Flight of the Eagle: The Grand Strategies That Brought America from Colonial Dependence to World Leadership

by Conrad Black

  In the east, Lincoln quickly tired of McClellan’s excuses for inaction, and of McClellan personally. The general was a vain and insubordinate martinet, which Lincoln, who had a notoriously invulnerable ego, would happily have overlooked if the general had won something. Under Lincoln’s orders to move on Richmond, McClellan chose to do so by an amphibious operation landed at the evocative locale of Yorktown on May 4. He moved slowly up the peninsula between the James and York Rivers, and a series of battles occurred between May and September. While this was happening, Stonewall Jackson moved brilliantly up the Shenandoah Valley between March and June, with about 20,000 men, outmaneuvering and defeating nearly 50,000 Union troops, until McDowell and local militia were forced to provide 30,000 troops for a possible defense of Washington.

  McClellan got within five miles of Richmond but was stopped by General Joseph E. Johnston at the Battle of Seven Pines (Fair Oaks), May 31 and June 1, 1862. The Union had about 6,000 casualties, the Confederacy 8,000, including Johnston, who was seriously wounded, but recovered. The struggle for Richmond continued in the Seven Days’ Battles around Mechanicsville from June 26 to July 2, where Lee made his debut as Confederate commander in Virginia. Both sides withdrew after this series of bloody engagements, in which the Union took 16,000 and the Confederacy over 20,000 casualties. If McClellan had had the determination of the war’s last Union commander in the east, he would have held Lee’s feet to the fire and might have broken the Confederacy’s back. On July 11, Lincoln put the ponderous General Henry Halleck in as general-in-chief, with McClellan continuing as head of the Army of the Potomac. He consolidated the armies of Virginia and ordered a land approach to Richmond. Lee masterminded an ambush superbly executed by his able lieutenants, Generals Stonewall Jackson and James Longstreet, and defeated General John Pope at the Second Battle of Bull Run (Manassas) on August 29 and 30. Pope retreated to the defenses of Washington, was replaced by McClellan, and Lee invaded the North, entering northwestward into Maryland, apparently aiming to advance into Pennsylvania and isolate the Union capital. He took Harper’s Ferry on September 15, capturing immense supplies of munitions and stores in the arsenal from which he had ejected John Brown on behalf of the Union just three years before, and taking 11,000 Union prisoners.

  McClellan, in his brief but finest hour, overtook Lee near Sharpsburg, Maryland, on September 17, and on the bloodiest day of the war, at Antietam, the two armies divided nearly 25,000 casualties almost evenly. McClellan did not commit his reserves, as a bolder general would have done, given his numerical advantage, and Lee withdrew. McClellan did not try to press an advantage, but the day had important repercussions, at home and abroad.

  At the beginning of the Civil War, the British establishment had largely favored the Confederacy, out of commercial connections to the textile industry, but underlying this leaning was a desire to see the Americans who had exited the British Empire so effectively and almost painlessly, having left the mother country the chit for evicting France from Canada, humbled and laid low.

  Four outstanding past, present, and future prime ministers, of both major parties—Lord John Russell, Lord Palmerston, William Ewart Gladstone, and Robert Cecil, future Marquess of Salisbury, who between them had 11 terms as prime minister for a total of 42 years between 1846 and 1902—favored exchanging embassies with the Confederacy and, if need be, accepting war with America. It devolved upon cooler and relatively unestablished heads, including the Prince Consort, Albert (a German), and the leader of the Conservative Party in the House of Commons and overall leader for a total of 33 years, and twice prime minister, Benjamin Disraeli, to point out that the British government could not take a position in favor of slave-holding and secessionism, and that if it did, it would ultimately lose Canada and the West Indies whatever happened between the American North and South. Seward proved an energetic and sensible secretary of state, whose instincts were sound and who did not require much oversight from the president. Lincoln named as minister to London the very apt Charles Francis Adams, a scholarly diplomat and son and grandson of presidents, as close as America could come to an aristocrat, accredited to governments of British aristocrats. Adams admonished the foreign minister (and former and future prime minister), Lord Russell, not to engage in diplomatic intercourse with the Confederacy and secured a promise that he would not do so (having initially received Richmond’s representatives). There had been a controversy in November and December 1861 when the Americans stopped a British merchantman and removed two emissaries from the Confederacy to Great Britain. Seward eventually rescinded the action on a technicality and the problem passed.

