by Bruce Catton
And then suddenly it was all over. Most of Farragut’s ships were above the forts, the Confederate gunboats had been sunk or driven ashore, and by daybreak the old admiral was anchoring his fleet halfway between the forts and the city, giving decent burial to his dead and making repairs to damaged hulls and rigging. The forts still held out, but they were dead ducks now, wholly cut off, their garrisons on the edge of mutiny with fatigue, battle-weariness, and a general sense of defeat; they would surrender presently and be occupied by Union troops, and New Orleans would surrender, too, as soon as the fleet got there, because with the forts and gunboats gone it had no means of defense.
Rain was coming down as Farragut’s ships came steaming up to the New Orleans levee. Onshore there were thousands of people, jeering and cursing and shouting impotent defiance at the Yankee ships; and on Hartford’s deck an old tar lounged negligently against a ponderous nine-inch gun, the lanyard in his hand, patting the side of the gun and smiling serenely at the yelling crowd.7 Officers came ashore, United States flags blossomed out over public buildings, and in a short time Breckinridge Democrat Butler would be on the scene with occupation forces. The victory was complete, city gone, forts gone, the two unfinished ironclads destroyed; and by the end of April the Confederacy owned no more of the Mississippi River than the stretch between Baton Rouge and Vicksburg.
So the war was looking up, in the spring of 1862. On the seacoast the navy was tightening its blockade. It owned deep-water harbors in South Carolina now as bases for its blockaders, the army had knocked Fort Pulaski to pieces at the mouth of the Savannah River, the North Carolina sounds were under almost complete Union control, and hopeful people in Washington were beginning to ask if Farragut could not simply go steaming on up the Mississippi and open the river singlehanded. (Not yet did they realize that running past a fort was not the same thing as destroying it.) The general idea set forth in Scott’s Anaconda Plan seemed to be working; perhaps if the armies got busy now victory might be very near.
This meant opportunity for generals; especially for Henry Wager Halleck, commander in the West.
Halleck had assembled a huge army near Pittsburg Landing: Grant’s army, Buell’s army, and the army with which Pope had been opening the upper Mississippi. He had come to the spot himself to take active field command — for the first and only time in the war — and he had given Grant a dubious sort of promotion, making him second-in-command of the united army and giving the troops Grant had been leading to George Thomas. Grant was finding that his job carried a fine title and prestige but no responsibility and little authority; for the time being he was on the shelf and he was bitterly dissatisfied.
Halleck may have been led to shelve him by the criticism that came down on Grant after Shiloh. Grant had won the battle, to be sure — or at any rate the battle had been won and he had been in command when it happened — but the fame he had won at Fort Donelson had been rubbed down a good deal.
The Confederates had hit him at Shiloh when he was not expecting it, and northern newspapers made a big thing of it. The first account of the battle to reach northern newspapers had been written by a correspondent who got to Shiloh on the second day of the fight and picked up his news from members of the rear echelon — the panicky crowd that hugged the bank by the steamboat landing, circulating doleful rumors of catastrophe. From these he got a fine collection of scare stories — a whole division had been captured, sound asleep, at daybreak; men had been bayoneted in their tents; some regiments were surprised at breakfast and ran away, leaving the Rebels to eat the meal — and all of this got printed and talked about all across the North.8 In addition, some of the officers who ran away and were cashiered for it had political influence and defended themselves by asserting that the whole army had been shamefully caught unawares. Grant, of course, was held responsible — Grant and Sherman — and the old story about Grant’s fondness for whiskey was told and retold. Sherman was fuming at a great rate, denouncing all of these stories as tales “gotten up by cowards to cover their shame,” but for a time Grant was under a cloud.9
By the end of April, Halleck had assembled 120,000 men. Not twenty miles away, at Corinth, was Beauregard, getting reinforcements for his shattered army but still able to muster less than half of Halleck’s numbers. He could be swamped any time Halleck chose to make a solid lunge at him, and after that nothing on earth could keep Halleck’s soldiers from going anywhere in the Deep South they wished.
