Hearts Touched by Fire

by Harold Holzer

  The choices were not always easy or obvious. The leading writers of the magazine series are all included—Grant, McClellan, Beauregard, Johnston, and Longstreet, to name but a few—but so are the keen observations of lesser-known generals and staff officers such as John D. Imboden (writing on Stonewall Jackson’s last campaign), Jacob D. Cox (on Antietam), Darius N. Couch (on Chancellorsville), Henry J. Hunt (the three days’ fighting at Gettysburg), John Coddington Kinney (on Farragut at Mobile Bay), and Horace Porter (on Lee’s surrender at Appomattox). To widen the opportunities for inclusion, the choices were selected from the four-volume book edition, not just the original magazine series. The overall result, it is hoped, is a rich and representative collection to treasure anew throughout the sesquicentennial of the American Civil War.

  ______

  The year that the four-volume book edition of Battles and Leaders first appeared in print, 1888, Century editor Richard Watson Gilder journeyed to Gettysburg for the twenty-fifth anniversary of the monumental battle there (its twentieth anniversary, five years earlier, had inspired the original series). Here on this sacred ground he offered, as if providing a rationale in verse for the high purpose and hard work that had informed his magazine’s ambitious project, a personal vision for preserving history and recognizing its heroes as a way of cementing the bonds of reunion:

  Shade of our greatest, O look down to-day!

  Here the long, dread midsummer battle roared,

  And brother in brother plunged the accursed sword;—

  Here foe meets foe once more in proud array,

  Yet not as once to harry and to slay,

  But to strike hands, and with sublime accord

  Weep tears heroic for the souls that soared

  Quick from earth’s carnage to the starry way.

  Each fought for what he deemed the people’s good,

  And proved his bravery by his offered life,

  And sealed his honor with his outpoured blood.…

  Gilder and the editors of The Century Magazine sincerely believed that their extraordinary enterprise “exerted an influence in bringing about a better understanding between the soldiers” who fought one another in the Civil War, contributing significantly to a “new heritage of manhood and peace.”39 Buel and his colleagues may have overstated their contributions to sectional reconciliation—for it all but excluded the idea of extending civil rights to African Americans, failing even to properly acknowledge their battlefield sacrifices in fighting for their own freedom. (The book version at least attempted to correct the imbalance a bit by including a chapter on the “colored troops” at Petersburg.)

  But Buel, Johnson, and Gilder did not overstate the venerable project’s overall contribution to American history. Never before, or since, have so many firsthand accounts so vividly, dispassionately, and authoritatively described the large and small struggles of the armies and navies of blue and gray who were so determined to fight, and if necessary die, to secure their clashing visions of American freedom.

  What Robert Underwood Johnson said of the series in 1923—forty years after he helped launch it—remains true today: “The work is of such a character that it simply cannot be ignored in any consideration of the Civil War, to which, in another cycle of historical study, public attention is likely to revert.…”

  Let the new cycle of public attention begin, with the best of Battles and Leaders again at its very core.

  1861

  INTRODUCTION

  Craig L. Symonds

  The first ten months of the American Civil War—from Lincoln’s inauguration in March to the beginning of the first wartime winter—marked a period of experimentation and adjustment for both sides. The national government in Washington had to adjust to a wartime footing, and in Montgomery, Alabama (later in Richmond, Virginia), the breakaway states had to create a government from scratch. There were two important battles during this period: one in the Eastern Theater along the banks of Bull Run Creek near Manassas, Virginia, and one in the Western Theater at Wilson’s Creek in Missouri, as well as a naval action at Port Royal, South Carolina. Each of these seemed epic at the time, though all of them were subsequently eclipsed by the unimagined fury and bloodshed of the great battles that would follow.

