Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction

by Allen C. Guelzo

  All of these lessons were very much in the mind of the man to whom Lincoln initially turned for military direction and advice, the senior commanding general of the United States Army, who in this case turned out to be the apostle of the American offensive: Lieutenant General Winfield Scott. Unfortunately for Lincoln, Scott in 1861 was seventy-five years old and too badly crippled by gout to mount a horse, much less think of taking active command in the field. Scott also had little faith in the military capacities of the volunteers Lincoln was calling for. Although Scott’s campaign in Mexico was the very model of the Napoleonic offensive, Scott’s army in Mexico had enjoyed a much higher ratio of regulars to volunteers than the army Lincoln was calling into being, and Scott did not mind telling people how dubious he was about the quality of the volunteers. “Our militia & volunteers, if a tenth of what is said be true, have committed atrocities—horrors—in Mexico, sufficient to make Heaven weep, & every American, of Christian morals blush for his country,” Scott wrote to the secretary of war in 1847. “Most atrocities are always committed in the absence of regulars, but sometimes in the presence of acquiescing, trembling volunteer officers.”23 Scott’s doubts about the reliability of an army of volunteers had not diminished since Mexico, and without a large stiffening of regulars, Scott wanted to take as few risks with the volunteer soldier as possible.

  Instead of proposing direct action against the Confederates, Scott suggested to Lincoln what derisively became known as the “Anaconda Plan” (so named for the huge snake that squeezes its prey to death), the first comprehensive strategic military plan in the nation’s history. First, Scott proposed to use the Federal navy to blockade the entire length of the Southern coasts. He would then establish a strong defensive cordon across the northern borders of the Confederacy. Finally, he would mount a joint expedition of some 60,000 troops, plus gunboats, to move down the Mississippi and secure the entire length of the river from the southern tip of Illinois to the Gulf of Mexico.

  In effect, Scott was recognizing that the Confederacy occupied its own set of interior lines, which a motley army of volunteers would be unwise to attack; consequently, the best way to bring the Confederacy to its knees would be to turn its flank (down the Mississippi) and sever its supply lines to the outside world (with the naval blockade). With the Confederacy encircled and squeezed by land and sea, Scott believed that it would only be a matter of time before secessionist fervor would pale (and Scott was a Virginian who might have been presumed to know) and Southern Unionists would be able to seize control of their state governments again.24

  Scott’s cautious approach to waging war, however, was overwhelmed in the outpouring of aggressive chest-thumping from Congress and the Northern newspapers, which were already demanding an immediate offensive on Richmond. Even Lincoln was anxious that some kind of demonstration be made in western Virginia and eastern Tennessee, where he believed that Southern Unionists would happily rally to the old flag. Scott reluctantly authorized the 35,000 volunteers who encamped around Washington to prepare for an offensive into Virginia, and put them under the command of one of his staff officers, Irvin McDowell.

  Across the Potomac, and across the Ohio, the Confederate forces were enduring similar confusions. The Confederacy had as one advantage the fact that its president, Jefferson Davis, was a West Point graduate and had served with distinction as an officer in the Mexican War and as secretary of war under Franklin Pierce. As such, Davis had the immediate advantage of being a military man with substantial military experience. In addition to Davis, 296 Southern officers serving in the United States Army (almost a quarter of the officer corps) resigned their commissions, and most returned to the South to offer their services to their respective state governments. Of the West Pointers, more than half resigned to join the Confederacy, and the bulk of those were the younger, up-and-coming officers.25 Although a few Southerners remained with the Federal army, most of them did not, including the one officer whom Winfield Scott had set his heart upon as a possible successor as general in chief, Robert E. Lee, and the most admired and widely respected soldier in the U.S. Army, Albert Sidney Johnston.

  Apart from these advantages, the Confederacy encountered the same organizational problems as the Federal army, and worse. The Confederate constitution permitted the Confederate Congress to raise and maintain armies, but its precise provisions made it clear that the Confederate government was expected to use the state militia as it existed rather than organizing a regular army of its own. Hence the Confederacy created its Provisional Army of the Confederate States exclusively by appeal to the states to supply regiments of state volunteers, like their Northern counterparts. Only the general organization of these forces, and the commission of general officers, was kept in the hands of the Confederate government. Unlike the Federal volunteers, who were initially enlisted for two- or three-year terms, the Confederate volunteers were enlisted for only a single year (Jefferson Davis would have preferred to enlist all Confederate volunteers for the duration of the war, but in 1861 there was no hope of talking the Confederate Congress into such a measure).

