by Bruce Catton
It was the beginning of wisdom, perhaps. For this was not the land of Old Black Joe and My Old Kentucky Home, with gay darkies picturesquely melancholy over long shadows dropping on the plantation lawn, Uncle Ned hanging up the shovels and the hoe after a life of faithful service, Nelly Gray gone down the river to the tune of quavering male quartet vocalizing, Swanee River curling lazily south with the romantic sadness of a faint tug at the heartstrings. This was not minstrel-show land, after all. These midwestern soldiers had grown up knowing only the stage Negro — the big-mouthed, grinning, perpetually carefree Sambo who loved watermelons and possum, had peculiar gifts for wielding the razor (always on other Sambos, who did not much mind being slashed, having been born for it), and who liked to eat fried chicken and drink more gin than he could properly manage. Mr. Bones was out of his depth here, and there were emotional values under the surface that Stephen Foster had not quite touched; when Negro music was heard it had a wild quality and a jungle drumbeat, fit to be punctuated by the thudding of heavy guns and the cries of men desperately in earnest. This was real, there was a life force welling up here, and these illiterate men and women whose English was a queer gumbo of mispronounced words and faulty grammar nevertheless were actually trying to say something. This was not picturesque Sambo, faithful Old Black Joe, the grinning darky who was gay in the autumn sunlight; this was a man struggling to stand upright as a man should and to be master, as far as a weak mortal may, of his own destiny, as precious to him as to any white boy from Wisconsin farm or Ohio city. It was something nobody had been prepared for, and it was inordinately disturbing.
What the Westerners were beginning to run up against, indeed, was the inexorable fact that the Negro was going to have a controlling effect on this war for union … simply because he was there. His presence, ultimately, had been the cause of the war; the war could not be fought and won without taking him into account; when the settlement finally took place, he would have to be in it.
On the day after Bull Run, Congress had solemnly decreed that the war was not being fought to disturb “the established institutions of the states,” and the radical Republicans had not ventured to object; yet the solemn resolve was becoming a dead letter, for the established institution which the resolution had been designed to protect was being disturbed more and more every day and there was no way to avoid disturbing it. Freedom and union were bound up together, whether man wished it so or not; and freedom was not a word that could ever be used in a limited sense. It was an idea, not a word, and there was no way to keep the people who wanted freedom the most from absorbing the idea.
If it did nothing else, slavery gave Union soldiers the notion that when they were in slave territory they were in land that somehow was foreign. This was as true in the Army of the Potomac as in Kentucky and Missouri. Private Chase of the 1st Massachusetts Artillery — a man who worshiped McClellan and who did not believe that abolition had any rightful part in this war — was writing home at this time that Virginia was a fine country in which, if there was no war, he would like to live. Yet he felt compelled to add: “I think if they could have a lot of New England farmers settle here they could show them how to raise a heap of stuff.” The war, he admitted, was ravaging the Virginia countryside fearfully, but perhaps that was all for the best: “I hope when it is done it will be a permanent thing and the Question settled that there is such a thing as Union.”7
McClellan himself — McClellan, who went by the book of Napoleon and saw all the rebellion as something formalized, to be settled by professionals who went by the old chivalric tradition — was beginning to learn this fall that this war could not be fought without some reference to the slavery issue. He was learning it just now in a very hard way, by means of a lost battle in which men were killed, by which bright reputations could be tarnished.
McClellan had troops occupying the Maryland country along the upper Potomac, northwest of Washington, with Confederates in unknown strength across the river. Late in October he got word that Confederate troops in Leesburg, Virginia, were making ominous moves, and he ordered a Union force to scout across the river, feel them out, and see what was developing. His orders went down to a division commander, Brigadier General Charles P. Stone, and Stone had a few regiments go over the river at Harrison’s Island, scale the muddy heights at Ball’s Bluff, and on October 21, 1861, perform the maneuver known to military men as a reconnaissance in force.
General Stone’s detachment went over under command of Colonel Edward D. Baker, the same who had orated gloriously in springtime New York, calling for bold and determined war and scoffing at battle deaths as matters of small account. On the fringe of a wood atop the bluff Baker inexpertly led his men into a more powerful Confederate force, which promptly cut the command to pieces, shooting down scores, capturing hundreds, and driving a disorganized remnant back across the river in headlong flight. Altogether the action cost the Union army nine hundred casualties, among them Baker himself, shot through the heart at the height of the battle.
In an official Washington which still had painful memories of Bull Run, this was exactly the sort of disaster for which somebody was going to be made to sweat; especially so since Baker himself had been a man of considerable political consequence — a close friend of Abraham Lincoln (who had named his second son for him), a leading west-coast Republican, and a member of the United States Senate. House and Senate joined to name a committee to look into the business, and this committee — which before long would become a fearsome Jacobin creation, the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War — selected as the chief culprit General Stone, who had not been present at the battle but who seemed to be mostly responsible for the move.
