won its way down the Mississippi from Cairo to Memphis, and fairly attained the first objective–the possession of the border States; but how it also failed from the north, as the others had failed from the south, to gain a footing on the crucial stretch between Vicksburg and Port Hudson. One more year was required to win the Mississippi; two more to invade the lower South; three to conquer Virginia.
Just after the fall of Fort Sumter the Union Government had the foresight to warn James B. Eads, the well-known builder of Mississippi jetties, that they would probably draw upon his “thorough knowledge of our Western rivers and the use of steam on them.” But it was not till August that they gave him the contract for the regular gunboat flotilla; and it was not till the following year that his vessels began their work. In the meantime the armies were asking for all sorts of transport and protective craft. So the first flotilla on Mississippi waters started under the War (not the Navy) Department, though manned under the executive orders of Commander John Rodgers, U. S. N., who bought three river steamers at Cincinnati, lowered their engines, strengthened their frames, protected their decks, and changed them into gunboats.
The first phase of the clash in this land of navigable rivers had ended, as we have seen already, with the taking of Boonville on the Missouri by that staunch and daring Union regular, General Nathaniel Lyon, on June 17, 1861. Boonville was a stunning blow to secession in those parts. Confederate hopes, however, again rose high when the news of Bull Run came through. At this time General John C. Fremont was taking command of all the Union forces in the “Western Department,” which included Illinois and everything between the Mississippi and the Rockies. Fremont’s command, however, was short and full of trouble. Round his headquarters at St. Louis the Confederate colors were flaunted in his face. His requisitions for arms and money were not met at Washington. Union regiments marched in without proper equipment and with next to no supplies. There were boards of inquiry on his contracts. There were endless cross-purposes between him and Washington. And early in November he was transferred to West Virginia just as he was about to attack with what seemed to him every prospect of success. He had not succeeded. But he had done good work in fortifying St. Louis; in ordering gunboats, tugs, and mortar-boats; in producing some kind of system out of utter confusion,; in trusting good men like Lyon; and in sending the then unknown Ulysses Grant to take command at Cairo, the excellent strategic base where the Ohio joins the Mississippi.
The most determined fighting that took place during Fremont’s command was brought on by Lyon, who attacked Ben McCulloch at Wilson’s Creek, in southwest Missouri, on the tenth of August. Though McCulloch had ten thousand, against not much over five, Lyon was so set on driving the Confederates away from such an important lead-bearing region that he risked an attack, hoping by surprise, skillful maneuvers, and the help of his regulars to shake the enemy’s hold, even if he could not thoroughly defeat him. Disheartened by his repeated failure to get reinforcements, and very anxious about the fate of his flanking column under Sigel, whose attack from the rear was defeated, he expressed his forebodings to his staff. But the light of battle shone bright as ever in his eyes; he was killed leading a magnificent charge; and when, after his death, his little army drew off in good order, the Confederates, by their own account, “were glad to see him go.”
On the twentieth of September the Confederates under Sterling Price won a barren victory by taking Lexington, Missouri, where Colonel James Mulligan made a gallant defense. That was the last Confederate foothold on the Missouri; and it could not be maintained.
In October, Anderson, who had never recovered from the strain of defending Fort Sumter, turned over to Sherman the very troublesome Kentucky command. Sherman pointed out to the visiting Secretary of War, Simon Cameron, that while McClellan had a hundred thousand men for a front of a hundred miles in Virginia, and Fremont had sixty thousand for about the same distance, he (Sherman) had been given only eighteen thousand to guard the link between them, although this link stretched out three hundred miles. Sherman then asked for sixty thousand men at once; and said two hundred thousand would be needed later on. “Good God!” said Cameron, “where are they to come from?” Come they had to, as Sherman foresaw. Cameron made trouble at Washington by calling Sherman’s words “insane”; and Sherman’s “insanity” became a stumbling-block that took a long time to remove.
Grant, in command at Cairo, began his career as a general by cleverly forestalling the enemy at Paducah, where the Tennessee flows into the Ohio. Then, on the seventh of November, he closed the first confused campaign on the Mississippi by attacking Belmont, Missouri, twenty miles downstream from Cairo, in order to prevent the Confederates at Columbus, Kentucky, right opposite, from sending reinforcements to Sterling Price in Arkansas. There was a stiff fight, in which the Union gunboats did good work. Grant handled his soldiers equally well; and the Union objective was fully attained.
Halleck, the Federal Commander-in-Chief for the river campaign of ’62, fixed his headquarters at St. Louis. From this main base his right wing had rails as far as Rolla, whence the mail road went on southwest, straight across Missouri. At Lebanon, near the middle of the State, General Samuel R. Curtis was concentrating, before advancing still farther southwest against the Confederates whom he eventually fought at Pea Ridge. From St. Louis there was good river, rail, and road connection south to Halleck’s center in the neighborhood of Cairo, where General Ulysses S. Grant had his chief field base, at the junction of the Mississippi and Ohio. A little farther east Grant had another excellent position at Paducah, beside the junction of the Ohio and the Tennessee. Naval forces were of course indispensable for this amphibious campaign; and in Flag-Officer Andrew Hull Foote the Western Flotilla had a commander able to cooperate with the best of his military colleagues. Halleck’s left–a semi-independent command–was based on the Ohio, stretched clear across Kentucky, and was commanded by a good organizer and disciplinarian, General Don Carlos Buell, whose own position at Munfordville was not only near the middle of the State but about midway between the important railway junctions of Louisville and Nashville.
Henry W. Halleck was a middle-aged, commonplace, and very cautious general, who faithfully plodded through the war without defeat or victory. He looked so long before he leaped that he never leaped at all–not even on retreating enemies. Good for the regular officework routine, he was like a hen with ducklings for this river war, in which Curtis, Grant, Buell, and his naval colleague Foote, were all his betters on the fighting line.
His opponent, Albert Sidney Johnston, was also middle-aged, being fifty-nine; but quite fit for active service. Johnston had had a picturesque career, both in and out of the army; and many on both sides thought him likely to prove the greatest leader of the war. He was, however, a less formidable opponent than Northerners were apt to think. He was not a consummate genius like Lee. He had inferior numbers and resources; and the Confederate Government interfered with him. Yet they did have the good sense to put both sides of the Mississippi under his unified command, including not only Kentucky and Tennessee, Missouri and Arkansas, but the whole of the crucial stretch from Vicksburg to Port Hudson. In this they were wiser than the Federal Government with Halleck’s command, which was neither so extensive nor so completely unified.
Johnston took post in his own front line at Bowling Green, Kentucky, not far south of Buell’s position at Munfordville. He was very anxious to keep a hold on Kentucky and Missouri, along the southern frontiers of which his forces were arrayed. His extreme right was thrown northward under General Marshall to Prestonburg, near the border of West Virginia, in the dangerous neighborhood of many Union mountain folk. His southern outpost on the right was also in the same kind of danger at Cumberland Gap, a strategic pass into the Alleghanies at a point where Kentucky, Tennessee, and Virginia meet. Halfway west from there, to Bowling Green the Confederates hoped to hold the Cumberland near Logan’s Cross Roads and Mill Springs. Westwards from Bowling Green Johnston’s line held positions at Fort Donelson on the Cumberland, Fort Henry on the Tennessee, and Columbus on the Mississippi. All his Trans-Mississippi troops were under the command of the enthusiastic Earl Van Dorn, who hoped to end his spring campaign in triumph at St. Louis.
The fighting began in January at the northeastern end of the line, where the Union Government, chiefly for political reasons, was particularly anxious to strengthen the Unionists that lived all down the western Alleghanies and so were a thorn in the side of the solid South beyond. On the tenth Colonel James A. Garfield, a future President, attacked and defeated Marshall near Prestonburg and occupied the line of Middle Creek. The Confederates, half starved, half clad, ill armed, slightly outnumbered, and with no advantage except their position, fought well, but unavailingly. Only some three thousand men were engaged on both sides put together. Yet the result was important because it meant that the Confederates had lost their hold on the eastern end of Kentucky, which was now in unrestricted touch with West Virginia.