  Following Antietam, the British and the French, who had been ramping up to recognize the Confederacy and propose mediation between the parties, realized that the war, which was racking up casualties on a scale that surpassed all but the Russian campaign in the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, might not yield to such meddling. They desisted, resuming a state of watchful neutrality, though neutrality generally against the Union, tempered by the clear preference of the British working class for the Union, land of equality and absence of the decayed oppression of the class system. And Antietam emboldened Lincoln to issue his preliminary Emancipation Proclamation (on September 23), freeing all slaves in areas still in rebellion against the United States, as of January 1, 1863. On December 1, he asked for compensated emancipation, but that was declined by the Congress. To northerners uninterested in the plight of the slaves, he explained the measure as an incitement to revolt by the slaves, and a placebo to foreigners, i.e., the British and the French. He fended off complaints that emancipation would discourage the southern moderates with his attempt to compensate slaveholders. It was a deft tactical move, painlessly to stream together the two great purposes of the war, preservation of the Union and elimination of slavery, without offending those interested only in the former, by representing emancipation as an assist to the war effort.

  There was jockeying in the western theater in the last half of 1862. General Beauregard’s successor, General Braxton Bragg, like an angry hellcat, fought off all comers in central Tennessee, north and northwest of Chattanooga, until he narrowly lost the Battle of Murfreesboro to General Don Carlos Buell, with both sides splitting about evenly nearly 20,000 casualties. In the east, Lincoln finally became exasperated with McClellan’s molasses pace and especially his failure to press the advantage after Antietam, and sacked McClellan, replacing him with General Ambrose E. Burnside. The new commander, rattled by Confederate cavalry general J.E.B. Stuart’s daring October raids into Pennsylvania, led his army of 113,000 men against Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia of 75,000 men, near Fredericksburg, midway between Washington and Richmond, on December 13, 1862. Lee beat Burnside off, inflicting over 11,000 Union casualties, against less than 6,000 himself. Lincoln sacked Burnside six weeks later, and replaced him with General Joseph Hooker.

  Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, purporting to emancipate all slaves in areas in revolt as “then and forever free,” came down on January 1, 1863. As it applied only to insurgent-occupied areas, it didn’t have much practical impact but, again, sharply distinguished the combatants in the sight of the Europeans, where slavery was already an unappealing concept. The European desire to think of itself as compensatingly less raw and Darwinian than the United States, an amusing delusion in light of what would unfold in Europe in the coming century, was already a reflex. Lincoln knew that slavery was the cause of the war, though the abolition of it was not the real northern motive for pursuing the war. Emancipation, apparently almost meaningless, was successfully represented as a necessary tactical step to the president’s supporters, without being a distraction to the real objective of suppressing a revolt, but it also united the practical objective and moral cause of the war. It was another of Lincoln’s masterstrokes. The North was now bulletproof against both the charge of blasé non-concern about slavery and the domestic charge of spilling disturbing quantities of the Union’s blood and treasure for
a black population that most northerners did not consider to be entirely human, though most also considered the blacks to be victims of a system regarded as between distasteful and wicked. (It was both.) In thus aligning the two connected but not confluent Union war aims, Lincoln demonstrated again, as he had in his pursuit of the presidency, his unique mastery of the grand strategy of the war and of the causes that gave rise to it.

