The Confederate Union War

by Alan Sewell

  “Try not to hit any of the taverns and cat houses,” joked Taylor. “You know my Louisiana Tigers have arrived to take their part in the assault.”

  Alexander laughed while Lee rolled his eyes. Another thing I’ll have to worry about --- rambunctious Cajuns running amok in what’s left of the place. I hope some Rebel has had the foresight to destroy the liquor stocks in the taverns, but I wouldn’t count on it. The liquor won’t last long after our men get to whatever is left of the grog shops.

  “We’ve got nothing to do but wait on their answer to the ultimatum, which isn’t due until two o’clock,” continued Taylor. “May I suggest that we draw early rations and feed ourselves, Alexander’s gun crews, and the infantry that will be going into Cincinnati --- let the men eat their fill of the fresh cooked beef we have left. They won’t be getting anything but hardtack once the fighting starts.”

  Lee called to his orderly and gave the orders to draw rations for the officers and men.

  An hour later the officer that Lee had sent into Cincinnati under flag of truce the day before came back across the river to Confederate lines and made his way up the hills to Lee’s headquarters.

  “Sir, I met with Mayor Davis and Rebel General George Crook commanding the Cincinnati Garrison,” the officer reported. “They have referred it to their President Lincoln. He has telegraphed his reply.” The officer handed Lincoln’s terse telegraphed reply to Lee:

  GEN LEE. YOUR OFFER PROPOSING SUSPENSION OF HOSTILITIES AT CINCINNATI AND VICINITY IS DECLINED. A. LINCOLN.

  Lee turned to Alexander. “Signal your men to open a general bombardment.”

  “No warning shots?” asked Dick Taylor.

  Lee shook his head. “The ultimatum is the only warning required. They know the consequences of rejecting it. Major Alexander, order your batteries to fire at will on designated targets.”

  Alexander raised the pole flying the blue and white flags that signaled his gunners to open fire. Then he, Lee, and Taylor placed their hands over their ears and opened their mouths to equalize the air pressure.

  The first guns to open fire were the 128 pounders. On their signal 180 guns began firing on their pre-sighted targets. The simultaneous concussions rocked the earth and air. Despite Alexander’s concern about inconsistent gunpowder scattering the shots, the salvoes mostly impacted at or near their targets. Shells from Lilly Belle and Lady Kate plowed into the Little Miami Railroad Depot simultaneously, blowing out its supports and collapsing the roof. Geysers of water spewed from the Miami Canal as shells burst its locks. Solid bolts blew the railroad bridges over the canals off their abutments. Nearly a hundred shells from the 32-pounders obliterated the flimsy reconstructed warehouses near the river. The “shorts” from these least accurate of the guns lashed the river like a hailstorm.

  Three batteries of Rebel guns on the hills north of town attempted to return fire. They were bracketed within minutes then obliterated by salvoes from the 44 guns that Alexander had held in reserve for counterbattery fire.

  The stupendous thunder echoed and re-echoed across the valley. Lee motioned for Alexander to halt the bombardment after only forty-five minutes. By that time the smoke from spreading fires and clouds of dust thrown into the air from demolished buildings had obscured the aim points in the city. The shortened parabola of the winter sun sliding towards dusk lengthened the shadows. The smoke and shadows were ideal for masking a river crossing. Lee decided to commence the assault across the river without further delay.

  Lee scribbled a note to cease fire and passed it to Alexander who raised the yellow and black flags to signal a cease fire. It took many minutes for the excited gunners, intent on their work, to notice the ceasefire flags, also becoming obscured by the smoke and debris cloud drifting in across the river. But the volleys finally tapered off and the shaking of the ground ceased.

  “Send the men across the river,” Lee said to Dick Taylor when silence returned. Taylor looked puzzled. Lee issued the command louder. Taylor’s expression was still incomprehensible. Lee realized that he was hearing his voice only as it was echoed through the bones of his face. Only then did he realize that the bombardment had rendered every man in the Valley of the Ohio between Cincinnati and Covington stone deaf. Lee had to wait thirty more minutes for hearing among the officers to return sufficiently to command the men to move. The boats they had been storing on the hills around the Licking River that divided Covington from Newport began splashing into the river and rowing across on the slow current.