Within eight days a greater Union commander, General G.H. Thomas, emerged as the victor of a much bigger battle at Mill Springs and Logan’s Cross Roads on the upper Cumberland, ninety miles due east of Bowling Green. The victory was complete, and Thomas’s name was made. Thomas, indeed, was known already as a man whose stentorian orders had to be obeyed; and a clever young Confederate prisoner used this reputation as his excuse for getting beaten: “We were doing pretty good fighting till old man Thomas rose up in his stirrups, and we heard him holler out: ‘Attention, Creation! By kingdoms, right wheel!’ Then we knew you had us.”
There were only about four thousand men a side. But in itself, and in conjunction with Garfield’s little victory at Prestonburg, the battle of Logan’s Cross Roads was important as raising the Federal morale, as breaking through Johnston’s right, and as opening the road into eastern Tennessee. Short supplies and almost impassable roads, however, prevented a further advance. One brigade was therefore detached against Cumberland Gap, while the rest joined Buell’s command, which was engaged in organizing, drilling hard, and keeping an eye on Johnston.
In February the scene of action changed to Johnston’s left center, where Forts Donelson and Henry were blocking the Federal advance up the Cumberland and the Tennessee.
On the fourth, Flag-Officer Foote, with seven gunboats, of which four were ironclads, led the way up the Tennessee, against Fort Henry. That day the furious current was dashing driftwood in whirling masses against the flotilla, which had all it could do to keep station, even with double anchors down and full steam up. Next morning a new danger appeared in the shape of what looked like a school of dead porpoises. These were Confederate torpedoes, washed from their moorings. As it was now broad daylight they were all successfully avoided; and the crews felt as if they had won the first round.
The sixth of February dawned clear, with just sufficient breeze to blow the smoke away. The flotilla steamed up the swollen Tennessee between the silent, densely wooded banks. Not a sound was heard ashore until, just after noon, Fort Henry came into view and answered the flagship’s signal shot with a crashing discharge of all its big guns. Then the fire waxed hot and heavy on both sides, the gunboats knocking geyser-spouts of earth about the fort, and the fort knocking gigantic splinters out of the gunboats. The Essex ironclad was doing very well when a big shot crashed into her middle boiler, which immediately burst like a shell, scalding the nearest men to death, burning others, and sending the rest flying overboard or aft. With both pilots dead and Commander W.D. Porter badly scalded, the Essex was drifting out of action when the word went round that Fort Henry had surrendered: and there, sure enough, were the Confederate colors coming down. Instantly Porter rallied for the moment, called for three cheers, and fell back exhausted at the third.
The Confederate General Tilghman surrendered to Foote with less than a hundred men, all the rest, over twenty-five hundred, having started towards Fort Donelson before the flag came down. The Western Flotilla had won the day alone. But it was the fear of Grant’s approaching army that hurried the escaping garrison. An hour after the surrender Grant rode in and took command. That night victors and vanquished were dining together when a fussy staff officer came in to tell Grant that he could not find the Confederate reports. On this Captain Jesse Taylor, the chief Confederate staff officer, replied that he had destroyed them. The angry Federal then turned on him with the question, “Don’t you know you’ve laid yourself open to punishment?” and was storming along, when Grant quietly broke in: “I should be very much surprised and mortified if one of my subordinate officers should allow information which he could destroy to fall into the hands of the enemy.”
The surrender of Fort Henry, coming so soon after Prestonburg and Logan’s Cross Roads, caused great rejoicing in the loyal North. The victory, effective in itself, was completed by sending the ironclad Carondelet several miles upstream to destroy the Memphis-Ohio railway bridge, thus cutting the shortest line from Bowling Green to the Mississippi. But the action, in which the army took no part, was only a preliminary skirmish compared with the joint attack of the fleet and army on Fort Donelson. Fort Donelson was of great strategic importance. If it held fast, and the Federals were defeated, then Johnston’s line would probably hold from Bowling Green to Columbus, and the rails, roads, and rivers would remain Confederate in western Tennessee. If, on the other hand, Fort Donelson fell, and more especially if its garrison surrendered, then Johnston’s line would have to be withdrawn at once, lest the same fate should overtake the outflanked remains of it. Both sides understood this perfectly well; and all concerned looked anxiously to see how the new Federal commander, General Grant, would face the crisis.
Ulysses Simpson Grant came of sturdy New England stock, being eighth in descent from Matthew Grant, who landed in 1630 and was Surveyor of Connecticut for over forty years. Grant’s mother was one of the Simpsons who had been Pennsylvanians for several generations. His family was therefore as racy of the North as Lee’s was of the South. His great-grandfather and great-granduncle, Noah and Solomon Grant, held British commissions during the final French-and-Indian or Seven Years’ War (1756-63) when both were killed in the same campaign. His grandfather Noah served all through the Revolutionary War. Financial reverses and the death of his grandmother broke up the family; and his father, Jesse Grant, was given the kindest of homes by Judge Tod of Ohio. Jesse, being as independent as he was grateful, turned his energies into the first business at hand, which happened to be a tannery at Deerfield owned by the father of that wild enthusiast John Brown. A great reader, an able contributor to the Western press, and a most public-spirited citizen, Jesse Grant was a good father to his famous son, who was born on April 27, 1822, at Point Pleasant, Clermont County, Ohio. Young Grant hated the tannery, but delighted in everything connected with horses; so he looked after the teams. One day, after swapping horses many miles from home, he found himself driving a terrified bolter that he only just managed to stop on the edge of a big embankment. His grown-up companion, who had no stomach for any more, then changed into a safe freight wagon. But Ulysses, tying his bandanna over the runaway’s eyes, stuck to the post of danger.
After passing through West Point without any special distinction, except that he came out first in horsemanship, Grant was disappointed at not receiving the cavalry commission which he would have greatly preferred to the infantry one he was given instead. Years later, when already a rising general, he vainly yearned for a cavalry brigade. Otherwise he had curiously little taste for military life; though at West Point he thought the two finest men in the world were Captain C.F. Smith, the splendidly smart Commandant, and, even more, that magnificently handsome giant, Winfield Scott, who came down to inspect the cadets. Some years after having served with credit all through the Mexican War (when, like Lee, he learnt so much about so many future friends and foes) he left the army, not to return till he and Sherman had seen Blair and Lyon take Camp Jackson. After wisely declining to reenter the service under the patronage of General John Pope, who was full of self-importance about his acquaintance with the Union leaders of Illinois, Grant wrote to the Adjutant-General at Washington offering to command a regiment. Like Sherman, he felt much more diffident about the rise from ex-captain of regulars to colonel commanding a battalion than some mere civilians felt about commanding brigades or directing the strategy of armies. He has himself recorded his horror of sole responsibility as he approached what might have been a little battlefield on which his own battalion would have been pitted against a Southern one commanded by a Colonel Harris. “My heart kept getting higher and higher until it felt as though it was in my throat. I would have given anything then to have been back in Illinois; but I had not the moral courage to halt and consider what to do. When we reached a point from which the valley below was in full view . . . the troops were gone. My heart resumed its place. It occurred to me at once that Harris had been as much afraid of me as I had been of him: This was a view of the question I never forgot.”
Grant’s latent powers developed rapidly. Starting with a good stock of military knowledge he soon added to it in every way he could. He had the insight of genius. Above all, he had an indomitable will both in carrying out practicable plans in spite of every obstacle and in ruthlessly dismissing every one who failed. Not tall, not handsome, in no way striking at first sight, he looked the leader born only by reason of his square jaw, keen eye, and determined expression. Lincoln’s conclusive answer to a deputation asking for Grant’s removal simply was, “he fights.” And, when mounted on his splendid charger Cincinnati, Grant even looked what he was–“a first-class fighting man.”
Grant marched straight across the narrow neck of land between the forts, which were only twelve miles apart. Foote of course had to go round by the Ohio–fifteen times as far. His vanguard, the dauntless Carondelet, now commanded by Henry Walke, arrived on the twelfth and fired the first shots at the fort, which stood on a bluff more than a hundred feet high and mounted fifteen heavy guns in three tiers of fire. Grant’s infantry was already in position round the Confederate entrenchments; and when his soldiers heard the naval guns they first gave three rousing cheers and then began firing hard, lest the sailors should get ahead of them again. Birge’s sharpshooters, the snipers of those days, were particularly keen. They never drilled as a battalion, but simply assembled in bunches for orders, when Birge would ask: “Canteens full? Biscuits for all day?” After which he would sing out: “All right, boys, hunt your holes”; and off they would go to stalk the enemy with their long-range rifles.
