American Experiment

by James Macgregor Burns

  Sometimes fortune favors the bold. This time Grant would move south of the fortress and then try to beat the Rebels in detail. The notion of deliberately marching troops deep into enemy territory, with an insecure supply line and with two enemy columns ready to pounce on them, appalled Sherman and his fellow officers, but they had confidence in Grant. As the rains began to ease off in mid-April, the Army of the Tennessee moved down the muddy roads of the west bank, opposite the fortress. Admiral David Porter, after running his gunboats past the Confederate batteries at night, ferried the Union army piecemeal across the river.

  In trapping the enemy had Grant and Porter become trapped? Some thought so: the Unionists were on the dangerous side of the river, under Confederate guns. But Grant was just where he wanted to be—on dry ground and within grappling reach of the enemy. He pushed his army, a compact triangle of about 43,000 men, forward between Pemberton and the veteran Rebel general, Joseph Johnston, who commanded a newly assembled force in Jackson, to the east. On May 14 one prong of the mobile triangle stabbed into Jackson, putting Johnston to flight. While a Union detachment stayed behind destroying rail lines and military stores, the other two prongs of Grant’s main force cut back to grasp Pemberton, who was advancing cautiously out of Vicksburg. After twice pushing their foe back toward the fortress, Grant’s men attacked Vicksburg itself.

  The assault failed, but the battle had been won. Pemberton’s army now was trapped in Vicksburg; Johnston’s reinforcements were scattered on roads and troop trains for many miles around; the Army of the Tennessee, now resupplied, had a tight grip on the river stronghold. Sherman, riding with Grant to inspect the lines, was jubilant: “This is a campaign; this is a success if we never take the town.”

  The war was more than a campaign, however; it was a conflict in many theaters, and back on the eastern front the Federals were floundering after another defeat. In late April a refurbished Army of the Potomac, under a breezily confident new commander, Joseph Hooker, had marched forth to do battle once again with Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia. Hooker hoped to maneuver behind Lee, trap him at Fredericksburg of recent sad memory, and then crush him with the Union’s superior numbers. Instead, Lee met Hooker’s thrust head-on, blocking it for a time near the hamlet of Chancellorsville. At first, the Union men seemed to be winning the fight as the gray-clad troops slowly fell back through thick forest and tangled underbrush.

  Lee, badly outnumbered, seemed at last to be cornered, but he was setting a trap of his own. While his men slowly retreated, Lee sent “Stonewall” Jackson with 28,000 men on a fourteen-mile march, circling far around Hooker’s right flank. At dusk on May 2 Jackson’s men burst screaming out of the shadowy underbrush, routing an entire Union corps and knocking the Federals back toward the Rappahannock. Darkness, Northern reinforcements, and the accidental wounding of Jackson by his own men stopped the attack. Hooker still had strong forces left, but Lee simply outgeneraled him during the next two days, and the remaining Federals pulled back to the north bank of the Rappahannock.

  “My God!” an ashen-faced Lincoln had exclaimed on getting the news of Chancellorsville. “What will the country say?” Once again the South felt a surge of pride, tempered by the news of Stonewall Jackson’s death after the amputation of an arm and the onset of pneumonia. Lee’s textbook victory made him the military hope of the Confederacy. A son of Henry “Light-Horse Harry” Lee of Revolutionary War fame, a West Point graduate, married to the great-granddaughter of Martha Washington, a gallant officer in the Mexican War, Lee had seemed the natural choice as commander of Virginia’s armed forces when he chose his native slate over the Union at the start of the war. He had directed such a slow and fumbling campaign in western Virginia during the first months of the war, however, as to be called “Granny Lee” and almost lose his reputation before he could win it. But then, in battle after battle, he had developed such qualities of resourcefulness, mobility, audacity, imagination, resoluteness, and an almost intuitive understanding of enemy plans as to make him the supreme tactician of the war.

