Hearts Touched by Fire

by Harold Holzer

  In support of my statements, I would direct attention to my own reports on the battle and to the Confederate reports, especially to those of Lieutenant-Colonel Hyams and Captain Vigilini, of the 3d Louisiana; also to the report of Captain Carr, in which he frankly states that he abandoned me immediately before my column was attacked at the crossing of James Fork, without notifying me of the approach of the enemy’s cavalry. I never mentioned this fact, as the subsequent career of General Carr, his coöperation with me during the campaigns of General Frémont, and his behavior in the battle of Pea Ridge vindicated his character and ability as a soldier and commander.

  THE OPPOSING FORCES AT WILSON’S CREEK, MO.

  The composition and losses of each army as here stated give the gist of all the data obtainable in the official records. K stands for killed; w for wounded; m w mortally wounded; m for captured or missing; c for captured.—EDITORS.

  COMPOSITION AND LOSSES OF THE UNION ARMY.

  Brig.-Gen. Nathaniel Lyon (k), Major Samuel D. Sturgis.

  First Brigade, Major Samuel D. Sturgis: Regular Battalion (B, C, and D, 1st Infantry and Wood’s company Rifle Recruits), Capt. Joseph B. Plummer; Battalion 2d Mo. Infantry, Major P. J. Osterhaus; F, 2d U.S. Arty., Capt. James Totten; Kansas Rangers, Capt. S. N. Wood; B, 1st U.S. Cavalry, Lieut. Charles W. Canfield. Second Brigade, Lieut.-Col. George L. Andrews: Regular Battalion (B and E, 2d Infantry, Lothrop’s company General Service Recruits, and Morine’s company Rifle Recruits), Capt. Frederick Steele; DuBois’s Battery (improvised), Lieut. John V. DuBois; 1st Mo. Infantry, Lieut.-Col. Geo. L. Andrews. Third Brigade, Col. Geo. W. Deitzler: 1st Kansas, Col. Geo. W. Deitzler (w), Major J. A. Halderman; 2d Kansas, Col. R. B. Mitchell (w), Lieut.-Col. Chas. W. Blair. Missouri Volunteers. Second Brigade, Colonel Franz Sigel: 3d Mo., Lieut.-Col. Anselm Albert; 5th Mo., Col. C. E. Salomon; I, 1st U. S. Cavalry, Capt. Eugene A. Carr; C, 2d U. S. Dragoons, Lieut. C. E. Farrand; Backof’s Mo. Arty. (detachment), Lieutenants G. A. Schaefer and Edward Schuetzenbach. Unattached Organizations: 1st Iowa Infantry, Lieut.-Col. William H. Merritt; Wright’s and Switzler’s Mo. Home Guard Cavalry; detachment D, 1st U.S. Cavalry; Mo. Pioneers, Capt. J. D. Voerster.

  The Union loss, as officially reported, was 223 killed, 721 wounded, and 291 missing,—total, 1235.3

  COMPOSITION AND LOSSES OF THE CONFEDERATE ARMY.

  Brig.-Gen. Ben. McCulloch.

  MISSOURI STATE GUARD, Major-Gen. Sterling Price. RAINS’s DIVISION, Brig.-Gen. James S. Rains. First Brigade, Col. R. H. Weightman (m w), Col. John R. Graves: 1st Infantry, Lieut.-Col. Thomas H. Rosser; 3d Infantry, Col. Edgar V. Hurst; 4th Infantry (battalion), Major Thomas H. Murray; 5th Infantry, Col. J. J. Clarkson; Graves’s Infantry, Col. John R. Graves, Major Brashear; Bledsoe’s Battery, Capt. Hiram Bledsoe. Second Brigade, Col. Cawthon (m w). [Composition of brigade not given in the official records.] PARSON’s BRIGADE, Brig.-Gen. M. M. Parsons: Kelly’s Infantry, Col. Kelly (w); Brown’s Cavalry, Col. Ben. Brown (k); Guibor’s Battery, Capt. Henry Guibor. CLARK’s DIVISION, Brig.-Gen. John B. Clark; Burbridge’s Infantry, Col. J. Q. Burbridge (w), Major John B. Clark, Jr.; 1st Cavalry (battalion), Lieut.-Col. J. P. Major. SLACK’s DIVISION, Brig. Gen. W. Y. Slack (w); Hughes’s Infantry, Col. John T. Hughes; Thornton’s Infantry (battalion), Major J. C. Thornton; Rives’s Cavalry, Col. B. A. Rives. MCBRIDE’s DIVISION, Brig.-Gen. James R. McBride; Wingo’s Infantry; Foster’s Infantry, Col. Foster (w); Campbell’s Cavalry, Capt. Campbell.