  The essays in this first section of Battles and Leaders of the Civil War cover this period of experiment and adjustment. They are, of course, firsthand accounts by eyewitnesses and participants, but since they were written down some twenty years later in the 1880s, the authors also benefited from hindsight. Eyewitness accounts they may be, but they are also after-the-fact assessments, and a few of the authors used them as an opportunity to settle old scores.

  The war began at Fort Sumter on April 12, 1861. Stunning as it was, the first shot was hardly a surprise to the garrison. Since the day after Christmas 1860, when Major Robert Anderson moved his men and their dependents from Fort Moultrie on Sullivan’s Island out to the more isolated—and therefore more defensible—Fort Sumter, the men of the garrison knew that they were at the center of a dispute that could turn violent at any moment.

  Sergeant James Chester, who rose to the rank of captain in the ensuing war, was one of those who worked tirelessly to prepare Sumter for the expected onslaught. His story provides unique insight into the ingenuity of the besieged garrison. Fort Sumter was still unfinished on December 26, and there was a lot of work to do. The soldiers put the heavy guns in place, mined the small wooden pier, erected some guns at an angle to use as mortars, and even fabricated some ersatz hand grenades in case of an attack by small boats. They created what Chester calls a “flying fougasse”—a barrel filled with small stones that had a canister of black powder at its center, making it a kind of fragmentation bomb, which they planned to roll down onto attackers. Interestingly, Chester notes that Anderson declined to place the heavy barbette guns on the highest tier of the fort. Though such guns were likely to have the greatest impact in any subsequent artillery duel, their crews would also be fully exposed to return fire, and Anderson did not want to put them at risk. Anderson not only worried about the safety of his artillerists, he hoped to avoid a confrontation altogether. As a Kentuckian, he was especially conflicted about the prospect of civil war.

  In another essay, Confederate lieutenant general Stephen D. Lee (who was a mere captain in 1861 and one of Brigadier General P.G.T. Beauregard’s young aides) offers a summary of the negotiations and private conversations that informed the decision to open fire. Beauregard dispatched Lee and James Chesnut (another aide) out to Sumter to ask Anderson if he would surrender. He would not, but he admitted, “Gentlemen, if you do not batter the fort to pieces about us, we shall be starved out in a few days.” In Montgomery, Jefferson Davis and his advisers wanted Anderson to commit to a specific time. After a rapid exchange of telegrams, Anderson responded that he would have to evacuate by the fifteenth—in three days—unless he received supplies or reinforcements before then. Better informed than Anderson, Davis knew that supplies were already en route, and he ordered Beauregard to open fire. At about 3:30 A.M., Lee and Chesnut handed Anderson a note telling him that the batteries would open “one hour from this time.”

  A few minutes past 4:30 A.M. on April 12, 1861, Lee and Chesnut were in a small boat just north of Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor. They had rowed over to Fort Johnson on James Island to deliver Beauregard’s orders and were heading back to Fort Moultrie when Lee noticed the muzzle flash of a gun on James Island. He watched as the ten-inch mortar shell traced an arc across the night sky and exploded over the ramparts of Fort Sumter. That explosion, Lee writes, “woke the echoes from every nook and corner of the harbor, and in this the dead hour of the night, before dawn, that shot was a sound of alarm that brought every soldier in the harbor to his feet, and every man, woman, and child in the city of Charleston from their beds.” Writing in the 1880s, Lee presents the story as a human tragedy, and his account is absent any triumphalist sentiment that may have animated others.

  The ons
et of war prompted a surge of patriotism in both the North and South. Jacob Cox, who later became a division commander in the Union army, recalls in his essay, “At the first shot from Beauregard’s guns in Charleston Harbor … men crowded to the recruiting stations to enlist for the defense of the national flag and the national union.” He describes the ad hoc nature of this early mobilization in the North, which featured the election of officers, the establishment of rudimentary campsites, and the almost comical early efforts to drill the men. “The arriving regiments,” he writes, “sometimes had their first taste of camp life under circumstances well calculated to dampen their ardor.”