  A tactician—but now the South needed a strategist. Grant had Vicksburg in his grasp, thus threatening to cut the Confederacy in two. The blockade was tightening. Union forces were threatening to attack in central Tennessee, even launch a joint army-navy operation into Charleston. Now, in May 1863, Confederate leaders took anxious counsel together. Some wanted to strike west, liberate Tennessee, and break Grant’s grip on Vicksburg and the Mississippi. But Lee pressed for a more daring plan—to reinforce the Army of Northern Virginia and then strike north through the Shenandoah Valley into the fertile Pennsylvania countryside, thus lightening the pressure on Richmond and forcing the Union to pull troops from the west; this would inspire the Peace Democrats in the North, perhaps win recognition from European powers, and possibly even result in the capture of Washington. The tactician had turned strategist.

  In June, in search of the decisive victory of the war, Lee slipped his army toward the Shenandoah Valley and plunged northward. Things went handily at first. Confederate columns scattered Union detachments in the valley, crossed the Potomac, speared through Maryland and southern Pennsylvania, and reached the outskirts of Harrisburg. Hooker proposed to the President that, while Lee moved north, the Federals should move south and seize Richmond; Lincoln responded drily, “I think Lee’s army, and not Richmond, is your true objective point.” Still looking for a fighter, the President accepted Hooker’s resignation and chose George Gordon Meade as commander of the main Union forces in the East. In Pennsylvania, Lee was already finding that instead of encouraging Peace Democrats, his advance—especially his seizure of livestock and food, and the capture of Pennsylvania Negroes and dispatch of them south to slavery— had aroused Northern anger to a new pitch.

  So stupendous odds had turned on the outcome of the battle that erupted in the little town of Gettysburg on July 1, as commanders deployed their troops and sent them forward into a cauldron of noise and heat and smoke, of fear and pain and sudden darkness; as artillery pounded away, soldiers shot and stabbed and clubbed one another on Little Round and the Wheat Field and Cemetery Ridge, and famous regiments once a thousand strong melted away. Waiting in the War Department’s telegraph room, Lincoln finally received the message he so desperately wanted: Lee was defeated, his troops moving back toward Virginia. Then came word from the Army of the Tennessee: Vicksburg had surrendered to Grant on the Fourth of July. Telegraph lines flashed the news across a joyous North.

  “We have at last got the harpoon into the monster, but we must now look how we steer,” Lincoln had said earlier, “or with one flop of his tail he will send us all into eternity.” His words seemed more apt than ever as Meade allowed the bulk of Lee’s troops to retreat south. Gideon Welles had never seen the President so upset and discouraged. “We had them in our grasp,” Lincoln kept saying. “We had only to stretch forth our hands and they were ours.” Further confirming his fears, the seesaw of war again teetered as autumn neared. General William Rosecrans’s Federals captured Chattanooga in southeast Tennessee, but Braxton Bragg’s Confederates counterattacked at Chickamauga, cracked and broke the Union line, pushed the Union forces back to Chattanooga, and laid the city under siege.

  The whale’s tail was still flopping, but the Northern harpoon was sinking deeper. Given command of the armies of the west, Grant drove Bragg’s men off Lookout Mountain and then off Missionary Ridge, in a battle won by soldiers who stormed the ridge on their own, ahead of orders. Lincoln got the news a few days after returning from his Gettysburg Address trip. With Union ships once again plying the Mississippi, Bragg’s troops retreating into Georgia, and Grant’s divisions poised to break through the mountains and advance on Atlanta, the President was on the eve of achieving his great strategic aim of breaking the Confederacy in two.

  Confederate hopes ebbed after Gettysburg and Vicksburg. “We are now in the darkest hour of our political existence,” Jefferson Davis said. Wrote a Confederate private captured at V
icksburg: “We have Lost the Mississippi and our nation is Divided and they is not a nuf left to fight for.” A Southern veteran of Gettysburg wrote his sister: “We got a bad whiping…. They are awhiping us … at every point.” He hoped the South would make peace so that he could “get home agane” alive.

  In Richmond the Confederates’ diarist-at-large, Mary Chesnut, began her January 1, 1864, entry, “God Help My Country.” She had almost become used to social occasions attended by men without arms, without legs, men unable to see, unable to speak. “Gloom and unspoken despondency hang like a pall everywhere.” As she looked out on the endless Richmond rain, her main hope now was that the enemy would become bogged down. “Our safeguard, our hope, our trust is in beneficent mud, impassable mud.”

  General Mud. But there was also General Industry, General Supply, General Transport, General Manpower—and General Grant.