  By the time the sun had set behind the hills of Covington, Lee’s men were clamoring up past the blasted docks and burning warehouses of the Cincinnati riverfront. And as, he had expected, more than a few had stopped to ransack the ruins of the taverns.

  30

  Elkton, Maryland, December 12, 1861

  “Where in Hell are all the Negroes I came here to liberate?” bellowed General of the Atlantic Department John Fremont. “I invited Charles Sumner and Thaddeus Stevens to attend tomorrow’s Liberation ceremony. If I don’t find more Negroes to set free by then, I’ll look like the King of Fools!”

  Fremont could not understand why only two Negro slaves had shown up for his Proclamation of Liberation ceremony in Elkton, the seat of Cecil County, Maryland.

  “You hear those guns?” asked Frederick Douglass whom Fremont had invited to speak at tomorrow’s ceremony. The sound of musketry came in on the wind, indicating that the Free State invaders and the Confederate defenders were fighting not far away. “Slaves won’t risk running away from their masters until we’ve shown them that we will stay here long enough to protect them from being returned to slavery. But if you need more Negroes to put on a show for tomorrow, Eddie and I can pretend to be slaves for a day.”

  Eddie Bates, also invited by Fremont to speak at the ceremony, howled with laughter. Fremont grimaced with fury. Douglass decided he’d best apologize.

  “I’m sorry, General. My meager attempt at humor was in very poor taste. Please know that I appreciate the risk you are taking in bringing your men into Maryland. You’re the only person of authority in the Free State Government who’s shown any interest in liberating the slaves. I am grateful for that.”

  Fremont pursed his lips in a half-smile and nodded ever so slightly to show Douglass that he was mollified by the apology.

  “I understand. I confess that I sometimes think more of my image with the public than I should. I was more disappointed at being held up to ridicule than I was at not being able to liberate the slaves I expected to find here.”

  Fremont had acted immediately after receiving Lincoln’s permission to take the offensive. The Confederates, accustomed to pinning the Free State Republicans down with the ever-present threat of moving against Philadelphia, had drawn down their men in quiet stretches of the front. Fremont had easily advanced across the Maryland State Line, guarded only by frontier outposts on the macadamized roads that crossed into Pennsylvania.

  His unexpected advance had caught the Confederates in Maryland by surprise, isolating the portion of the state east of the Susquehanna and north of the Chesapeake, and breaking the railroad connections between Baltimore and Wilmington. If Fremont had so far failed in his quest to free slaves, he had at least made the Confederates understand that they, too, could be invaded. He had set the telegraph lines humming with calls to return to Maryland the units transferred to other fronts. Those Confederate guns he heard had come from units hastily withdrawn from the front between Wilmington and Philadelphia. The Confederates had withdrawn them reluctantly, knowing that by weakening its defenses they were placing Wilmington in danger of attack from Philadelphia. That was precisely the state of confusion that Fremont wanted to foment.

  I will have the Confederates swinging to and fro like a pendulum, moving their men between different points on a wide front. Every unit in transit is a unit that isn’t fighting. These movements exhaust the men and wear on the railroads and rolling stock that move them. They spread the Confederates thin an
d allow us to exploit their weak points.

  Douglass continued explaining the paucity of slaves.

  “The main reason that fewer slaves have come forward than you anticipated is because there aren’t many left in this county. There were thousands here when I was born into slavery. Now perhaps there are only several hundred. Their masters took those off when word came that your army had arrived in Maryland. The only two that were remained here to ‘liberate’ are the elderly servants of the oldest lady in town.”

  “Why so few? I thought Maryland would be thick with them.”

  “It is ‘thick’ with slaves on the Chesapeake Shore, fifty miles south of here. But slavery has been declining in northern Maryland since even before I was born. It’s difficult for masters to keep their slaves this close to the Free States. Look at me and Eddie. We both escaped from plantations not far from here. There are Quakers and Abolitionists all around here who’ll spirit slaves across the state line into Pennsylvania. They disappear into the Negro Quarter of Philadelphia and are never heard from again.”