General Stone himself had a certain standing. During the previous winter James Buchanan had commissioned him colonel and had given him responsibility for maintaining order at the inauguration of President Lincoln; an important assignment, as men saw it then, for the capital had been full of rumors about a secessionist attempt to keep the ceremony from taking place. Lincoln knew Stone and trusted him, and Stone enjoyed McClellan’s full confidence, but none of this helped him now. The Joint Committee scented something very fishy about the whole Ball’s Bluff operation; suspected, in fact, that Baker and his command might have been purposely sacrificed by a Federal officer secretly in sympathy with the Confederacy — an officer who, under the circumstances, could not be anyone but General Stone, who had ordered the crossing in the first place. The committee collected a quantity of ominously vague testimony about mysterious flags of truce and the passage of messages back and forth between Union and Confederate commanders along the upper Potomac. It reflected also that during the last couple of months Stone had won a certain unhappy prominence by ordering his men to return to their owners all fugitive slaves who came within his lines; a course of action that had involved him in violent argument with Governor John Andrew of Massachusetts and with that afflicted lion of the anti-slavery cause, Senator Charles Sumner himself. As more and more testimony came in, it seemed clear to the members of the committee that Stone was probably disloyal.
Stone was never actually accused of anything. He was simply wrapped in suspicion; the War Department took note of it, and in time Stone was quietly removed from command and locked up in prison, where he had to stay for quite a number of months. He was released eventually — not exactly cleared, because there had never been any charges that could be either replied to or canceled, but at least released — but his career was ruined.
General Stone had run into very bad luck and had suffered atrocious injustice. Yet what had really wrecked him was not so much the vengeful suspicion of ruthless politicians as the sunken reef of the slavery issue. He had been taught, suddenly and with great brutality, what other soldiers were being permitted to surmise for themselves — that that issue was not going to stay submerged, that it was going to become central, that sooner or later the war was going to adjust itself to it.8
Like the lamented Colonel Bake
r, the principal men in the Republican party believed in bold and determined war, and it did not seem to them that they had been getting it lately. It had been hard enough for them to keep quiet while McClellan leisurely perfected his army’s organization and training; they found it altogether unendurable when the first aggressive move made by any piece of that army proved to be the halfhearted thrust at Ball’s Bluff, productive of shameful disaster. When the man responsible for that fiasco turned out to be one who had steadfastly refused to let his part of the army take an anti-slavery stand, the inference seemed irresistible.
For the Republican leaders in Congress — men like Ohio’s Senator Ben Wade, Michigan’s Senator Zachariah Chandler, Pennsylvania’s Congressman Thaddeus Stevens — believed not only in hard war but also in the abolition of slavery. Hard war meant smiting the Confederacy quickly and with vigor; also, as they saw it, it meant destroying what the Confederacy stood on, the institution of slavery. The two must go together, and a general who had no interest in striking down slavery probably had no real interest in striking down the Confederacy either. That the President of the United States had flatly refused to let abolition be made official policy made no difference. Notice had been served that softness on the slavery issue would ultimately be equated with softness in regard to victory itself.
… In which, perhaps, there was less political scheming and plain human cussedness than may appear. The innocent enlisted man who went to Kentucky fancying that colored folk were burnt-cork clowns who expressed their deepest feelings with the music of Stephen Foster or Dan Emmett was beginning to learn that the reality was a little grimmer than that. He was discovering, in fact, that the contraband who tried to hide in a Union camp was a fugitive from slavery and not just from a minstrel show; and he was also beginning to sense that it was going to be very difficult to wage war against the society from which those men were trying to escape, without in one way or another taking a stand on the problem of the men themselves. Ben Wade and Thad Stevens and men like them had lost their innocence far back in the unrecorded past, but the same force that was pressing on the midwestern recruit was also pressing on them. Sambo was not Sambo any longer, and the land was going to march to more terrible music than any minstrel had yet sung. Slavery had been a factor in the events that had brought on the war, and now there was no way on earth to keep it from being a factor in the war itself. Both senators and private soldiers were beginning to respond to that fact.
2. War along the Border
Among those who would feel the pressure was General George B. McClellan.
It would come a bit later, of course. The prestige he had brought to Washington — a prestige which was at least partly due to the fact that everybody hopefully expected so much of him — was not yet dimmed. There were a few private mutterings, to be sure. McClellan had had a good deal of time to get his Army of the Potomac into shape — a good deal by pre-Bull Run standards, anyway — and he was steadfastly refusing to do anything with it. Rebel armies were still camped in the Bull Run region, defiant Rebel batteries closed the Potomac River to commercial traffic, and “On to Richmond” (which hardly anyone was saying out loud these days) had a rather hollow sound.
But actually the war was making progress, even though the country’s principal army was not moving.
Shortly after Fort Sumter, Lincoln had proclaimed a blockade of the southern seacoast. There had been at the time no way to make even a respectable pretense of enforcing the blockade, and the whole business had looked a little ridiculous — the more so when, before half the spring was gone, the Confederates seized the naval base at Norfolk, Virginia, capturing enough big naval guns to equip forts all over the South and possessing themselves of the disabled hulk of one of the nation’s first-line warships, U.S.S. Merrimac; a hulk that could be raised, remodeled, and put back into service under the Confederate flag. There had been times during the last few months when the only blockade worth talking about seemed to be the one which the Southerners themselves were maintaining on the water route to the Federal capital.