  Fort Sumter had a revolutionary impact on the South as well. Lincoln’s call for volunteers on April 15, which implied a federal effort to coerce the states back into the Union, provoked four more states—including Virginia—to join the Confederacy, and the rebel government moved from Montgomery to Richmond. Though there were no political parties in the South and thus no formal opposition to the government, there was personal and often bitter criticism from several quarters. One of the most vocal critics was Robert Barnwell Rhett of South Carolina, an early fire-eater who had been greatly disappointed when he had been overlooked for the presidency of the new Confederacy. Rhett died in 1876, but the editors of The Century invited his son, who bore the same name, to write about the formation of the Confederate government.

  The younger Rhett had spent the war as the antiadministration editor of the Charleston Mercury, and his essay is not kind to Davis. He asserts that most of the important business of nation building in Montgomery was conducted secretly behind closed doors, and insists that the South’s leaders failed to take advantage of early opportunities to improve their position. In effect, he argues, “We could have won if only …” Rhett ticks off the lost opportunities one by one: the failure to use the power of King Cotton to gain leverage with foreign powers; the failure to purchase warships from Europe (for which he blames Confederate navy secretary Stephen Mallory); and the failure to pledge low tariffs, which he insists would have prompted European governments to sign alliances with the Confederacy.

  Rhett’s laments are part and parcel of the Lost Cause view of the war, which was in full flower in the 1880s. But Rhett’s real purpose is to malign and indict Jefferson Davis. He quotes his father, who told him in 1865: “Mr. Davis never had any policy; he drifted from the beginning to the end of the war.” The clear implication is that with better leadership—presumably featuring Robert Barnwell Rhett—the South could have won.

  The two pieces on the Battle of Bull Run are especially interesting, more for what they reveal about internal bickering in the upper echelons of Confederate leadership than for details of the battle itself. P.G.T. Beauregard’s essay was one of the first to be published in The Century Magazine, appearing in November 1884. Beauregard’s personal flamboyance and garrulousness are evident in his writing, which is characterized by very long sentences in even longer paragraphs (some as long as three pages). Beauregard complains that Jefferson Davis rejected his “brilliant and comprehensive” plan and forced him to remain on the defensive at Bull Run. “With 6500 men and 13 pieces of artillery,” he writes, “I now awaited the onset of the enemy, who were pressing forward 20,000 strong.…” Despite this, Beauregard writes, “I myself” led a movement of “such keeping and dash that the whole plateau was swept clear of the enemy.”

  No one who knew Beauregard was surprised by this kind of self-promotional puffery, for it had been a hallmark of the mercurial Creole general since his youth. But Beauregard not only dismissed Jefferson Davis in his essay, he also made only a fleeting reference to his own superior on the field, Confederate general Joseph E. Johnston. Touchy about such things, Johnston eagerly accepted an offer to write his own essay on the battle, hoping also to set the record straight concerning his own relationship with Jefferson Davis. The Confederate president’s memoir, Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government, had appeared in 1881, and believing that Davis had “degraded me to the utmost of his power,” Johnston was determined to respond. Instead of an essay, therefore, Johnston submitted a pedantic line-by-line rebuttal of Davis’s memoir, beginning many of his paragraphs with “Mr. Davis says,” followed by a quoted passage, and then a rebuttal. A number of Johnston’s corrections are technical and petty, and the result is to make Johnston himself seem petty. While he was at it, Johnston took a few swipes at Beauregard, too. “An opinion seems to prevail,” Johnston wrote, “that important plans of General Beauregard were executed by him. It is a mistake.… As fought, the battle was made by me.” However valid, such a claim infuriated Beauregard, who then offered his own rebuttal, which appeared in the original Battles and Leaders volumes, and which is also included here.