Early next morning Grant sent word to Walke that he was establishing the rest of his batteries and that he was ready to take advantage of any diversion which the Carondelet could make in his favor. Walke then fired hard for two hours under cover of a wooded point. The fort fired back equally hard; but with little effect except for one big solid shot which stove in a casemate, knocked down a dozen men, burst the steam heater, and bounded about the engine room “like a wild beast pursuing its prey.” Forty minutes later the Carondelet was again in action, firing hard till dark. Late that night Foote arrived with the rest of the flotilla.
The fourteenth was another naval day. Foote’s flotilla advanced gallantly, the four ironclads leading in line abreast, the two wooden gunboats half a mile astern. The ironclads closed in to less than a quarter-mile and hung on like bulldogs till the Confederates in the lowest battery were driven from their guns. But the plunging fire from the big guns on the bluff crashed down with ever increasing effect. Davits were smashed like matches, boats knocked into kindling wood, armor dented, started, ripped, stripped, and sent splashing overboard as if by strokes of lightning. Before the decks could be resanded there was so much blood on them that the gun crews could hardly work for slipping. Presently the Pittsburgh swung round, ran foul of the Carondelet, and dropped downstream. The pilot of the St. Louis was killed, and Foote, who stood beside him, wounded. The wheel-ropes of the St. Louis, like those of the Louisville, were shot away. The whole flotilla then retired, still firing hard; and the Confederates wired a victory to Richmond.
Both sides now redoubled their efforts; for Donelson was a great prize and the forces engaged were second only to those at Bull Run. Afloat and ashore, all ranks and ratings on both sides together, there were fifty thousand men present at the investment from first to last. The Confederates began with about twenty thousand, Grant with fifteen thousand. But Grant had twenty-seven thousand fit for duty at the end, in spite of all his losses. He was fortunate in his chief staff officer, the devoted and capable John A. Rawlins, afterwards a general and Secretary of War. Two of his divisional commanders, Lew Wallace and, still more, C.F. Smith, the old Commandant of Cadets, were also first-rate. But the third, McClernand, here began to follow those distorting ideas which led to his dismissal later on. The three chief Confederates ranked in reverse order of efficiency: Floyd first and worst, cantankerous Pillow next, and Buckner best though last.
The Federal prospect was anything but bright on the evening of the fourteenth. Foote had just been repulsed; while McClernand had fought a silly little battle on his own account the day before, to the delight of the Confederates and the grievous annoyance of Grant. The fifteenth dawned on a scene of midwinter discomfort in the Federal lines, where most of the rawest men had neither great-coats nor blankets, having thrown them away during the short march from Fort Henry, regardless of the fact that they would have to bivouac at Donelson. Thus it was in no happy frame of mind that Grant slithered across the frozen mud to see what Foote proposed; and, when Foote explained that the gunboats would take ten days for indispensable repairs, Grant resigned himself to the very unwelcome idea of going through the long-drawn horrors of a regular winter siege.
But, to his intense surprise, the enemy saved him the trouble. At first, when they had a slight preponderance of numbers, they stood fast and let Grant invest them. Now that he had the preponderance they tried to cut their way out by the southern road, upstream, where McClernand’s division stood guard. As Grant came ashore from his interview with Foote an aide met him with the news that McClernand had been badly beaten and that the enemy was breaking out. Grant set spurs to his horse and galloped the four muddy miles to his left, where that admirable soldier, C.F. Smith, was as cool and wary as ever, harassing the enemy’s new rear by threatening an assault, but keeping his division safe for whatever future use Grant wanted. Wallace had also done the right thing, pressing the enemy on his own front and sending a brigade to relieve the pressure on McClernand. These two generals were in conversation during a lull in the battle when Grant rode up, calmly returned their salutes, attentively listened to their reports, and then, instead of trying the Halleckian expedient of digging in farther back before the enemy could make a second rush, quietly said: “Gentlemen, the position on the right must be retaken.”
Grant knew that Floyd was no soldier and that Pillow was a stumbling-block. He read the enemy’s mind like an open book and made up his own at once by the flash of intuition which told him that their men were mostly as much demoralized by finding their first attempt at escape more than half a failure as even McClernand’s were by being driven back. He decided to use Smith’s fresh division for an assault in rear, while McClernand’s, stiffened by Wallace’s, should re-form and hold fast. Before leaving the excited officers and men, who were talking in groups without thinking of their exhausted ammunition, he called out cheerily “Fill your cartridge boxes quick, and get into line. The enemy is trying to escape and he must not be permitted to do so.” McClernand’s division, excellent men, but not yet disciplined soldiers, responded at once to the touch of a master hand; and as Grant rode off to Smith’s he had the satisfaction of seeing the defenseless groups melt, change, and harden into well-armed lines.
Smith, ready at all points, had only to slip his own division from the leash. Buckner, who was to have covered the Confederate escape, was also ready with the guns of Fort Donelson and the rifles of defenses that “looked too thick for a rabbit to get through.” Smith, knowing his unseasoned men would need the example of a commander they could actually see, rode out in front of his center as if at a formal review. “I was nearly scared to death,” said one of his followers, “but I saw the old man’s white moustache over his shoulder, and so I went on.” As the line neared the Confederate abatis a sudden gust of fire seemed to strike it numb. In an instant Smith had his cap on the point of his sword. Then, rising in his stirrups to his full gigantic height, he shouted in stentorian tones: “No flinching now, my lads! Here–this way in! Come on!” In, through, and out the other side they went, Smith riding ahead, holding his sword and cap aloft, and seeming to bear a charmed life amid that hail of bullets. Up the slope he rode, the Confederates retiring before him, till, unscathed, he reached the deadly crest, where the Union colors waved defiance and the Union troops stood fast.
Floyd, being under special indictment at Washington for misconduct as Secretary of War, was so anxious to escape that he turned over the command to Pillow, who declined it in favor of Buckner. That night Floyd and Pillow made off with all the river steamers; Forrest’s cavalry floundered past McClernand’s exposed flank, which rested on a shallow backwater; and Buckner was left with over twelve thousand men to make what terms he could. Next morning, the sixteenth, he wrote to Grant proposing the appointment of commissioners to agree upon terms of surrender. But Grant had made up his mind that compromise was out of place in civil war and that absolute defeat or victory were the only alternatives. So he instantly wrote back the famous letter which quickly earned him the appropriate nickname–suggested by his own initials–of Unconditional Surrender Grant.
Hd Qrs., Army in the Field
Camp near Donelson Feb’y 18th 1882
Gen. S.B. Buckner,
Confed. Army.
Sir: Yours of this date proposing armistice, and appointment of Commissioners to settle terms of capitulation is just received. No terms except an unconditional and immediate surrender can be accepted. I propose to move immediately upon your works
I am, Sir, very respectfully,
Your obt. sert.,
U.S. GRANT
Brig. Gen.
Grant and Buckner were old army friends; so their personal talk was very pleasant at the little tavern where Buckner and his staff had just breakfasted off corn bread and coffee, which was all the Confederate stores afforded.
Donelson at once became, like Grant, a name to conjure with. The fact that the Union had at last won a fight in which the numbers neared, and the losses much exceeded, those at Bull Run itself, the further fact that this victory made a fatal breach in the defiant Southern line beyond the Alleghanies, and the delight of discovering another, and this time a genuine, hero in “Unconditional Surrender Grant,” all combined to set the loyal North aflame with satisfaction, pride, and joyful expectation. Great things were expected in Virginia, where the invasion had not yet begun. Great things were expected in the Gulf, where Farragut had not yet tried the Mississippi. And great things were expected to result from Donelson itself, whence the Union forces were to press on south till they met other Union forces pressing north. The river campaign was then to end in a blaze of glory.