  ARKANSAS FORCES, Brig.-Gen. N. B. Pearce, 1st Cavalry, Col. De Rosey Carroll; Carroll’s Company Cavalry, Capt. Charles A. Carroll; 3d Infantry, Col. John R. Gratiot; 4th Infantry, Col. J. D. Walker; 5th Infantry, Col. Tom P. Dockery; Woodruff’s Battery, Capt. W. E. Woodruff; Reid’s Battery, Capt. J. G. Reid.

  MCCULLOCH’s BRIGADE: 1st Ark. Mounted Riflemen, Col. T. J. Churchill; 2d Ark. Mounted Riflemen, Col. James McIntosh, Lieut.-Col. B. T. Embry; Arkansas Infantry (battalion), Lieut.-Col. Dandridge McRae; South Kansas–Texas Mounted Regiment, Col. E. Greer; 3d La. Infantry, Col. Louis Hébert.

  The Confederate loss, as officially reported, was 265 killed, 800 wounded, and 30 missing,—total, 1095.3

  STRENGTH OF THE OPPOSING FORCES.

  The Union forces are estimated from official returns at 5400 (with 16 guns). Of these 1118 were with Sigel and 350 mounted reserve. The Confederate forces are more difficult to estimate, but Colonel Snead, General Price’s adjutant-general during the battle, gives in his volume, “The Fight for Missouri” (Charles Scribner’s Sons), the following estimate, which is doubtless as near the facts as it is possible to get: Price’s force (Missouri State Guard), 5221; McCulloch’s brigade, 2720, and Pearce’s brigade, 2234,—total, 10,175 (with 15 guns).

  * * *

  1 Colonel Graves, commanding the First Brigade, Mo. State Guards, says in his report: “Colonel Rosser, commanding the 1st Regiment and Fourth Battalion, with Captain Bledsoe’s artillery, being stationed on the extreme left, was attacked by Colonel Sigel’s battery, and his men exposed to a deadly fire for thirty minutes.”—F.S.

  2 Colonel Carr says in his official report: “It is a subject of regret with me to have left him [Sigel] behind, but I supposed all the time that he was close behind me till I got to the creek, and it would have done no good for my company to have been cut to pieces also.”—EDITORS.

  3 NOTE.—Colonel Snead, with unusual facilities for ascertaining the facts, gives the losses as follows: Union, (k), 258; (w), 873; (m), 186,—total, 1317. Confederate, (k), 279; (w), 951,—total, 1230. The Union reports do not include Osterhaus’s battalion, which lost (k), 15; (w), 40; and give Sigel’s loss at 26 less than Colonel Snead’s estimate.—EDITORS.

  1862

  INTRODUCTION

  Stephen W. Sears

  As the calendar turned to 1862, the Union war effort appeared stalled on dead center. On January 10, to try to get the war moving again, President Lincoln convened a conference of his generals and advisers at the White House. “The President was greatly disturbed at the state of affairs,” wrote one of his listeners, General Irvin McDowell. “Spoke of the exhausted condition of the Treasury; of the loss of public credit; of the Jacobinism in Congress; of the delicate condition of our foreign relations; of the bad news he had received … on the state of affairs in Missouri; of the want of co-operation between General Halleck and General Buell; but, more than all, the sickness of General McClellan.… To use his own expression, if something was not soon done, the bottom would be out of the whole affair.…”

  Clearly, Lincoln had cause to be disturbed. Of immediate concern was the illness of his general in chief, George B. McClellan, diagnosed with a serious case of typhoid fever. For almost three weeks McClellan was incommunicado; no one knew his plans, or if he had any plans, or indeed if he would survive. By McDowell’s account, the president remarked, “if General McClellan did not want to use the army, he would like to ‘borrow it,’ provided he could see how it could be made to do something.…”