  Lincoln’s sure political instincts required him to deal with many ripplings of insurgency in his cabinet and Congress, but he never had much difficulty isolating plotters and disarming them with the inexorable logic of his position. Those instincts extended also to the British and the French. The British were never far from the temptation to assist in giving a comeuppance to the only country that had durably defeated and outsmarted them, and the French could never long resist the temptations of sheer opportunism, however elegantly they would dress it up as legitimate policy. In July 1862 the British had built for the Confederacy the CSS Alabama, a commerce raider. The United States lost hundreds of ships to the Alabama and several other raiders, and more than 700 U.S. flag vessels changed to other countries of registration to avoid the risk; the country’s merchant marine took more than 50 years to recover. This was the origin of the famous flags of convenience of Liberia and later, Panama. Events had moved sufficiently by April 1863, partly because of the Emancipation Proclamation, and partly because of northern military gains, that when another raider was completed in British yards, Adams delivered so strenuous a protest that the British government seized her (the Alexandria), but courts forced her delivery and release. The British had at all times to weigh the fact that if they pushed the Union too hard, they would be flung out of Canada and probably the West Indies. Whatever happened between the North and the South, Britain had no ability to defend Canada from the ever-growing Union Army, now nearly 500,000 men. The bemusement with which the British observed the start of the Civil War had given way to awe at the ferocity and courage of both sides, as even Palmerston acknowledged in Parliament several times. Britain had never in her history taken military casualties on the scale of those that were coming in every few weeks in the U.S. Civil War. However it ended, the implacable and uncompromising nature and astounding scale of the conflict commanded the attention and respect of all.

  It was naturally a good deal more frivolous with the carnival government of Napoleon’s nephew’s Second Empire. Having ridden nostalgia about his uncle to the presidency when the Second Republic replaced the Orleans monarchy, when it was turfed out in the events of 1848, Louis Napoleon Bonaparte had, after four years, simply announced that he was emperor and had had it ratified in a trumped-up referendum. A charming scoundrel, Napoleon III disguised a weak chin with a well-trimmed goatee, and was an inveterate schemer, but without many other qualities that would remind anyone of his uncle, a demiurge and many-sided genius and one of the most immense personalities in all of human history. (In fame and mystique, Lincoln would become one of his very few rivals.)

  Napoleon III proposed to mediate the U.S. Civil War, through his minister in Washington, in February 1863, but his good offices were roundly declined both by Seward and for good measure by the Congress, which with Lincoln’s blessing dismissed even an offer of mediation as unacceptable “foreign intervention.” France was still the country of Genet and XYZ and had the greatest difficulty figuring out how to behave sensibly with the Americans. As he had less to lose in the Americas than Britain, Napoleon III had no compunction about building raiders for the Confederacy, and in 1864 he intervened in Mexico to place the Archduke Maximilian of Austria on the throne of that country. This was another example of the diplomatic stupidity of the French. By April 1864, the likelihood, though not a certainty until after Maximilian was installed, was that the North would win. And Seward and other American diplomats had left the French in no doubt that the United States would not tolerate a French puppet state in Mexico. If Napoleon had had a fraction of the skill at international affairs of Palmerston or Disraeli or Salisbury (three of Britain’s craftiest and most diplomatically successful leaders), he would have promised the North any assistance in exchange for an expansion of French influence in Latin America, a share in the isthmian canal, and an expansion of French Guyana and the French West Indies perhaps. At the most difficult times, Lincoln might have been prepared to indulge such a thing. That would have lent the French gift of the Statue of Liberty 20 years later greater resonance. Maximilian’s fraudulent empire ended tragically at the hands of Benito Juárez (the Lincoln of Mexico and namesake of Mussolini), and three years later Napoleon III’s empire would end, appropriately, in farce, at the hands of Bismarck, continental Europe’s greatest statesman since Richelieu. (Napoleon I being more of a conqueror than a statesman.)

  4. THE TURNING POINT: VICKSBURG AND GETTYSBURG

  The 1863 campaigns in the east began with the Union commander Lincoln named to replace Burnside after the Fredericksburg fiasco, General Joseph Hooker, attacking south against Lee’s army and coming to grips with him at Chancellorsville, a few miles west of Fredericksburg, 50 miles southwest of Washington and north of Richmond. Hooker had 130,000 men, many of them now battle-trained (even if not many of the battles had been successful). Lee had only about 60,000, but he sent Jackson on a brilliant flanking move on Hooker’s right and, with perfect timing, pushed the main Union Army back. Both sides took about 11,000 casualties, including Jackson, killed by the fire of his own sentries, on May 2. Hooker withdrew and followed McClellan and Burnside out of command and was replaced by Major General George G. Meade. While Union fortunes were discouraging, the Union was assembling a huge and well-trained and equipped army and Lincoln was changing generals after every defeat; he would come up with winners soon, because incoming Union commanders, as Scott had foreseen, now had a winning hand. One of the great turning points of world military history was almost at hand.