  The western counterpart to the Battle of Bull Run in July was the Battle of Wilson’s Creek in August. As in Virginia, a Federal army advanced against a rebel position anticipating victory; as in Virginia, undisciplined but determined men shot one another down; and as in Virginia, a rebel counterattack at the right time and place drove the Federal army from the field in near panic. Confederate brigadier general Nicholas B. Pearce describes his role in the battle and gives credit for the eventual Confederate victory to the Arkansas troops he commanded. “The Arkansans in this battle were as brave, as chivalrous, and as successful as any of the troops engaged,” he writes. The real value of this essay, however, is Pearce’s admission that the death of the Union commander, Brigadier General Nathaniel Lyon, was very likely a major factor in the Union defeat. “In the light of the present day,” Pearce writes, “it is difficult to measure the vast results had Lyon lived.…”

  Before Lyon was killed, and before the bulk of the Union army fell back, a Union flanking column led by German-born brigadier general Franz Sigel was roughly treated and repulsed in great disorder. Pearce notes that Sigel “made vain attempts to hold his men,” but in the end he could not, and the whole column fled all the way back to Springfield. Soon afterward, Sigel’s behavior at the battle became grist for the rumor mill. One rumor had it that his undisciplined men had stopped to loot houses, which was why they were surprised by the rebel counterattack; another was that Sigel himself had fled the field well ahead of his troops and arrived back in Springfield in midafternoon while most of his command was still strung out behind him on the road to Wilson’s Creek.

  In his essay on the battle, Sigel defends himself from these charges and describes the battle as he remembers it, though he does admit that he and his small escort were pursued by rebel cavalry “for about six miles” as they raced back to Springfield.

  Only five days after the first shot at Fort Sumter, President Lincoln declared a blockade of the Southern ports. To maintain the ships of the several blockading squadrons, it was necessary to acquire some coaling stations along the Southern coast. This led to the first important naval action of the war: the seizure of Port Royal Sound off the coast of South Carolina by a squadron under Flag Officer Samuel F. Du Pont. It almost didn’t happen. As navy captain Daniel Ammen notes in his essay, a furious gale nearly wrecked the fleet as it rounded Cape Hatteras heading south to Port Royal. In the end, all the warships arrived safely, though some transports were blown across the ocean and fetched up on the coast of Ireland. On November 9, Du Pont’s squadron fought its way into Port Royal Sound, blasting the Confederate Fort Walker so thoroughly that the enemy abandoned its position on the coastal islands. It was the first really good war news for the North. Ammen notes, “The battle of Port Royal … was of surpassing value in its moral and political effect, both at home and abroad. It gave us one of the finest harbors on the Atlantic sea-board, affording an admirable base for future operations.…”

  It did more than that, however. After watching the engagement, Robert E. Lee, who was present in South Carolina as a military adviser to President Davis, recommended that the Confederacy should abandon most of its own coast to the enemy, concentrating its resources on a handful of important port cities. Du Pon
t’s triumph demonstrated that the balance of power between ships and forts had shifted. Steam-powered warships with heavy rifled guns proved that they could stand up to all but the strongest shore fortifications. Later in the war, Du Pont would have a falling-out with the administration over his perceived timorousness, but in the late fall of 1861, he was the first Union hero of the war, and, writing in 1887, Ammen was pleased to note the erection of a statue to Du Pont in Washington and the designation of Dupont Circle to honor his “intelligent and cheerful” commander.

  Though the engagements of these early months of war seemed epic to those who fought in them—and to those who viewed them from afar—they were but a prelude to the horrible slaughter and wholesale destruction that would follow. For one thing, the armies would be larger. President Lincoln called for 100,000 volunteers, and then 300,000 more. The Confederacy resorted to conscription—a draft—to fill its dwindling ranks. Confederates now knew that one rebel could not in fact whip five Yanks; Union volunteers now knew that the rebellion would not, after all, be squashed in a single summer. The war would be neither short nor bloodless, and the scale of the conflict would surpass anything anticipated by the leaders on either side.