  “That’s exactly how my wife Emma got herself free,” interjected Eddie. “She walked out of her master’s house in Delaware when her master passed away. She crossed over into Pennsylvania and went straight into Philadelphia. Nobody ever came looking for her, not until the slave raid that started this war.”

  Eddie thought about Emma, back home in Cass County Michigan. He longed to return home and get back to the comfortable routine of working his bakery shop. Then he remembered that it was cold and snowy back there. The pale sunny early winter sky of Maryland took his thoughts back to his first home, the cabin on the slave plantation he had been raised in until his family had escaped to Free Pennsylvania. Eddie turned his face to the sun.

  Will my people ever be able to live free in the “Sunny South?” Most of us would return to this warm and happy land if only we could do so as free men and women. We would work for wages as we do in the Free States, educate ourselves and our children, and contribute to the improvement of the country.

  Fremont has freed only two slaves, but everything has to start out small. Perhaps he will free more next week and still more the week after. Set the slaves free in dribs and drabs if that is how it has to be. Emma, Frederick Douglas, and I are only three, but to each of us freedom is more valuable than life itself. And every slave who is set free to prosper by his or her own hands refutes the stories told by the slaveholders who say that Negroes by nature are incapable of governing themselves.

  In the background Eddie could hear Frederick Douglass continuing to inform Fremont about the scarcity of slaves here.

  “The slave owners couldn’t secure their slaves,” so they sold them further south,” Douglass explained. “The nature of the land has changed too. The old tobacco plantations of my childhood have been subdivided into smaller parcels. Most of those grow wheat. Slaves aren’t used as much on small farms. You’ll need to advance a couple counties deeper into Maryland’s Eastern Shore in order to find the tobacco plantations that work hundreds of slaves.”

  “I don’t know if we’ll be able to move any further south,” replied Fremont. “This war has not been kind to commanders who failed to fortify their lines of communication. If I move any further south or east the Confederates will certainly try to cut me off from Pennsylvania. The best I could hope for would be an ignominious retreat. It will be best to fortify the ground we have already gained, which blocks the railroad into Wilmington and makes it difficult for the Confederates to threaten Philadelphia. I regret not being able to push far enough south to liberate slaves in large numbers, but I don’t see that as being an important enough objective at the moment to risk having this force cut off and destroyed.”

  Douglass nodded. “Even if you don’t advance any farther, you’ll encourage some of the Negroes further south to make a run for our lines. They’ll try to escape at night, so warn your sentries not to shoot them. Now if we can only convince Mr. Lincoln to let the free Negroes fight for us, it might convince many more to join our cause.”

  “I won’t ask Mr. Lincoln,” replied Fremont. “I’ll enlist the Negroes in the ranks and put the burden on the President to muster them out.”

  “You will do that?” asked Douglass.

  “You just watch me.”

  “Well, God bless your pompous hide, you----!” exclaimed Douglass, stopping himself in mid sentence before he said out loud all he thought of Fremont..

  They all laughed uproariously. No one laughed louder than Fremont, who didn’t seem to mind the very few he considered his true friends poking fun at his pretentiousness. Douglass smiled broadly, realizing by Fremont’s laughter, than he had passed within the general’s embrace of friendship.

  “What about you, Douglass?” asked Fremont “I wouldn’t mind you --- and Eddie --- sticking with me for a while. Every slave we liberate is important to our cause, and both of you give powerful testimony that encourages Whites to respect free Negroes as their equals. It doesn’t do any good to liberate the Negroes if they are then to be despised as an inferior class of citizens. Our common cause will be strengthened if we encourage Free States Whites to believe that they have a stake in your progress from slavery to equality.”

  “I’ll be pleased to accompany you,” answered Douglass at once. “Garrison has asked me to return to Boston to help him continue to publish The North Star Liberator. But I’m frankly afraid to do it. The Confederates haven’t gone so far as to kidnap any free Negroes and sell them back into slavery, but if they start it will very likely be with me. I also believe it’s better for me to dedicate myself to rallying the people inside our lines to fight for our cause rather than trying to persuade the people remaining in Boston to passively resist the Confederates.”