Halleck recognized his opportunity; unfortunately he also recognized a vast number of dangers, including some that did not exist. Grant had been bitterly criticized because he had not entrenched at Shiloh. Halleck would not lay himself open to the same criticism; accordingly, whenever his vast army halted it entrenched, turning each camp into a minor fort. It spent so much time digging trenches, indeed, that it had little time left for marching. An Illinois soldier recalled that they spent two hours every evening digging trenches and then got up at three in the morning to stand in line in the trenches until daybreak; they marched, he said, from a quarter of a mile to two miles each day. There were times when it appeared that Halleck was going to burrow his way to Corinth.10
Roads were very bad and there were numerous swamps, and when an unpaved road crossed a swamp it had to be corduroyed. Ten-foot logs would be cut and laid side by side across the roadway, from solid ground to solid ground. Sometimes the watery mud was so oozy that many layers of logs had to be piled up. Often enough the nearest wood was half a mile away, and the troops would have to carry the logs in, six or eight men to a log. When finished, these roads were both atrocious and dangerous, the sole advantage being that they could at least be used by a moving army, as roads of bottomless mud could not. If an unskilled driver let his horses get too near the edge, one wheel of wagon or gun might slip off the logs into the mud, in which case the whole business would capsize — whereupon all the soldiers in the vicinity had to get into the swamp and hoist everything back on the road again. Sometimes, when mud and water were very bad, a horse that slipped off the corduroy was simply left to sink down out of sight and die. Years after the war an Indiana veteran remembered with distaste “the black slimy water and the old moss-covered logs” of those Mississippi swamp roads.11
When the roads were not too wet they were apt to be too dry. Mississippi heat was something new, even to boys who knew what heat could be like in Illinois and Indiana. Roads were narrow, and they frequently ran between tall pines that met overhead, cutting off all air and sunlight. The soil was a fine sandy-white loam, and in dry weather a road would be ankle-deep in dust; and a moving column would kick up unending clouds of it, so that a road through a forest would be a choking tunnel in which some men would collapse from exhaustion while others would stagger along, retching and vomiting. One veteran wrote feelingly: “You load a man down with a sixty-pound knapsack, his gun and forty rounds of ammunition, a haversack full of hardtack and sow belly, and a three-pint canteen full of water, then start him along this narrow roadway with the mercury up to 100 and the dust so thick you could taste it, and you have done the next thing to killing this man outright.”12
The army did move, and with infinite caution it approached Corinth, averaging less than one mile a day. In some way Halleck was getting fantastic reports about Confederate strength. It was believed at headquarters that Beauregard would presently get sixty thousand fresh troops; then credit was given to a report that one hundred thousand Rebels were waiting at Corinth, with more coming in daily. Assistant Secretary of War Scott, who was traveling with Halleck as a War Department observer, wired Stanton in the middle of May that “the enemy are concentrating a powerful army” and suggested that Halleck ought to be reinforced. An attack by Beauregard was expected daily, at practically any point along the front, and the army was kept ready to go on the defensive at any moment. A captured army surgeon, recently released, assured Grant that while behind the enemy lines he had learned there were one hundred and forty-six thousand Rebels in Corinth, with e
nough reinforcements on the way to raise the number to two hundred thousand; he added, not wishing to draw too dark a picture, that a number of these reinforcements would of course consist of old men and boys.13
A month after it left Shiloh field the army found itself squarely in front of the Rebel lines at Corinth. Beauregard had received all the reinforcements he was going to get, and he had, all in all, just over fifty-two thousand men.14 He had not a chance in the world to fight off Halleck’s army and he knew it; seeing that the Federal was at last nerving himself for an assault, Beauregard abruptly left the place — left it at night, arranging one final deception for the Yankees by having steam engines come puffing and whistling into town at intervals to the accompaniment of loud cheers. Pope, commanding the Federal advance, heard it all, told Halleck that lots of fresh troops were coming in to Beauregard’s aid, and predicted that he would be attacked in heavy force by daylight. Then at last, when the Confederate rear guard blew up such supplies as it could not remove, Pope caught on, and on May 30 his regiments went cautiously forward into an empty town. Beauregard kept on going until he reached Tupelo, fifty miles south. He was not pursued with any great vigor.
For Halleck clung to the thought that the war might be won without very much fighting. To him, the occupation of Rebel territory was the big thing. Here he was, sitting in an important junction town, occupying a healthy stretch of the Memphis and Charleston Railroad; as far as he could see, this was victory. He wrote to Pope that all he wanted was for Beauregard to go far enough south so that he could not menace the railroad line: “There is no object in bringing on a battle if this object can be obtained without one. I think by showing a bold front for a day or two the enemy will continue his retreat, which is all I desire.”15
Memphis was in Union hands now, and Grant was sent over to take charge of it. This assignment marked the beginning of the upswing for Grant. He had been on the verge of quitting the army during the march down to Corinth, feeling humiliated because Halleck was giving him nothing to do, and Sherman had talked him out of it — Sherman, who had lost his command and been written off as insane early in the war, but who had come back and was now solidly established, the last of his nervous anxiety having been burned away in the fires of Shiloh. Now Grant had a job again. Before long it would grow bigger.
Bit by bit Halleck was scattering the huge army that Beauregard had not dared to fight. He had to occupy Memphis, Corinth, many miles of railroad, a network of towns behind the railroad. Also, he was sending Buell east to take Chattanooga — an eminently sound idea, one which the Confederates just then did not know how they were going to stop, except that it was all being done very slowly. Buell was a cautious, methodical man and Halleck was the last man on earth to make him less so; Buell went inching along toward Chattanooga, rebuilding as he went the railroad line which the Rebels had been tearing up, and it was almost an open question whether he would reach Chattanooga before the war was over.16
Meanwhile the army had lost a good man — old C. F. Smith, who had damned the volunteers and led them to victory at Fort Donelson, who had given Grant the framework for his “unconditional surrender” message, and who should have been spared for more battles; there was plenty of fighting ahead, and a man of his kind would be useful. But the old man had been ill for weeks with his infected leg, and a few weeks after the battle of Shiloh had died at Savannah, Tennessee. They would miss him.