The administration, however, had no intention of letting things remain in this unhappy condition, and early in August it began to take steps. These steps were not very well co-ordinated at first, and there was a certain amount of pulling and hauling in opposite directions, but eventually the army and navy found themselves carrying out a logical, co-ordinated plan for sealing off the Confederacy. Old General Scott’s “anaconda” idea had taken root.
As was the case with a number of things in this war, the operation seemed to begin with Ben Butler, After his crackdown on Baltimore and eastern Maryland, Butler had been sent to take command at Fortress Monroe, at the entrance to Chesapeake Bay. In a purely military way he had very little to do there, but his fertile lawyer’s mind had made one great contribution to the handling of the fugitive-slave problem. Runaway slaves who came within his lines, he held, were, as far as he was concerned, simply a species of property owned by men in rebellion; property which could have a direct military usefulness and whose owners, by the act of rebellion, had forfeited title; contraband of war, in other words. As contraband, fugitive slaves could be collected and used by a Union army just as any other property could be collected and used, and nobody was in any way committed on any side of the slavery issue itself. This interpretation proved enormously handy to harassed Federal commanders everywhere, and the word itself caught on at once. For the rest of the war runaway slaves and displaced colored folk in general were contrabands.
Late in August an amphibious expedition with troops under Butler and warships under a lean, irritable flag officer named Silas Stringham sailed from Hampton Roads, dropped down the Carolina coast, and without great difficulty captured two forts which the Confederates had built at Hatteras Inlet, where there was a good entrance to the vast enclosed area of the North Carolina sounds. Leaving a garrison for the forts and a tiny fleet of light-draft vessels, general and flag officer returned to Hampton Roads. The foothold they had gained could be exploited whenever the government chose.1
Government would choose just as soon as it could get everything ready, for the advantages of amphibious warfare were beginning to become evident. While Butler and Stringham were cracking Hatteras Inlet, the navy was thinking about seizing a good harbor farther down the coast to serve as a fuel and supply base for blockading squadrons. It set aside its best warships and gave them to Flag Officer Samuel du Pont, a sailor whose social and financial standing was quite impeccable. Dupont decided to make a descent on Port Royal, South Carolina, and asked the War Department to stand by to provide troops. McClellan objected bitterly; this was a side show, the troops ought to be sent to his own Army of the Potomac, for the issue would finally be settled in Virginia and there should be no diversions. He was overruled, however. Lincoln wrote to the Secretary of War that the expedition must get moving in October, and twelve thousand soldiers were earmarked for the job, under General Thomas W. Sherman. (Not William Tecumseh; it was Thomas W.’s misfortune, by the end of the war, to be known simply as the other General Sherman.)
Inspired by this or by cogitations of his own, General Ambrose E. Burnside next went to McClellan with a proposition.
Burnside was an easy-going West Pointer from Rhode Island; a big, handsome, likable chap whose visible assets included an intimate friendship with McClellan, a set of the best intentions in all the world, and a fantastic growth of well-sited whiskers; and he asked permission to recruit along the New England seaboard a division of troops familiar with the coasting trade and the handling of small boats. With such men, he said, and with proper help from the navy, he could go in through Hatteras Inlet, dismantle every Confederate installation on the sounds, and forever end the danger of any blockade-running in that area. Furthermore, the army would be established on the mainland not too many miles south of Richmond if the expedition was a success.2
McClellan had just got through objecting to the Port Royal expedition, but he went for this one with enthusiasm an
d Burnside was told to go ahead. Hardly had this been done when the navy picked up a couple of Ben Butler’s regiments and a battery of artillery and whisked them down into the Gulf of Mexico, to occupy desolate Ship Island, a sprawling sand dune dotted with marsh grass and scrub oaks and pines, which lay a few miles offshore some little distance west of the entrance to Mobile Bay. The original idea seems to have been to hold the place as a coaling depot for light-draft gunboats, with which the navy hoped to break the Confederate traffic between New Orleans and Mobile. But the men and guns deposited on Ship Island were hardly seventy-five miles in an air line from New Orleans itself, largest city in the Confederacy, and they were an equal distance from the entrance to the all-important Mississippi River; a fact that was bound to call itself to strategic attention before long.
Thus by the middle of the fall the government was beginning to get on with the war even though most of the progress was as yet invisible. If McClellan’s army was doing nothing in particular in Virginia, the Confederate army in that state was keeping equally quiet; and although the idea would never have dawned on McClellan, it is just possible that by keeping quiet in Virginia his army was fulfilling its most important function. The strategy by which the Confederacy would eventually be destroyed was taking shape that fall — seal off the coast, strike down the Mississippi, destroy secession state by state, working east from the West — and the unhappy Army of the Potomac, which was to do the worst of the fighting and suffer the heaviest casualties, was not, in the end, actually required to do anything more than hold the line in front of Washington.