  Douglass’ determination to work with Fremont inspired Eddie to think about his own role.

  And what about me? Should I continue speaking at these rallies? Or should I pick up a gun and fight for the liberation of my people now that Fremont says he will enlist us. Maybe I ought to go back home and raise a company of Cass County Negroes and bring them to Fremont. That will show folks that Negroes can fight as well as Whites. A company of Free Negroes fighting here might even inspire the slaves of Maryland and Delaware to come into our lines to fight with us.

  “General Fremont, Sir?”

  “Yes, Mr. Bates.”

  “With your permission I’d like to return to Michigan and see if I can raise up a company of free Negroes to fight with you. We’ll soonest earn our freedom if’n we show that we’ll fight for it.”

  “Yes, Eddie, by all means!” exclaimed Fremont. “Return home and raise your company and bring them to me. I will prepare them to fight, and I promise I will fight them!”

  Fremont reached into his pocket and removed the nine-page flowery speech that he had written as an address at tomorrow’s Liberation Ceremony. The speech was mostly written with a view toward promoting himself as the Great Emancipator. Fremont ripped the speech to shreds.

  “Why did you do that?” asked Douglass.

  “Because I realized that I don’t need a speech. All I need to do is let the world know that Eddie will be raising the first Negro Company. From now on I will not be your race’s liberator. You will liberate yourselves.”

  31

  Cincinnati, December 14, 1861

  Confederate Colonel of Artillery Porter Alexander shouted a command to his telegrapher over the din of exploding shells: “Battery Mason. Adjust Fire. Up thirty. Right thirty. Fire bolts.”

  The telegrapher clicked out the message. Minutes later solid bolts from the Parrot Rifles of Mason’s Battery on Covington Heights began slamming into the three-story building across Seventh Street to Alexander’s right. The Rebels firing out of the windows of the upper floors ceased fire at once, some struck down by the bolts and flying shards of brick and glass they scattered, while the rest fled out the back.

  Alexander watched as another salvo collapsed the roof into the interio
r of the top floor. Then he shouted to the telegrapher, “Battery Mason. Cease fire.”

  Alexander was not only the Confederate Army’s most respected artillery officer but also its chief signals expert. He was testing out his newly developed method of controlling indirect artillery fire by telegraph.

  He shouted his next command: “Lilly Belle. Adjust Fire. Up fifty. Right fifty. Fire percussion.” The ground shook as one of the big shells plowed into the ground behind the vacated building and detonated. A debris cloud mushroomed up behind the building. The third floor fell on top of the second when the concussion shook it. Alexander hoped the round had killed or disabled any of the men who might have been preparing a defensible position behind the building. He called in two more shells.

  He decided that this would be the last fire mission he called from Lilly Belle that day. Lilly’s “sister” Lady Kate had blown itself sky high two days before when its chamber proved unable to withstand the black powder charge that hurled its huge shells across town. A store of black powder carelessly placed near the gun had gone off too. The combined explosions killed twenty-two of Alexander’s gunners and wounded fifty more --- the most dreadful day of the war for Alexander’s men so far.

  After the explosion Alexander had called in fire support from Lilly sparingly. After each three rounds he allowed the chamber to cool for three hours before calling in the next mission. As soon as he had time he would devise a method for remote firing the huge gun so as never again to place a gun crew at risk of being killed by the exploding charge or premature detonation of the shell.

  He looked at Major Roberdeau Wheat, commanding his Special Assault Battalion of Louisiana Tigers. The Tigers, late to the Battle of the Salient, were right where they needed to be in this fight. Lee had used them to fill out the depleted divisions of Cleburne, McCulloch, Van Dorn, Hindman and Hardee. Van Dorn was attacking Ormsby Mitchel’s army from the west side of Madison while Hardee and McCulloch had moved into its rear at Lawrenceburg. Cleburne’s division, its battered regiments filled out with fresh Tigers snarling for a fight, was hacking its way through the blasted ruins of Cincinnati.