Donelson did have important results. Johnston, who had already abandoned Bowling Green for Nashville, had now to abandon Nashville, with most of its great and very sorely needed stores, as well as the rest of Tennessee, and take up a new position along the rails that ran from Memphis to Chattanooga, whence they forked northeast to Richmond and Washington and southeast to Charleston and Savannah. Columbus was also abandoned, and the only points left to the Confederates anywhere near the old line were Island Number Ten in the Mississippi and the Boston Mountains in Arkansas.
But the triumphant Union advance from the north did not take place in ’62. Grant was for pushing south as fast as possible to attack the Confederates before they had time to defend their great railway junction at Corinth. But Halleck was too cautious; and misunderstandings, coupled with division of command, did the rest. Halleck was the senior general in the West. But the three, and afterwards four, departments into which the West was divided were never properly brought under a single command. Then telegrams went wrong at the wire-end advancing southwardly from Cairo, the end Grant had to use. A wire from McClellan on the sixteenth of February was not delivered till the third of March. Next day Grant was thunderstruck at receiving this from Halleck: “Place C.F. Smith in command of expedition and remain yourself at Fort Henry. Why do you not obey my orders to report strength and positions of your command?” And so it went on till McClellan authorized Halleck to place Grant under arrest for insubordination. Then the operator at the wire-end suddenly deserted, taking a sheaf of dispatches with him. He was a clever Confederate.
Explanations followed; and on the seventeenth of March Grant rejoined his army, which was assembling round Pittsburg Landing on the Tennessee, near the future battlefield of Shiloh, and some twenty miles northeast of Corinth.
Meanwhile Van Dorn and Sterling Price, thinking it was now or never for Missouri, decided to attack Curtis. They had fifteen against ten thousand men, and hoped to crush Curtis utterly by catching him between two fires. But on the seventh of March the Federal left beat off the flanking attack of McCulloch and McIntosh, both of whom were killed. The right, furiously assailed by the Confederate Missourians under Van Dorn and Price, fared badly and was pressed back. Yet on the eighth Curtis emerged victorious on the hard-fought field that bears the double name of Elkhorn Tavern and Pea Ridge. This battle in the northwest corner of Arkansas settled the fate of Missouri.
A month later the final attack was made on Island Number Ten. Foote’s flotilla had been at work there as early as the middle of March, when the strong Confederate batteries on the island and east shore bluffs were bombarded by ironclads and mortarboats. Then the Union General John Pope took post at New Madrid, eight miles below the island, on the west shore, which the Confederates had to evacuate when he cut their line of communications farther south. They now held only the island and the east shore opposite, with no line of retreat except the Mississippi, because the land line on the east shore was blocked by swamps and flanked by the Union armies in western Tennessee.
On the night of the fourth of April the Carondelet started to cut this last line south. She was swathed in hawsers and chain cables. Her decks were packed tight with every sort of gear that would break the force of plunging shot; and a big barge, laden with coal and rammed hay, was lashed to her port side to protect her magazine. Twenty-three picked Illinoisian sharpshooters went aboard; while pistols, muskets, cutlasses, boarding-pikes, and hand grenades were placed ready for instant use. The escape-pipe was led aft into the wheel-house, so as to deaden the noise; and hose was attached to the boilers ready to scald any Confederates that tried to board. Then, through the heart of a terrific thunderstorm, and amid a furious cannonade, the Carondelet ran the desperate gauntlet at full speed and arrived at New Madrid by midnight.
The Confederates were now cut off both above and below; for the position of Island Number Ten was at the lower point of a V-shaped bend in the Mississippi, with Federal forces at the two upper points. But the Federal troops could not close on the Confederates without crossing over to the east bank; and their transports could not run the gauntlet like the ironclads. So the Engineer Regiment of the West cut out a water road connecting the two upper points of the V. This admirable feat of emergency field engineering was effected by sawing through three miles of heavy timber to the nearest bayou, whence a channel was cleared down to New Madrid. Then the transports went through in perfect safety and took Pope’s advanced guard aboard. The ironclad Pittsburg had come down, through another thunderstorm, this same morning of the seventh; and when the island garrison saw their position completely cut off they surrendered to Foote. Next day Pope’s men cut off the greater part of the Confederates on the mainland. Thus fell the last point near Johnston’s original line along the southern borders of Missouri and Kentucky. Just before it fell Johnston made a desperate counterattack from his new line at Corinth, in northwest Mississippi, against Grant’s encroaching force at Shiloh, fifteen miles northeast, on the Tennessee River.
Writing “A. S. Johnston, 3d April, 62, en avant” on his pocket map of Tennessee, the Confederate leader, anguished by the bitter criticism with which his unavoidable retreat had been assailed, cast the die for an immediate attack on Grant before slow Halleck reinforced or ready Buell joined him. Johnston’s lieutenants, Beauregard and Bragg, had obtained ten days for reorganization; and their commands were as ready as raw forces could be made in an extreme emergency. They hoped to be joined by Van Dorn, whose beaten army was working east from Pea Ridge. But on the second they heard that Buell was approaching Grant from Nashville; and on the third Johnston’s advanced guard began to move off. Van Dorn arrived too late.
The march, which it was hoped to complete on the fourth, was not completed till the fifth. The roads were ankle-deep in clinging mud, the country densely wooded and full of bogs and marshes. The forty thousand men were not yet seasoned; and, though full of enthusiasm, they neither knew nor had time to learn march discipline. Moreover, Johnston allowed his own proper plan of attacking in columns of corps to be changed by Beauregard into a three-line attack, each line being formed by one complete corps. This meant certain and perhaps disastrous confusion. For in an attack by columns of corps the firing line would always be reinforced by successive lines of the same corps; while attacking by lines of corps meant that the leading corps would first be mixed up with the second, and then both with the third.
In the meantime Grant was busier with his own pressing problems of organization for an advance than with any idea of resisting attack. He lacked the prevision of Winfield Scott and Lee, both of whom expected from the first that the war would last for years. His own expectation up to this had been that the South would collapse after the first smashing blow, and that its western armies were now about to be dealt such a blow. He was not unmindful of all precautions; for he knew the Confederates were stirring on his front. Yet he went downstream to Savannah without making sure that his army was really safe at Shiloh.
Pittsburg Landing was at the base of the Shiloh position. But the point at which, by the original orders, Buell was to join was Savannah, nine miles north along the Tennessee. So Grant had to keep in touch with both. He had not ignored the advantage of entrenching. But the best line for entrenching was too far from good water; and he thought he chose the lesser of two evils when he devoted the time that might have been used for digging to drilling instead. His army was raw as an army; many of the men were still rawer recruits; and, as usual, the recruiting authorities had sent him several brand-new battalions, which knew nothing at all, instead of sending the same men as reinforcements to older battalions that could “learn ’em how.” Grant’s total effectives at first were only thirty-three thousand. This made the odds five to four in favor of Johnston’s attack. But the rejoining of Lew Wallace’s division, the great reinforcement by Buell’s troops, and the two ironclad gunboats on the river, raised Grant’s final effective grand total to sixty thousand. The combined grand totals therefore reached a hundred thousand–double the totals at Donelson and far exceeding those at Bull Run.
After a horrible week of cold and wet the sun set clear and calm on Saturday, the eve of battle. The woods were alive with forty thousand Confederates all ready for their supreme attack on the thirty-three thousand Federals on their immediate four-mile front. Grant’s front ran, facing south, between Owl and Lick Creeks, two tributaries that joined the Tennessee on either side of Pittsburg Landing. Buell’s advance division, under Nelson, was just across the Tennessee. But Grant was in no hurry to get it over. His reassuring wire that night to Halleck said: “The main force of the enemy is at Corinth. I have scarcely the faintest idea of an attack (general one) being made upon us.” But the skirmishing farther south on Friday had warned Grant, as well as Sherman and the vigilant Prentiss, that Johnston might be trying a reconnaissance in force–the very thing that Beauregard wished the Confederates to do.
Long before the beautiful dawn of Sunday, the fateful sixth of April, Prentiss had thrown out from the center a battalion which presently met and drove in the vanguard of the first Confederate line of assault. The Confederate center soon came up, overwhelmed this advanced battalion, and burst like a storm on the whole of Prentiss’s division. Then, above the swelling roar of multitudinous musketry, rose the thunder of the first big guns. “Note the hour, please, gentlemen,” said Johnston; and a member of his staff wrote down: “5:14 A.M.”