  Borrowing McClellan’s army was perhaps not such a far-fetched idea. It was the widespread perception, in that January of 1862, that the Army of the Potomac had sat unused at Washington for far too long. It was going on six months since McClellan had taken command after the Bull Run defeat and commenced reorganizing and training and generally breathing new life into the Union’s principal army. Yet still a Confederate army under Joseph E. Johnston was encamped at Manassas, only some twenty-five miles from the capital and as menacing as ever. Further, the Rebels had closed the Potomac below Washington, and along the upper Potomac they blocked railroad and canal access to the city. McClellan’s sole countermove, an attempt to clear the upper Potomac in October 1861, had been bloodily repulsed in fighting at Ball’s Bluff. Washington remained encased in a near blockade, and Attorney General Edward Bates made complaint: “It isolates the Capital by closing its only outlet to the ocean, and thus makes the impression upon both parties to the contest, and especially to foreigners, that we are both weak and timid.” Under this stale
mate, Bates added, “the public spirit is beginning to quail.” Lincoln’s White House conference would at least rouse General McClellan from his sickbed, and in due course gain from him a campaign plan and a promise of action. It would be spring, however, before serious campaigning could begin in the Eastern Theater.

  Just then the Western Theater appeared equally stagnant. Union forces there comprised the Department of the Missouri, under Henry Halleck, and the Department of the Ohio, under Don Carlos Buell, and neither general professed himself ready to take the offensive, separately or in combination. The president endorsed one of Halleck’s excuse-filled dispatches, “It is exceedingly discouraging. As everywhere else, nothing can be done.”

  Yet in a remarkably short time matters in the Western Theater took an upward turn. The Union’s trump card in the West proved to be its potential to seize (or hold) control of the great rivers of the Mississippi Valley—the Mississippi itself, the Ohio, and the Cumberland and the Tennessee feeding into it. A newly built Yankee gunboat fleet led the way to dramatic changes in war making on the western waters.

  The Confederate commander in the West, Albert Sidney Johnston, had been assigned by Richmond to defend a vast region of Kentucky and Tennessee, from the Alleghenies west to the Mississippi. General Johnston had far too few men to adequately secure this extended line, and he had almost no naval resources. He rested his hopes on a hastily erected patchwork of fortifications designed to block the Mississippi as well as the Cumberland and Tennessee rivers, which extended deep into the western Confederacy.

  To describe this riverine warfare the Century editors chose Rear Admiral Henry Walke, wartime commander of the Carondelet, the ironclad gunboat at the center of the actions he covers. Walke was a natural choice for the job, having published in 1877 his memoir Naval Scenes and Reminiscences of the Civil War in the United States. In his first article, “The Gun-Boats at Belmont and Fort Henry,” Walke introduces James B. Eads, constructor of the gunboats, Flag Officer Andrew H. Foote, commander of the flotilla, and an aspiring brigadier general named U. S. Grant. As Walke explains, gunboats proved essential to Grant’s venture at Belmont, Missouri, on the Mississippi, and, on February 6 to the taking of Fort Henry, guarding the Tennessee River just below the Kentucky border.

  In Walke’s second article, “The Western Flotilla,” he writes of Flag Officer Foote’s abortive gunboat attack on Fort Donelson, on the Cumberland—the army’s subsequent capture of Donelson is detailed in the following article—and then takes up the story of the navy’s battles to open the Mississippi. Walke himself played a key role in the capture of Island No. 10, so called for being the tenth island counting south from the Ohio River’s junction with the Mississippi. Island No. 10 was too formidable to be taken by bombardment, so General John Pope’s army was marched around and behind the fortress; then Walke’s Carondelet ran the Rebel river batteries in dramatic fashion to escort Pope to a blocking position that forced the enemy’s surrender. Walke concludes his story with the western flotilla engaging the Confederates’ riverine navy in violent mêlées that resulted, by June 1862, in clearing the Mississippi as far south as Memphis, Tennessee.

  The Century scored a literary coup in its day by publishing “The Capture of Fort Donelson” by the historical novelist Lew Wallace, author of the wildly popular Ben-Hur (1880). Wallace, a lawyer by trade, had commanded a division in General Grant’s army that took up the challenge of Donelson after Foote’s gunboats failed to bombard it into submission as they had Fort Henry.