  Arming and equipping the new Provisional Army was another matter. In terms of men, money, and resources, the Confederacy was dwarfed by the North. The Confederacy possessed eighty-one establishments capable of turning out bar, sheet, and railroad iron in 1861, but most were small-scale and located in the vulnerable upper reaches of the Confederacy; of the ten rolling mills (for iron plate) in the Confederacy, only the Tredegar Iron Works in Richmond possessed a steam hammer for large-scale foundry work. The military-age male population of the Southern states was outnumbered five to two by that of the North, and the Confederate government was so lacking in the means to uniform and arm its new recruits that Confederate soldiers turned out in even more different varieties, styles, and colors of uniforms than their Federal counterparts. Alabama volunteers were issued dark blue frock coats and gray pants in March 1861; the 5th Georgia wore so many different styles of uniform (including a regulation navy blue U.S. Army frock coat) that they were mocked as the “Pound-Cake Regiment,” while the 3rd Georgia featured a mix of red jackets and blue pants; the Louisiana “Tigers” sported brown jackets, red fezzes, and blue-and-cream-striped pantaloons; and so many Louisiana volunteers were issued blue uniforms in 1861 that the Louisianans were forced to wear red armbands to avoid being mistaken for Federal troops.26

  Feeding the new Confederate army was an even greater problem for the state and Confederate commissaries. Private George Asbury Bruton of the 19th Louisiana found that “the first few days that we were here” at Camp Moore, Louisiana, “they fed us well,” but within a few weeks the Confederate supply system broke down, and “now they feed us on old poor beef and Cast Iron pies.” Armament posed some of the most serious problems of all. The Confederacy was able to provide modern rifles for only about 10 percent of its soldiers, while the rest were forced to bring “country rifles,” shotguns, and even handguns from their own homes. The Virginia state arsenal at Richmond was the only facility in the South equipped to manufacture small arms, and even then it had capacity only for turning out about 1,000 rifles a month.27

  Even if weapons and uniforms had been in generous supply, the Confederate states had less than one-third the total railroad mileage of the Northern states for moving those supplies where they were needed. Only two complete railroad systems connected Richmond with the Mississippi River. One of these was the Memphis & Charleston, which originated in Memphis, picked up connector lines through Chattanooga and up the Piedmont to the Orange & Alexandria Railroad, and then made its way to Richmond over the Richmond & Danville Railroad. The other major lateral rail line, the Memphis & Ohio, connected Memphis with Bowling Green and Louisville, then hooked onto two other connector lines to arrive in Chattanooga, but since Kentucky remained undecided about joining the Confederacy, the usefulness of the Memphis & Ohio was in some question. That left only the Mississippi Southern line as a possible alternative. But the Mississippi Southern stopp
ed at Mobile Bay, forcing passengers and freight to ferry across the bay, and only then picked up a trunk line north to Chattanooga and to the connector lines that linked Mobile to the rest of the upper South.

  Although the South had actually been an early pioneer in railroad construction in the 1830s, the Southern rail lines had been built mostly with a view toward moving cotton from the interior to the coastlines. It had never been necessary for the southern states to create interlocking east-west rail networks, and so the best Southern railroads ran north-south toward the Gulf coast, such as the Mississippi Central (which ran from New Orleans to Memphis, with the help of the Memphis & Tennessee line) and the Nashville & Chattanooga (which used connector lines to link Louisville and Nashville with Atlanta). Nor was there much likelihood that new railroad systems could now be built, since Virginia was the only Confederate state with the facilities to build locomotives. William Howard Russell watched in disbelief as a Confederate troop train arrived in a camp north of New Orleans: “Our car was built in Massachusetts, the engine in Philadelphia, and the magnifier of its lamp in Cincinnati. What will the South do for such articles in future?”28