Johnston’s admirable plan was, first, to drive Grant’s left clear of Lick Creek, then drive it clear of Pittsburg Landing, where the two Federal ironclads were guarding the ferry. This, combined with a determined general assault on the rest of Grant’s line, would huddle the retreating Federals into the cramped angle between Owl Creek and the Tennessee and force them to surrender. But there were three great obstacles to this: Sherman on the right, the “Hornet’s Nest” in the center, and the gunboats at the Landing. Worse still for the Confederates, Buell was now too close at hand. Three days earlier Johnston had wired from Corinth to the Government at Richmond: “Hope engagement before Buell can form junction.” But the troubles of the march had lost him one whole priceless day.
The Confederate attack was splendidly gallant and at first pushed home regardless of loss. The ground was confusing to both sides: a bewilderment of ups and downs, of underbrush, woods, fields, and clumps of trees, criss-cross paths, small creeks, ravines, and swamps, without a single commanding height or any outstanding features except the two big creeks, the river, and the Pittsburg Landing.
At the first signs of a big battle Grant hurried to the field, first sending a note to Buell, whom he was to have met at Savannah, then touching at Crump’s Landing on the way, to see Lew Wallace and make sure whether this, and not the Pittsburg Landing, was the point of attack. Arrived on the field of Shiloh, calm and determined as ever, he was reassured by finding how well Sherman was holding his raw troops in hand at the extremely important point of Shiloh itself, next to Owl Creek.
But elsewhere the prospect was not encouraging, though the men got under arms very fast and most of them fought very well. The eager gray lines kept pressing on like the rising tide of an angry sea, dashing in fury against all obstructing fronts and swirling round the disconnecting flanks. The blue lines, for the most part, resisted till the swift gray tide threatened to cut them off. Half of Prentiss’s remaining men were in fact cut off that afternoon and forced to surrender with their chief, whose conduct, like their own, was worthy of all praise. Back and still back the blue lines went before the encroaching gray, each losing heavily by sheer hard fighting at the front and streams of stragglers running towards the rear.
Sherman, like others, gave ground, but still held his men together, except for the stragglers he could not control. In the center C.F. Smith’s division, with Hurlbut’s in support, and all that was left of Prentiss’s, defended themselves so desperately that their enemies called their position the Hornet’s Nest. Here the fight swayed back and forth for hours, with ghastly losses on both sides. C.F. Smith himself was on his deathbed at Savannah. But he heard the roar of battle. His excellent successor, W.H.L. Wallace, was killed; and battalions, brigades, and even divisions, soon became inextricably mixed together. There was now the same confusion on the Confederate side, where Johnston was wounded by a bullet from the Hornet’s Nest. It was not in itself a mortal wound. But, knowing how vital this point was, he went on encouraging his men till, falling from the saddle, he was carried back to die.
Grant still felt confident; though he had seen the worst in the rear as well as the best at the front. Two of his brand-new battalions, the very men who afterwards fought like heroes, when they had learned the soldier’s work, now ran like hares. “During the day,” says Grant, “I rode back as far as the river and met General Buell, who had just arrived. There probably were as many as four or five thousand stragglers lying under cover of the river bluff, panic-stricken. As we left the boat Buell’s attention was attracted by these men. I saw him berating them and trying to shame them into joining their regiments. He even threatened them with shells from the gunboats nearby. But all to no effect. Most of these men afterward proved themselves as gallant as any of those who saved the battle from which they had deserted.”
By half-past five, after twelve hours’ fighting, Grant at last succeeded in forming a new and shorter line, a mile behind that morning’s front, but without any dangerous gaps. There were three reorganized divisions–Sherman’s, McClernand’s, and Hurlbut’s, one fresh division under Nelson, and a strong land battery of over twenty field guns helping the two ironclad gunboats in the defense of Pittsburg Landing. The Confederate effectives, reduced by heavy losses and by as many stragglers as the Federals, were now faced by five thousand fresh men on guard at the Landing. Beauregard, who had succeeded Johnston, then stopped the battle for the day, with the idea of retiring next morning to Corinth. But, before his orders reached it, his battleworn right made a desperate, fruitless, and costly attack on the immensely strengthened Landing.
That night the rain came down in torrents; and the Confederates sought shelter in the tents the Federals had abandoned. They found little rest there, being harassed all through the bleak dark by the big shells that the gunboats threw among them.
At dawn Grant, now reinforced by twenty-five thousand fresh men under Buell and Lew Wallace, took the offensive. Beauregard, hopelessly outnumbered and without a single fresh man, retired on Corinth, magnificently covered by Bragg’s rearguard, which held the Federals back for hours near the crucial point of Shiloh Church.
Shiloh was the fiercest battle ever fought in the River War. The losses were over ten thousand a side in killed and wounded; while a thousand Confederates and three thousand Federals were captured. It was a Confederate failure; but hardly the kind of victory the Federals needed just then, before the consummate triumph of Farragut at New Orleans. It brought together Federal forces that the Confederates could not possibly withstand, even on their new line east from Memphis. But it did not raise the Federal, or depress the Confederate, morale.
Four days after the battle Halleck arrived at Pittsburg Landing and took command of the combined armies. He was soon reinforced by Pope; whereupon he divided the whole into right and left wings, center, and reserve, each under its own commander. Grant was made second in command of the whole. But, as Halleck dealt directly with his other immediate subordinates, Grant simply became the fifth wheel of the Halleckian slowcoach, which, after twenty days of preparation, began, with most elaborate precautions, its crawl toward Corinth.
Grant’s position became so nearly unbearable that he applied more than once for transfer to some other place. But this was refused. So he strove to do his impossible duty till the middle of July, when his punishment for Shiloh was completed by his promotion to command a depleted remnant of Halleck’s Grand Army. It is not by any means the least of Grant’s claims to real greatness that, as a leader, he was able to survive his most searching trials: the surprise at Shiloh, the misunderstandings and arrest that followed Shiloh, the slur of being made a fifth-wheel second-in-command, the demoralizing strain of that “most anxious period of the war” when his depleted forces were thrown back on the defensive, and the eight discouraging months of Sisyphean offensive which preceded his triumph at Vicksburg. No one who has not been in the heart of things with fighting fleets or armies can realize what it means to all ranks when there is, or even is supposed to be, “something wrong” with the living pivot on which the whole force turns. And only those who have been behind the scenes of war’s all-testing drama can understand what it means for even an imagined “failure” to “come back.”
Corinth was of immense importance to both sides, as it commanded the rails not only east and west, from the Tennessee to Memphis, but north and south, from the Ohio to New Orleans and Mobile. Though New Orleans was taken by Farragut on the twenty-fifth of April, the rails between Vicksburg and Port Hudson remained in Confederate hands till next year; while Mobile remained so till the year after that.
Beauregard collected all the troops he could at Corinth. Yet, even with Van Dorn’s and other reinforcements, he had only sixty thousand effectives against Halleck’s double numbers. Moreover, the loss of three States and many battles had so shaken the Confederate forces that they stood no chance whatever against Halleck’s double numbers in the open. All the same, Halleck burrowed slowly forward like a mole, entrenching every night as if the respective strengths and victories had been reversed.
After advancing nearly a mile a day Halleck closed in on Corinth. He was so deeply entrenched that no one could tell from appearances which side was besieging the other. Towards the end of May many Federal railwaymen reported that empty trains could be heard running into Corinth and full trains running out. But, as the Confederates greeted each arriving “empty” with tremendous Cheers, Halleck felt sure that Beauregard was being greatly reinforced. The Confederate bluff worked to admiration. On the twenty-sixth Beauregard issued orders for complete evacuation on the twenty-ninth. On the thirtieth Halleck drew up his whole grand army ready for a desperate defense against an enemy that had already gone a full day’s march away.
In the meantime the Federal flotilla had been fighting its way down the Mississippi, under (the invalided) Foote’s very capable successor, Flag-Officer Charles Henry Davis. The Confederates had very few naval men on the river, but many of their Mississippi skippers were game to the death. They rammed Federal vessels on the tenth of May at Fort Pillow, eighty miles above Memphis. Eight of their fighting craft were strongly built and heavily armored, though very deficient in speed. The Federal flotilla was very well manned by first-class naval ratings, and was reinforced early in June by seven fast new rams, commanded by their designer, Colonel Charles Ellet, a famous civil engineer.