  In the west, the South was holding the Confederacy together by blocking the North’s southern drive down the Mississippi at Vicksburg, about 250 miles south of Memphis and 200 miles north-northwest of New Orleans. Vicksburg was a great fortress, defended with the usual tenacity of the Confederate Army. In a brilliant campaign from March to July 1863, Grant crossed the Mississippi into Louisiana, marched south of Vicksburg and brought his 20,000 men back north on Union ships on the river toward the back of Vicksburg, separating the two local Confederate armies, invested the city on May 22, and enforced a leak-proof siege of the fortress city. In the east, Lee, playing for European recognition, trying to demoralize the North, and concerned at the ever-increasing size and capability of the armies facing him, and of Grant’s progress in the west, invaded the North, moving into Pennsylvania 50 miles north of Antietam and 100 miles northwest of Washington. Lincoln called for 100,000 volunteers, and considerably more men came forward into the Union recruiting offices.

  Meade followed Lee, and the two armies met at Gettysburg, starting on July 1, 1863, as the siege of Vicksburg came to a climax. In a very complicated, desperately fought three-day battle replete with unit-sized acts of conspicuous courage on both sides again and again, the Confederacy made its supreme play at Gettysburg in Longstreet’s assault on the Little Round Top on July 3. This would have turned the battle, if successful, but was repulsed after prolonged and intense fighting at close quarters, especially in the famous charge of Cemetery Ridge, where the Union prevailed with massed artillery and musketry at point-blank range. (This charge was one of Lee’s few serious mistakes, and Longstreet made the effort only after expressing private misgivings.) Lee had no choice but to fall back on July 4, his retreat blocked by the swollen Potomac. Lincoln gave Meade a direct order to attack Lee with his back to the river, but Meade wavered. Lee escaped across the river in the succeeding days, but at the head of a defeated army.

  Early on the morning of July 4, Vicksburg surrendered to Grant, who bagged 30,000 Confederate prisoners. Apart from the prisoners, both sides had taken about 10,000 casualties around Vicksburg.
In three days at Gettysburg, the two armies had taken, together, over 50,000 casualties, nearly 60 percent of them Confederates, and counting the prisoners, over 100,000 casualties in the two actions. General Abner Doubleday said of Gettysburg: “Each house, church, hovel, and barn is filled with the wounded of both armies. The ground is covered with the dead.”86 The American aptitude for war would not be questioned again for a very long time. Spokesmen for government and opposition in the British Parliament paid homage to the ferocity and courage of the combatants. No one except Lincoln and the senior officers of both armies had imagined that the decisive climax of the American constitutional project could be such a noble and terrible combat.

  Three days were required to receive confirmation of the surrender of Vicksburg and the proportions of the Union victory at Gettysburg, and on the evening of July 7, thousands marched to the White House to congratulate the president, led by a regimental band. Lincoln appeared at the balcony, spoke of the glorious theme of the 4th of July, of the brave men who had died in the great victories of that and preceding days, and declared himself unable to improvise an address worthy of the historic occasion; he smiled, waved, and concluded jauntily, turning to the band: “I’ll take the music.”87 On November 19, Lincoln would dedicate the cemetery at Gettysburg and deliver, in just 10 sentences, the speech he declined to try to improvise on July 4 from the White House balcony. It became perhaps the most famous speech in the history of the English language. He began on the uniqueness of America’s foundation as a nation where “all men are created equal” and closed on the contribution of “these honored dead” that “government of the people, by the people, and for the people, will not perish from the earth.” Both were slightly histrionic liberties, but close enough to the truth, and a gem of concise and overpowering simplicity and elegance on behalf, very artistically, of “those who here gave their lives that that nation might live.” Lincoln always believed that the American idea would have died spiritually without the South. (His speech was also a contrast with the two-hour oration by Edward Everett that had preceded it, an admirable festive memorial of the traditional kind.)