  There was, however, a silver lining to these logistical clouds. The South’s shortages of manpower and military material dictated that the Confederacy adopt a basically defensive posture, and taking the strategic defensive would allow the Confederacy, as Winfield Scott had foreseen, to operate along interior lines. The broad heartland of the Confederate states would give the Southern armies room enough to draw the Federal armies in after them, string out their supply lines, and thus render them vulnerable to counterattack on unfriendly territory. Above all, it would force the real expense of waging war onto the Federal army, and if the Confederacy made that expense high enough through delay and resistance, the government in Washington would be forced to give up simply out of exhaustion. No matter what other material shortages the Confederacy suffered from, it was still the world’s leading supplier of cotton, and Southerners fully expected that the voracious demand of European textile manufacturing for Southern cotton would draw Great Britain and France to the Southern side, as suppliers of weapons or perhaps even as open allies.

  At first this Confederate war strategy seemed amply justified. By mid-July, the public outcry in the North for an invasion of Virginia had reached a pitch where Generals Scott and McDowell could afford to wait no longer. Moreover, the three-month militia enlistments would run out by the end of July, so if the militia were going to be of any use at all, it had to be now. Thus on July 16, 1861, McDowell’s poorly trained, gaudily dressed, and marvelously disorganized army of newly minted volunteers and restless militia (with a sprinkling of regulars and a battalion of Marines scratched up from the Washington Navy Yard) happily marched out of Washington to crush the rebellion.

  Scott and McDowell had before them two basic choices for an invasion of Virginia. They might do as Scott had done in the Mexican War and use the Federal navy to transport the army down Chesapeake Bay, deposit it on the James River peninsula on the east side of Richmond, and lay siege to the new Confederate capital without risking a pitched battle. Or they could march overland, using the Orange & Alexandria Railroad as a supply line, cross the Rappahannock River, and attack Richmond from the north, with the certainty that somewhere along the route, a stand-up, knock-down fight would have to be fought with the Confederates.

  The first choice was wiser in strictly military terms, since the army was too poorly organized as yet to fight a large-scale battle, and even if they should win such a battle, the impact would disorganize the army so badly that it might have to withdraw anyway. Besides, it had been one of the first lessons of the Crimean War that it was not the one-off impact of battles that decided the outcomes of war but the fatal, unremitting grind of sieges that destroyed enemy armies. “It was in these siege-works that the strength of the Russians was worn down,” wrote Sir Evelyn Wood; “the battles, glorious as they were,” were “merely incidents in the struggle.”29 The second choice was what the newspapers and Congress were demanding: a sensational and decisive confrontation, straight out of a picture book of battles, that would put an end to the war at one stroke. So the long columns of Union soldiers straggled out of their Washington encampments onto the roads of northern Virginia, headed in a more or less straight line south for Richmond.

  The result was a thundering humiliation for the Federal army. To defend Richmond, the Confederate government had concentrated approximately 20,000 of its own volunteers under P. G. T. Beauregard, the hero of Fort Sumter, near the village of Manassas Junction, squarely across the track of the Orange & Alexandria railroad and behind a meandering little stream called Bull Run. There, on July 21, the hapless McDowell attempted to clinch Beauregard’s army in its front with an initial punch at Beauregard’s main lines behind Bull Run, and then swing a clumsy flanking maneuver around the left flank of Beauregard’s defenses. It might have succeeded had not some 12,000 Confederate reinforcements under Brigadier General Joseph E. Johnston shown up at the last minute to stagger the oncoming Federals with one blow and send them reeling back to Washington. The effect of the battle of Bull Run on Union morale was crushing: more than 500 Union volunteers were dead, another 2,600 wounded or missing.

  The poet Walt Whitman watched the defeated army drag itself back through the streets of Washington under a sullen and rainy sky. “The defeated troops commenced pouring into Washington over the Long Bridge at daylight on Monday, 22nd,” Whitman recalled. “During the forenoon Washington gets all over motley with these defeated soldiers—queer-looking objects, strange eyes and faces, drench’d (the steady rain drizzles on all day) and fearfully worn, hungry, haggard, blister’d in the feet.” Whitman found “the magnates and officers and clerks” in Washington calling for surrender and the resignation of Lincoln. “If the secesh officers and forces had immediately follow’d, and by a bold Napoleonic movement had enter’d Washington the first day, (or even the second,) they could have had things their own way.”30