At sunrise on the lovely sixth of June the Federal flotilla, having overcome the Confederate posts farther north and being joined by Ellet’s rams, lay near Memphis. The Confederates came upstream to the attack, expecting to ram the gunboats in the stern as they had at Fort Pillow. But Ellet suddenly darted down on the eight Confederate ironclads, caught one of them on the broadside, sank her, and disabled two others. The action then became general. The overmatched Confederates kept up a losing battle for more than an hour, in full view of many thousands of ardent Southerners ashore. The scene, at its height, was appalling. The smoke, belching black from the funnels and white from the guns, made a suffocating pall overhead; while the dark, squat, hideous ironclad hulls seemed to have risen from a submarine inferno to stab each other with livid tongues of flame–so deadly close the two flotillas fought. When the awful hour was over the Confederates were not only defeated but destroyed; and a wail went up from the thousands of their anguished friends, as if the very shores were mourning.
For the next month Grant held the command at Memphis. Then, on the eleventh of July, Halleck was recalled to Washington as General-in-Chief of the whole army; while Pope was transferred to Virginia. The Federal invasion of Virginia under that “Young Napoleon,” McClellan, had not been a success against Lee and Stonewall Jackson. Nor did it improve with Pope at the front and Halleck in the rear, as we shall presently see; though Halleck had declared that Pope’s operations at Island Number Ten were destined to immortal fame, and Pope himself admitted his own greatness in sundry proclamations to the world.
The campaign now entered its second phase. The Virginian wing (of the whole front reaching from the Mississippi to the sea) was checked this summer; and was to remain more or less checked for many a long day. The river wing, under the general direction of Halleck, had also reached its limit for ’62 about the same time, after having conquered Kentucky and western Tennessee as well as the Mississippi down to Memphis.
This river wing was now depleted of some excellent troops and again divided into quite separate commands. Buell commanded the Army of the Ohio. Grant commanded his own Army of the Tennessee and Rosecrans’s Army of the Mississippi. Buell’s scene of action lay between the tributary streams–Ohio, Cumberland, and Tennessee–with Chattanooga as his ultimate objective. Grant’s scene of action lay along the southward rails and Mississippi, with Vicksburg as his ultimate objective.
The Confederates were of course set on recovering complete control of the line of Southern rails that made direct connections between the Mississippi Valley and the sea: crossing the western tributaries of the St. Francis and White Rivers; then running east from Memphis, through Grand Junction, Corinth, and Iuka, to Chattanooga; thence forking off northeast, through Knoxville, to Washington, Richmond, and Norfolk; and southeast to Charleston and Savannah. Confederate attention had originally been fixed on Corinth and Chattanooga. But General O. M. Mitchel’s abortive raid, just after Shiloh, had also drawn it to the part between. The Federals therefore found their enemy alert at every point.
Braxton Bragg, Beauregard’s successor and Buell’s opponent, basing himself on Chattanooga, tried to drive his line of Confederate reconquest through the heart of Tennessee and thence through mid-Kentucky, with the Ohio as his ultimate objective. His colleagues near the Mississippi, Van Dorn and Sterling Price, meanwhile tried to effect the reconquest of the Memphis-Corinth rails that Grant and Rosecrans were holding.
All main offensives, on both sides, ultimately failed in this latter half of the river campaign of ’62. So nothing but the bare fact that they were attempted needs any notice here.
In August, about the time that Lee and Jackson were maneuvering in Virginia to bring on the Second Bull Run, Price and Bragg began their respective advances against Grant and Buell. Buell was at Murfreesboro, defending Nashville. Bragg, screened by the hills of eastern Tennessee, made for the Ohio at Louisville and Cincinnati. Pivoting on his left he wheeled his whole army round and raced for Louisville. Buell enjoyed the advantage of rails over roads and of interior lines as well. But Bragg had stolen several marches on him at the start and he only won by a head.
The Union Government, now thoroughly alarmed, sent Thomas to supersede Buell. But Thomas declined to take over the command, and on the eighth of October Buell fought Bragg at Perryville. There was no tactical defeat or victory; but Bragg retired on Chattanooga. The Government now urged Buell to enter east Tennessee. He protested that lack of transport and supplies made such a move impossible. William S. Rosecrans then replaced him. Buell was never employed again. He certainly failed fully to appreciate the legitimate bearing of statesmanship on strategy; but, for all that, he was an excellent organizer and a good commander.
In the meantime Grant had been experiencing his “most anxious period of the war.” During this anxious period, which lasted from July to October, Rosecrans defeated Price at Iuka. This happened on the nineteenth of September. Van Dorn then joined Price and returned to the attack but was defeated by Rosecrans at Corinth on the fourth of October. The Confederates, who had come near victory on the third, retired in safety, because Grant still lacked the means of resuming the offensive.
As soon as he had the means Grant marched his army south for Vicksburg. There were three converging forces: Grant’s from Grand Junction, Sherman’s from Memphis, and a smaller one from Helena in Arkansas. But the Confederate General, J.C. Pemberton, who had replaced Van Dorn, escaped the trap they tried to set for him. He was strongly entrenched on the south side of the Tallahatchie, north of Oxford, on the Mississippi Central rails. While Grant and Sherman converged on his front, the force from Helena rounded his rear and cut the rails. But the damage was quickly repaired; and Pemberton retired south toward Vicksburg before Grant and Sherman could close and make him fight.
Then Grant tried again. This time Sherman advanced on board of Mississippi steamers, with the idea of meeting the Union expedition coming up from New Orleans. But Van Dorn cut Grant’s long line of land communications at Holly Springs, forcing Grant back for supplies and leaving Sherman, who had made his way up the Yazoo, completely isolated. Grant fared well enough, so far as food was concerned; for he found such abundant supplies that he at once perceived the possibility of living on the country without troubling about a northern base. He spent Christmas and New Year at Holly Springs, and then moved back to Memphis.
In the meantime Sherman’s separated force had come to grief. On the twenty-ninth of December its attempt to carry the Chickasaw Bluffs, just north of Vicksburg, was completely frustrated by Pemberton; for Sherman could not deploy into line on the few causeways that stood above the flooded ground.
On the eleventh of January this first campaign along the Mississippi was ended by the capture of Arkansas Post. McClernand was the senior there. But Sherman did the work ashore as D. D. Porter did afloat.
Meanwhile Bragg had brought the campaign to a close among the eastern tributaries by a daring, though abortive, march on Nashville. Rosecrans, now commanding the army of the Cumberland, stopped and defeated him at Stone’s River on New Year’s Eve.
The “War in the West,” that is, in those parts of the Southwest which lay beyond the navigable tributaries of the Mississippi system, was even more futile at the time and absolutely null in the end. Its scene of action, which practically consisted of inland Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona, was not in itself important enough to be a great determining factor in the actual clash of arms. But Texas supplied many good men to the Southern ranks; and the Southern commissariat missed the Texan cattle after the fall of Vicksburg in ’63. New Mexico might also have been a good deal more important than it actually was if it could have been made the base of a real, instead of an abortive, invasion of California, the El Dorado of Confederate finance.
We have already seen what happened on February 15, 1861, when General Twiggs handed over to the State authorities all the army posts in Texas. On the first of the following August Captain John R. Baylor, who had been forming a little Confederate army under pretext of a big buffalo hunt, proclaimed himself Governor of New Mexico (south of 34 degrees) and established his capital at Mesilla. In the meantime the Confederate Government itself had appointed General H.H. Sibley to the command of a brigade for the conquest of all New Mexico. Not ten thousand men were engaged in this campaign, Federals and Confederates, whites and Indians, all together; but a decisive Confederate success might have been pregnant of future victories farther west. Some Indians fought on one side, some on the other; and some of the wilder tribes, delighted to see the encroaching whites at loggerheads, gave trouble to both.