  Forging the Sword

  Late in the afternoon of March 8, 1864, a train carrying Ulysses S. Grant, his teenage son, and two aides steamed into the Washington railroad station. No one was on hand to greet the man who was about to take command of the most powerful army the world had ever seen—and who had never set foot in his nation’s capital or met his commander-in-chief. Making his way to Willard’s Hotel on 14th Street, the general waited there until after nine in the evening, when he left for the White House. There, at one end of the Blue Room, Lincoln was greeting guests at one of his large receptions. Hearing a rising buzz of conversation at the other end, the President moved through the crowd toward the man who had just entered. “Why, here is General Grant!”

  While the two men exchanged a few amiable words, other guests crowded in around them or climbed chairs and tables to get a better view. If some were disappointed in the appearance of this small scrubby man of forty-two, with his slight stoop and the wart on his right cheek, they did not show it. They needed a hero, and here was the Hero of the West. The next day the President commissioned Grant a lieutenant general, commanding all the armies—the rank previously given in full only to George Washington.

  Leaders choose strategies, and strategies choose leaders. Grant was not only a proven fighter and winner but a general who could be counted on to carry out Lincoln’s long-frustrated strategy of attacking the enemy on all fronts simultaneously. Grant also could be expected to wage a continuous battle of attrition: instead of engaging the foe in one major struggle at a time and then pulling back to prepare for the next encounter—the pattern so far of the Civil War and of most wars—he would hammer the Confederates unceasingly, hanging on like a bulldog, grinding and wearing down the South to the point of exhaustion.

  Southern leaders had taken their measure of the man. “He fights to win, that chap,” they were saying in Richmond. “He is not distracted by a thousand side issues. He does not see them. He is narrow and sure, sees only in a straight line.”

  As Grant came to grips with Lee in Virginia during the spring of 1864, the new general-in-chief found not only that a strategy of attrition was correct but that he had no alternative. For the new strategist-in-chief under Lincoln could not outgeneral the master tactician. Time and again Lee outmaneuvered Grant, and when the two armies came to grips with each other—in the horrifying Battle of the Wilderness, at Spotsylvania, at Cold Harbor—the Union’s casualties totaled nearly 60,000 men, almost twice the Confederate losses. By mid-June Grant was moving his troops south of the James River to Petersburg, where he planned to cut Lee’s transport to the south and attack Richmond from the rear. When Petersburg fought off the Union attacks, inflicting heavy Federal losses, Grant settled down to a long siege. It would last nine months. Meanwhile, strong Union attacks continued in the west.

  Lincoln’s strategy of exerting pressure on all fronts, combined with Grant’s bulldog tactics, required a massive Northern effort in production, manpower, and transport—and called forth a forceful Southern response. Since the early months of the war, when men had first streamed to the colors on a three-month or (in the South) twelve-month basis, both commands had been struggling to keep their ranks filled. Facing threatened Yankee offensives in the spring of 1862, the Confederate Congress moved boldly to make all able-bodied white males between eighteen and thirty-five liable to military service for three years. Only a year later did the United States Congress pass a draft act, which made all men twenty to forty-five liable to military service, unless they paid a $300 commutation fee or found a substitute who would enlist for three years. These and later measures on both sides were heavily inegalitarian, allowing both Northerners who were wealthy enough and many Southerners with upper-class occupations—including the owner or overseer of any large plantation—to avoid the draft.

  “A rich man’s war and a poor man’s fight,” some had grumbled, and now they felt they had proof. To fight the war for the rich man—and even worse, for the “niggers” who were already taking jobs from whites— aroused muttering across the North. Nowhere did the first drawings catalyze feeling more than in the simmering working-class districts of Northern cities and the “secessionist” areas of the Midwest. In Manhattan, mobs of working people, mainly Irish, roamed the streets for four days, burning draft headquarters, pillaging homes, attacking Greeley’s New York Tribune building, putting the Colored Orphan Asylum to the torch, and hunting down, torturing, and lynching blacks. Troops had to be brought in from the Gettysburg campaign to quell the riots.