3. Invitation to General Lee
This was the spring when they could have done it. The irresponsible overconfidence of the old “On to Richmond” days was gone forever, and there was a sullen new respect for the fighting capacity of the southern soldier, but the chance was there just the same. Now was the time to move fast and hit hard, because the other side was badly off balance. The Confederate war potential, limited in any case by comparison with that of the North, had not yet been fully developed. Final victory could be won before summer if the strong northern advantage was pressed to the limit.
Yet the great Federal offensive moved with leaden feet. In the West, Halleck was profoundly cautious, inching along with pick and shovel, leaving nothing to the chances that might go against him, blind to the chances that might work in his favor, asking only that Beauregard leave him alone. And in the East, where the Confederate capital and nerve center lay a scant hundred miles from Washington, the Federal command was demonstrating that speed was a word it did not understand.
Richmond had become very important. Not only was it the capital, the living symbol of the Confederacy’s ability to exist as an independent nation. In the largely rural South it was now the metropolis, the great industrial center, the heart and core of the war-production machine. Memphis was gone, and Nashville, and New Orleans; now Richmond was the keystone, and if it fell the Confederacy’s ability to resist would be fatally limited. To take and hold Richmond this spring was to win it all.
But there were problems. While the Westerners were moving up the Tennessee toward what would soon be the Shiloh battlefield, Confederate Joe Johnston was stoutly entrenched around the old Bull Run battlefield, and McClellan at last moved forward to drive him out But McClellan’s army was more than twice as big as Johnston’s, and Johnston had no intention of waiting to be destroyed; he got out of there before McClellan arrived, falling back behind the Rappahannock River and leaving nothing for the Yankees except miles of trenches, a string of log huts and barracks, a number of wooden guns that had been mounted for purposes of deception, and smoldering piles of burned foodstuffs and equipment that could not be carried away. McClellan looked things over, decided that an overland pull down to Richmond would be too risky, and returned to Washington; he would put his army on boats and steam down to Old Point Comfort, where the James River came into the lower end of Chesapeake Bay. From there he would march up the long peninsula between the James and York rivers, striking Richmond from the east, trusting to Federal sea power to protect his flanks and give him his supplies.
The plan was good enough, and the army sailed with high confidence. By the first week in April thousands of troops were going ashore near Fortress Monroe; like their general, the men assumed that they would be in Richmond in a few weeks, and the mere sight of the great fleet of transports and warships, the waving flags and the visible display of northern power, convinced them that they were irresistible. Richmond was perhaps fifty miles away, and in the state of Virginia there were at least twice as many Union soldiers as Confederates. A quick march up the peninsula, one big battle at the gates of Richmond, and that would be that.
Yet the march was not quick. McClellan got his army to the peninsula before Johnston did, and for a few crucial days there was nothing much there to stop him. Yorktown was fortified, and a sketchy line of works ran across the peninsula from York River to the James, but there were no more than fifteen thousand armed Confederates present. McClellan had fifty-three thousand men with him, more were coming down on every boat, and one hard smash would probably have settled things. But McClellan was an engineer and he wanted to study the situation with an engineer’s careful eye, and while he was at his studies the local Confederate commander played a game on him.
This officer was General John Bankhead Magruder, an imposing-looking gentleman whose military talents were limited but who for years had been an enthusiast for amateur theatricals, and the show he put on now had a sure professional touch that completely baffled McClellan. Magruder marched his skimpy forces back and forth and up and down, making a great show, behaving as if his force was unlimited, and McClellan was greatly impressed; he concluded presently that the Confederate line was too strong to be stormed, and so he halted his army, began to wheel up a ponderous array of siege guns and heavy mortars, built works for their protection — and, in the end, lost an entire month, during which time Johnston and his army showed up and the invasion came to a stalemate.1
Other things went wrong, military errors being cumulative.
The Union navy ruled the waters, and it had been su
pposed originally that any Rebel line on the peninsula could easily be outflanked: warships could steam up either of the rivers, hammering down any fieldworks that might exist and landing troops in the Rebel rear. But just at this time the navy had utterly lost control of the waters around Hampton Roads, and the flanking device McClellan had counted on was not available. This had happened because when the Federals evacuated Norfolk navy yard in the spring of 1861 they had done an imperfect job of destruction on one warship which they had been obliged to leave behind — U.S.S. Merrimac, a powerful steam frigate, temporarily immobilized because of defective engines.
Merrimac had been burned and scuttled, but when the Confederates took over the yard they raised the hulk, found it largely intact, and with vast ingenuity created a new marine monster that almost won the war for them. Merrimac was cut down to her berth deck and was given a slanting superstructure with twenty-four-inch oaken walls covered by four inches of iron plating, with ports for ten guns. For Merrimac’s bow the unorthodox naval architects devised a four-foot iron beak. The defective engines, not at all improved by having spent some weeks at the bottom of the harbor, were more or less repaired, the vessel was rechristened Virginia, and early in March this unique creation came steaming out into Hampton Roads to upset Yankee strategy.