On February 21, 1862, Sibley defeated Colonel E.R.S. Canby at Valverde near Fort Craig. But his further advance was hindered by the barrenness of the country, by the complete destruction of all Union stores likely to fall into his hands, and by the fact that he was between two Federal forts when the battle ended. On the twentyeighth of March there was a desperate fight in Apache Canon. Both sides claimed the victory. But the Confederates lost more men as well as the whole of their supply and ammunition train. After this Sibley began a retreat which ended in May at San Antonio. His route was marked by bleaching skeletons for many a long day; and from this time forward the conquest of California became nothing but a dream.
The “War in the West” was a mere twig on the Trans-Mississippi branch; and when the fall of Vicksburg severed the branch from the tree the twig simply withered away.
The sword that ultimately severed branch and twig was firmly held by Union hands before the year was out; and this notwithstanding all the Union failures in the last six months. Grant and Porter from above, Banks and Farragut from below, had already massed forces strong enough to make the Mississippi a Union river from source to sea, in spite of all Confederates from Vicksburg to Port Hudson.
CHAPTER V. LINCOLN: WAR STATESMAN
Lincoln was one of those men who require some mighty crisis to call their genius forth. Though more successful than Grant in ordinary life, he was never regarded as a national figure in law or poli tics till he had passed his fiftieth year. He had no advantages of birth; though he came of a sturdy old English stock that emigrated from Norfolk to Massachusetts in the seventeenth century, and though his mother seems to have been, both in tellectually and otherwise, above the general run of the Kentuckians among whom he was born in 1809. His educational advantages were still less. Yet he soon found his true amities in books, as afterwards in life, not among the clever, smart, or sentimental, but among the simple and the great. He read and reread Shakespeare and the Bible, not because they were the merely proper things to read but because his spirit was akin to theirs. This meant that he never was a bookworm. Words were things of life to him; and, for that reason, his own words live.
He had no artificial graces to soften the uncouth appearance of his huge, gaunt six-foot-four of powerful bone and muscle. But he had the native dignity of straightforward manhood; and, though a champion competitor in feats of strength, his opinion was always sought as that of an impartial umpire, even in cases affecting himself. He “played the game” in his frontier home as he afterwards played the greater game of life-or-death at Washington. His rough-hewn, strong-featured face, shaped by his kindly humor to the finer ends of power, was lit by a steady gaze that saw yet looked beyond, till the immediate parts of the subject appeared in due relation to the whole. Like many another man who sees farther and feels more deeply than the rest, and who has the saving grace of humor, he knew what yearning melancholy was; yet kept the springs of action tense and strong. Firm as a rock on essentials he was extremely tolerant about all minor differences. His policy was to live and let live whenever that was possible. The preservation of the Union was his master-passion, and he was ready for any honorable compromise that left the Union safe. Himself a teetotaller, he silenced a temperance delegation whose members were accusing Grant of drunkenness by saying he should like to send some of his other generals a keg of the same whisky if it would only make them fight.
When he took arms against the sea of troubles that awaited him at Washington he had dire need of all his calm tolerance and strength. To add to his burdens, he was beset by far more than the usual horde of officeseekers. These men were doubly ravenous because their party was so new to power. They were peculiarly hard to place with due regard for all the elements within the coalition. And each appointment needed most discriminating care, lest a traitor to the Union might creep in. While the guns were thundering against Fort Sumter, and afterwards, when the Union Government was marooned in Washington itself, the vestibules, stairways, ante-rooms, and offices were clogged with eager applicants for every kind of civil service job. And then, when this vast human flood subsided, the “interviewing” stream began to flow and went on swelling to the bitter end. These war-time interviewers claimed most of Lincoln’s personal attention just when he had the least to spare. But he would deny no one the chance of receiving presidential aid or comfort and he gladly suffered many fools for the chance of relieving the sad or serious others. Add to all this the ceaseless work of helping to form public opinion, of counteracting enemy propaganda, of shaping Union policy under ever-changing circumstances, of carrying it out by coalition means, and of exercising civil control over such vast armed forces as no American had hitherto imagined: add these extra burdens, and we can begin to realize what Lincoln had to do as the chief war statesman of the North.
A sound public opinion is the best embattlement of any home front. So Lincoln set out to help in forming it. War on a national scale was something entirely new to both sides, and especially unwelcome to many people in the North, though the really loyal North was up at Lincoln’s call. Then came Bull Run; and Lincoln’s renewed determination, so well expressed in Whitman’s words: “The President, recovering himself, begins that very night–sternly, rapidly sets about the task of reorganizing his forces, and placing himself in positions for future and surer work. If there was nothing else of Abraham Lincoln for history to stamp him with, it is enough to send him with his wreath to the memory of all future time, that he endured that hour, that day, bitterer than gall–indeed a crucifixion day–that it did not conquer him that he unflinchingly stemmed it, and resolved to lift himself and the Union out of it.”
Bull Run was only the beginning of troubles. There were many more rocks ahead in the stormy sea of public opinion. The peace party was always ready to lure the ship of state out of its true course by using false lights, even when certain to bring about a universal wreck in which the “pacifists” would suffer with the rest. But dissensions within the war party were worse, especially when caused by action in the field. Fremont’s dismissal in November, ’61, caused great dissatisfaction among three kinds of people: those who thought him a great general because he knew how to pose as one and really had some streaks of great ability, those who were fattening on the army contracts he let out with such a lavish hand, and those who hailed him as the liberator of the slaves because he went unwarrantably far beyond what was then politically wise or even possible. He was the first Unionist commander to enter the Northern Cave of Adullam, already infested with Copperhead snakes.
There he was joined by McClellan exactly a year later; and there the peace-at-current-prices party continued to nurse and cry their grievances till the war was over. McClellan’s dismissal was a matter of dire necessity because victory was impossible under his command. But he was a dangerous reinforcement to the Adullamites; for many of the loyal public had been fooled by his proclamations, the press had written him up to the skies as the Young Napoleon, and the great mass of the rank and file still believed in him. He took the kindly interest in camp comforts that goes to the soldier’s heart; and he really did know how to organize. Add his power of passing off tinsel promises for golden deeds, and it can be well understood how great was the danger of dismissing him before his defects had become so apparent to the mass of people as to have turned opinion decisively against him. We shall presently meet him in his relation to Lincoln during the Virginian campaign, and later on in his relation to Lee. Here we may leave him with the reminder that he was the Democratic candidate for President in ’64, that he was still a mortal danger to the Union, even though he had rejected the actual wording of his party’s peace plank.
The turn of the tide at the fighting front came in ’63; but not at the home front, where public opinion of the most vocal kind was stirred to its dregs by the enforcement of the draft. The dime song books of the Copperhead parts of New York expressed in rude rhymes very much the same sort of apprehension that was voiced by the official opposition in the Presidential campaign of ’64.
Abram Lincoln, what yer ’bout?
Stop this war, for it’s played out.
Another rhyme, called “The Beauties of Conscription,” was a more decorous expression of such public opinion.
And this, the “People’s Sovereignty,” Before a despot humbled!
. . . .
Well have they cashed old Lincoln’s drafts, Hurrah for the Conscription!
. . . .
Is not this war–this MURDER–for
The negro, nolens volens?
So, carrying out their ideas to the same sort of logical conclusion, the New York mob of ’63 not only burnt every recruiting office they found undefended but burnt the negro orphan asylum and killed all the negroes they could lay their hands on.
Public opinion did veer round a little with the rising tide of victory in the winter of ’63 and ’64. But, incredible as it may seem to those who think the home front must always reflect the fighting front, the nadir of public opinion in the North was reached in the summer of ’64, when every expert knew that the resources of the South were nearing exhaustion and that the forces of the North could certainly wear out Lee’s dwindling army even if they could not beat it. The trumpet gave no uncertain sound from Lincoln’s lips. “In this purpose to save the country and its liberties no class of people seem so nearly unanimous as the soldiers in the field and the sailors afloat. Do they not have the hardest of it? Who should quail while they do not?” But the mere excellence of a vast fighting front means a certain loss of the nobler qualities in the home front, from which so many of the staunchest are withdrawn. And then warweariness breeds doubts, doubts breed fears, and fears breed the spirit of surrender.