  “No measure of the war was a more stunning disappointment” than the North’s conscription of 1863, Allan Nevins concluded. Inequitable and inefficient, the draft fostered a hive of bounty jumpers, substitute brokers, emigrant runners, collusive doctors. The draft act did, however, stimulate “volunteering,” so, paradoxically, a small fraction of the Union army finally was supplied through this measure. In the South the draft met little open resistance, but as Confederate fortunes sagged, men took to the hills or woods instead of reporting, or hid with family or friends. Some Southerners contended that conscription was unconstitutional, a threat to personal liberty and states’ rights, the very things they were fighting for. Several governors defied Richmond’s efforts to enforce conscription within their borders. Still and all, both North and South mobilized an immense number of men—about a million and a half in the Union army, it is estimated, and almost a million in the Confederate.

  To supply these men was, in some respects, an even more exacting task. Suddenly in 1861 there were hundreds of regiments to begin to equip—five hundred on the Union side alone. The records of a high quartermaster officer in the Army of the Potomac showed him, according to Nevins, “receipting within a short period for 39 barrels of coal, 7½ tons of oats, 23 boxes of bandages, 31 of soap, 4 of lanterns, 80 beef cattle and 450 sheep, 180 mules, a miscellany of ropes, nails, rags, forges, lumber, and wagons, rolls of canvas, shipments of stoves, parcels of wire, ‘sundries,’ and sacks—how the army needed sacks!”

  Despite enormous confusion, incompetence, and corruption, the rich agricultural North could easily supply such needs; by the end of 1864 Lincoln could report that the national resources “are, then, unexhausted, and, as we believe, inexhaustible.” The economic expansion of the 1850s had laid the foundation for a factory as well as a farm spurt. A prime need was shoes, the things that armies literally travel on. By 1860 over 100,000 persons worked in the boot and shoe industry, in their homes or in factories where machines sewed the seams of the uppers, which were then sewn by hand, or pegged, to the sole. A Massachusetts inventor, Lyman Reed Blake, developed a machine to sew the soles to the uppers, then he traveled through New England teaching workers how to use it. Within two years of Sumter the new machines had stitched 2.5 million shoes. The Confederacy lagged behind, resulting in its troops often going bootless into battle—though Union men too, on occasion, had to march and fight without shoes.

  Beset by the loss of Southern goods and markets and with swiftly changing needs, some Northern industries faltered early in the war, then experimented, improvised, and recovered. Wh
ile cotton textiles declined, woolen mills hummed away, soon doubling production. Both iron and coal production dropped at first and then rose to the highest levels ever. Here again, the South fell behind badly. “The South lacked factories, raw materials, machines, managers who knew how to organize production, and skilled laborers,” in T. Harry Williams’s summation. “The largest ironwork in the section, and the only big installation of any kind, the Tredegar plant in Richmond, Virginia, had to operate at half or less of its capacity throughout the war because it could not procure sufficient supplies of pig iron,” and because it was also short of trained workers.

  The Northern munitions industries experimented and innovated as they expanded lustily. Armies and armories throughout the North and South had about half-a-million smoothbore muskets when Sumter fell, and 30,000 or so rifles or rifled muskets. Immensely outproduced, Richmond was in many respects more innovative and daring than Washington in both spurring and undertaking war production. Needing desperately to make up for their industrial disadvantages, the Confederates centralized war production to a degree that would not be seen again until 1917. Their war and navy departments in Richmond directed rail traffic, spurred iron production, constructed ships—including twenty-two ironclads and an experimental submarine—and built up vast stocks of munitions. Even the home spinning of cloth by Southern women was coordinated by local quartermaster depots. Ironically, the Confederacy would run out of funds before it ran out of bullets.

  With the Harpers Ferry armory lost when fighting began, the North had only its small federal establishment in Springfield, Massachusetts. A wild scramble for rifles on the part of competing states and armies produced a spate of orders for foreign arms and a burst of production at home. Slowly production was shifted from smoothbores to rifles, from the old muzzle-loaders to breech-loaders, from single-shot carbines to repeaters, amid much confusion, skepticism in the Ordnance Bureau, and wasted time. Artillery too was improved, but infantrymen on both sides often preferred their supporting gunners to use old-fashioned canister or grape that could mow down advancing enemy troops like a “huge sawed-off shotgun.”