  In fact, the Confederate army did not follow up its victory at Bull Run with a hot pursuit. Fully as ill-prepared for battle as the Federal army had been, the Confederates were badly disorganized by their victory and in no condition to undertake an offensive of their own. Nor did they think it was necessary, since they had achieved in this triumph all that their defensive strategy had promised. For his part, Abraham Lincoln was temporarily shaken by the defeat, but not as badly as some other Northerners. Horace Greeley’s editorials in the New York Tribune had screamed “On to Richmond!” but now the editor decided that the rebels “cannot be beaten” and counseled Lincoln to “have Mr. Crittenden move any proposition that ought to be adopted.”31

  Within a day, the president had recovered his composure, and on July 27 Lincoln sat down to draft a more aggressive program for conducting the war, calling for a three-pronged invasion of the Confederacy in Virginia and in east and west Tennessee. To accomplish that, he needed to do some housecleaning: he relieved the unfortunate McDowell of his command and called to Washington as his replacement the commander of the Department of the Ohio, George B. McClellan, who had managed to win some small-scale victories with Ohio volunteers in western Virginia that summer. Then in November Lincoln rid himself of the lumbering Winfield Scott and promoted McClellan to general in chief of all the Union armies, and in January 1862 he deposed Secretary of War Cameron and replaced him with a steely-eyed lawyer named Edwin M. Stanton.

  The naive war, the glory-to-God war, the war of the thousand-colored uniforms, was over. The war in earnest had now begun.

  THE YOUNG NAPOLEON

  The arrival of George Brinton McClellan on the scene in Washington was a second wind to the demoralized Federal army. At age thirty-five, McClellan was dashing and dapper, the very storybook image of a general, a “Young Napoleon.” To support that image, he brought with him from his years as a railroad executive some substantial and useful experience as an organizer. And organize he did. Numerous thre
e-months’ militia regiments that had been about to go home were reenlisted for three-year terms of service; the streets of Washington were cleared of loitering volunteers by a provost guard or regulars; the regiments were reorganized into brigades, the brigades into divisions, and the divisions into corps, and the corps were given commanders. Uniforms and weapons were given some measure of standardization, discipline and drill were imposed properly, and the bedraggled army encamped around Washington was given a name that would stick to it throughout the war—the Army of the Potomac.

  The army responded by giving to McClellan its whole-souled devotion. “For the first time,” wrote Adam Gurowski, a dour expatriate Pole employed by the State Department, “the army… looks martial. The city, likewise, has a more martial look than it had all the time under Scott. It seems that a young, strong hand holds the ribbons.” McClellan made the volunteers feel like real soldiers, and at review after glorious review in the fall of 1861, the men of the Army of the Potomac shouted themselves hoarse for McClellan. “He had a taking way of returning such salutations,” recalled Jacob Dolson Cox, the Ohio state senator turned officer. “He went beyond the formal military salute, and gave his cap a little twirl, which with his bow and smile seemed to carry a little of personal good fellowship even to the humblest private soldier.” McClellan even acquired a portable printing press to haul around on campaign with him so that he could keep his exhortations and advice flowing constantly through the hands of his soldiers. “It was very plain that these little attentions to the troops took well, and had no doubt some influence in establishing a sort of comradeship between him and them. They were part of an attractive and winning deportment which adapted itself to all sorts and ranks of men.”32

  At first McClellan received the same response from Lincoln, the cabinet, and Congress. Dinner invitations poured in upon him faster than the time available to schedule them, compliments from young and old were publicly showered upon him, and in a very short while McClellan was being hailed as the savior of the Union—a view that McClellan himself began to share after old Winfield Scott was retired in November and McClellan made general in chief in his place. “By some strange operation of magic I seem to have become the power of the land,” McClellan wrote to his wife, Ellen Marcy McClellan, soon after his appointment. “I almost think that were I to win some small success now I could become Dictator or anything else that might please me.”33 Dictator or not, McClellan found an appreciative audience in Abraham Lincoln, for at the time of McClellan’s appointment, he and Lincoln saw the purpose of the war in very much the same terms. Lincoln still believed that secession was a political bubble that only required some measure of squeezing before it popped, and he advocated the application of just enough force to persuade the South that armed resistance was in vain.