There seemed to be more Copperheads in the conglomerate opposition than Unionists ready to withstand them. The sinister figure of Vallandigham loomed large in Ohio, where he openly denounced the war in such disloyal terms that the military authorities arrested him. An opposition committee, backed by the snakes in the grass of the secret societies, at once wrote to Lincoln demanding release. Lincoln thereupon offered release if the committee would sign a declaration that, since rebellion existed, and since the armed forces of the United States were the constitutional means of suppressing rebellion, each member of the committee would support the war till rebellion was put down. The committee refused to sign. More people then began to see the self-contradictions of the opposition, and most of those “plain people” to whom Lincoln consciously appealed were touched to the heart by his pathetic question: “Must I shoot the simpleminded soldier boy who deserts, while I must not touch a hair of the wily agitator who induces him to desert?”
But there was still defection on the Union side, and among many “plain people” too; for Horace Greeley, the best-known Union editor, lost his nerve and ran away. And Greeley was not the only Union journalist who helped, sometimes unwittingly, to pervert public opinion. The “writing up” of McClellan for what he was not, though rather hysterical, was at least well meant. But the reporters who “wrote down” General Cox, because he would not make them members of his staff in West Virginia, disgraced their profession. The lies about Sherman’s “insanity” and Grant’s “intoxication” were shamelessly excused on the plea that they made “good stories.” Sherman’s insanity, as we have seen already, existed only in the disordered imagination of blabbing old Simon Cameron. Grant, at the time these stories were published, was strictly temperate.
Amid all the hindrances–and encouragements, for the Union press generally did noble service in the Union cause–of an uncensored press, and all the complexities of public opinion, Lincoln kept his head and heart set firmly on the one supreme objective of the Union. He foresaw from the first that if all the States came through the war United, then all the reforms for which the war was fought would follow; but that if any particular reform was itself made the supreme objective, then it, and with it all the other reforms, would fail, because only part of the Union strength would be involved, whereas the whole was needed. Moreover, he clearly foresaw the absolute nature of a great civil war. Foreign wars may well, and often do, end in some sort of compromise, especially when the home life of the opponents can go on as before. But a great civil war cannot end in compromise because it radically changes the home life of one side or the other. Davis stood for “Independence or extermination”; Lincoln simply for the Union, which, in his clear prevision, meant all that the body politic could need for a new and better life. He accepted the word “enemy” as descriptive of a passing phase. He would not accept such phraseology as Meade’s, “driving the invader from our soil.” “Will our generals,” he complained, “never get that idea out of their heads? The whole country is our soil.”
He was a life-long advocate of Emancipation, first, with compensation, now as part of the price to be paid for rebellion. Emancipation, however, depended on the Union, not the Union on it. His Proclamation was ready in the summer of ’62. But to publish it in the midst of defeat would make it look like an act of despair. In September, when the Confederates had to recross the Potomac after Antietam, the Proclamation was given to the world. Its first effect was greater abroad than at home; for now no foreign government could say, and rightly say, that the war, not being fought on account of slavery, might leave that issue still unsettled. This was a most important point in Lincoln’s foreign policy, a policy which had been haunted by the fear of recognition for the South or the possibility of war with either the French or British, or even both together.
Lincoln’s Cabinet was composed of two factions, one headed by Seward, the Secretary of State, the other by Chase, the Secretary of the Treasury. Both the fighting services were under War Democrats: the Army under Stanton, the Navy under Welles. All these ministers began by thinking that Lincoln had the least ability among them. Seward and Welles presently learnt better. Stanton’s exclamation at Lincoln’s death speaks for itself “Now he belongs to the ages!” But Chase never believed that Lincoln could even be his equal. Chase and the Treasury were a thorn in the side of the Government; Chase because it was his nature, the Treasury because its notes fell to thirty-nine cents in the dollar during the summer of ’64. Welles, hard-working and upright, was guided by an expert assistant. Stanton, equally upright and equally hardworking, made many mistakes. And yet, when all is said and done, Stanton was a really able patriot who worked his hardest for what seemed to him the best.
Such were the four chief men in that Cabinet with which Lincoln carried out his Union policy and over which he towered in what became transcendent statesmanship–the head, the heart, the genius of the war. He never, for one moment, changed his course, but kept it fixed upon the Union, no matter what the winds and tides, the currents and cross-currents were. Thus, while so many lesser minds were busy with flotsam and jetsam of the controversial storm, his own serener soul was already beyond the far horizon, voyaging toward the one sure haven for the Ship of State.
But Lincoln was more than the principal civilian war statesman: he was the constitutional Commander-in-Chief of all the Union forces, afloat and ashore. He was responsible not only for raising, supplying, and controlling them, but for their actual command by men who, in the eyes of the law, were simply his own lieutenants. The problem of exercising civil control without practicing civilian interference, always and everywhere hard, and especially hard in a civil war, was particularly hard in his case, in view of public opinion, the press, his own war policy, and the composition of his Cabinet. His solution was by no means perfect; but the wonder is that he reached it so well in spite of such perverting factors. He began with the mere armed mob that fought the First Bull Run beset with interference. He ended with Farragut, Grant, and Sherman, combined in one great scheme of strategy that included Mobile, Virginia, and the lower South, and that, while under full civil control, was mostly free from interference with its naval and military work–except at the fussy hands of Stanton.
The fundamental difference between civil control, which is the very breath of freedom, and civilian interference, which means the death of all efficiency, can be quite simply illustrated by supposing the proverbial Ship of State to be a fighting man-of-war. The People are the owners, with all an owner’s rights; while their chosen Government is their agent, with all an agent’s delegated power. The fighting Services, as the word itself so properly implies, are simply the People’s servants, though they take their orders from the Government. So far, so good, within the limits of civil control, under which, and which alone, any national resources–in men, money, or material–can lawfully be turned to warlike ends. But when the ship is fitting out, still more when she is out at sea, and most of all when she is fighting, then she should be handled only by her expert captain with his expert crew. Civilian interference begins the moment any inexpert outsider takes the captain’s place; and this interference is no less disastrous when the outsider remains at home than when he is on the actual spot.
Lincoln and Stanton were out of their element in the strategic fight with Lee and Stonewall Jackson, as the next chapter abundantly proves. But they will bear, and more than bear, comparison with Davis and Benjamin, their own special “opposite numbers.” Benjamin, when Confederate Secretary of War in ’62, nearly drove Jackson out of the service by ordering him to follow the advice of some disgruntled subordinates who objected to being moved about for strategic reasons which they could not understand. To make matters worse, Benjamin sent this precious order direct to Jackson without even informing his immediate superior, “Joe” Johnston, or even Lee himself. Thus discipline, the very soul of armies, was attacked from above and beneath by the man who should have been its chief upholder. Luckily for the South things were smoothed over, and Benjamin learnt something he should have known at first. Davis had none of Lincoln’s diffidence about his own capacity for directing the strategy of armies. He had passed through West Point and commanded a battalion in Mexico without finding out that his fitness stopped there. He interfered with Lee and Jackson, sometimes to almost a disabling extent. He forced his enmity on “Joe” Johnston and superseded him at the very worst time in the final campaign. He interfered more than ever just when Lee most required a free hand. And when he did make Lee a real Commander-in-Chief the Southern cause had been lost already. Lincoln’s war statesmanship grew with the war. Davis remained as he was.
Lincoln had to meet the difficulties that always occur when professionals and amateurs are serving together. How much Lincoln, Stanton, professionals, and amateurs had to do with the system that was evolved under great stress is far too complex for discussion here. Suffice it to say this: Lincoln’s clear insight and openness of mind enabled him to see the universal truth, that, other things being equal, the trained and expert professional must excel the untrained and inexpert amateur. But other things are never precisely equal; and a war in which the whole mass-manhood is concerned brings in a host of amateurs. Lincoln was as devoid of prejudice against the regular officers as he was against any other class of men; and he was ready to try and try again to find a satisfactory commander among them, in spite of many failures. The plan of campaign proposed by General Winfield Scott (and ultimately carried out in a modified form) was dubbed by wiseacre public men the “Anaconda policy”; witlings derided it, and the people were too impatient for anything except “On to Richmond!” Scott, unable to take the field at seventyfive, had no second-in-command. Halleck was a very poor substitute later on. In the meantime McDowell was chosen and generously helped by Lincoln and Stanton. But after Bull Run the very people whose impatience made victory impossible howled him down.