  Following the capture of Donelson, General Grant took his army back down the Cumberland in transports and then up the Tennessee to Pittsburg Landing, close by the Mississippi border. At a rural meetinghouse called Shiloh, Grant waited for the army of Don Carlos Buell to join him. Twenty miles to the south, at Corinth, Mississippi, Albert Sidney Johnston was gathering every Confederate soldier he could lay hands on in the western Confederacy to try to check the Union surge that so far had made a shambles of his defenses. The consequence was the great two-day Battle of Shiloh. Grant had agreed to write several papers for The Century’s “War Series,” and when editor R. W. Gilder read this first one, on Shiloh, he wrote his associates, “Hurrah for Grant!” He went on to say that “now that Grant has got going as a chronicler of his own battles, he might be induced to keep at it until he had made a book of his own.” Indeed, that book would be Grant’s famous Personal Memoirs, published posthumously in 1885.

  Meanwhile, in the East, the opening actions of 1862 also took place on the waters, notably Virginia’s Hampton Roads. The outbreak of war found the U.S. Navy’s steam frigate Merrimac laid up for engine repairs at the Norfolk, Virginia, naval base. In abandoning the base to the Rebels, the Federals burned and scuttled the Merrimac. Stephen R. Mallory, the Confederacy’s resourceful secretary of the navy, had the hulk raised and converted into a powerful ironclad ram, renamed CSS Virginia. The two naval constructors who directed the conversion, John M. Brooke and John L. Porter, tell their story here.

  Intelligence on this imposing warship made its way north and started the Navy Department on a frantic search for a counter to the enemy’s new weapon. At stake was maintaining the blockade of Southern ports, most immediately at Hampton Roads. Swedish-born naval engineer John Ericsson met the challenge with the revolutionary Monitor, a new-from-the-keel-up armored warship featuring a revolving gun turret. Ericsson’s detailed account of designing and building the Monitor is noticeably assertive about his creation; the ironclad’s alleged failings and general unseaworthiness, he says, were due to mismanagement by others.

  “The First Fight of Iron-clads” is the work of then lieutenant John Taylor Wood, in charge of the Virginia’s aft pivot gun during her destructive sortie against the Union blockading fleet in Hampton Roads on March 8, and then her historic duel the next day with the Monitor. Taylor goes on to relate the initial crimp the Virginia put in General McClellan’s Peninsula campaign, and her fate when her base at Norfolk was seized by the Yankees.

  Even before the showdown at Hampton Roads, the Union navy had made serious inroads on the coastlines of North and South Carolina, seizing bases for the blockading squadrons. The navy’s most important such venture was aimed at New Orleans, the largest city in the Confederacy and the Mississippi Valley’s outlet to the sea. Some sixty miles down the Mississippi from New Orleans were the city’s primary guardians, Fort Jackson and Fort St. Philip, large masonry fortifications predating the war, mounting seventy-five and fifty-six cannon, respectively. Two large ironclads of the Virginia type were also intended for the city’s defense, but they could not be completed in time.

  Washington assigned Flag Officer David Glasgow Farragut the task of conquering New Orleans, and in April 1862 Farragut assembled his warship squadron off the mouth of the Mississippi. “The ‘Brooklyn’ at the Passage of the Forts” was written for The Century by John Russell Bartlett, who commanded a gun crew aboard USS Brooklyn the night of April 24, when in a pyrotechnic spectacular Farragut ran the Rebel batteries and captured New Orleans.

  Starting in March, General McClellan finally mounted his “grand campaign” against Richmond, advancing the Army of the Potomac up the Virginia Peninsula toward the Confederate capital. To distract the Federals and keep them from reinforcing McClellan, Stonewall Jackson mounted a campaign of his own in the Shenandoah Valley. Jackson’s operations, widely considered a military classic, are described here by John D. Imboden, who had commanded the 1st Virginia Partisan Rangers under Jackson.

  McClellan’s name was familiar to Century readers, he having written five articles for the magazine, all on European affairs, during the postwar years. McClellan had yet to write about his own controversial wartime command, however, and he welcomed The Century’s War Series as an opportunity to tell the story of the Peninsula campaign from his perspective. That perspective is predominantly self-serving, with everything that went wrong in the failed campaign blamed on the machinations of the administration in Washington, most particula
rly those of the secretary of war, Edwin M. Stanton. McClellan does not mention here the pivotal event in the Peninsula campaign—the accession of Robert E. Lee to command of the Army of Northern Virginia after the wounding of Joseph E. Johnston at Fair Oaks. Lee’s relentless offensive in the Seven Days’ Battles (June 25–July 1) demoralized McClellan and drove the larger—not the smaller, as McClellan has it—Army of the Potomac from the gates of Richmond.