Victory on the Peninsula left Lee and his army squarely between McClellan’s Army of the Potomac, at Harrison’s Landing on the James River, and John Pope’s newly assembled Army of Virginia, on the Rappahannock River halfway between Richmond and Washington. Direction of the Union forces was now in the hands of the new general in chief, Henry Halleck, like Pope brought to Washington from the Western Theater. McClellan—and Pope as well—saw opportunity here, the chance to grind Lee between their two armies. Halleck saw here only danger, the risk of leaving Lee free to move against one or the other of the divided Union forces, and he ordered McClellan to evacuate the Peninsula and combine his army with Pope’s before Washington. Lee seized the moment and brilliantly exploited it, rushing against Pope before the Army of the Potomac could seriously intervene.
Pope’s “The Second Battle of Bull Run” is, like McClellan’s article, self-serving, but John Pope had far more justification for thinking himself betrayed. Thanks to his delusionary overcounting of Confederate numbers, McClellan was overcautious in pulling out of the Peninsula and clearly negligent in dispatching his divisions to Pope’s aid. Pope takes bitter aim at Fitz John Porter, a McClellan acolyte who was court-martialed and cashiered for disobedience of orders and misbehavior before the enemy at Second Bull Run. Twenty-four years after the event, Porter would be vindicated in a rehearing of his case, but the fact remains that both he and McClellan failed to do their proper duty to General Pope on the Second Bull Run battlefield.
James Longstreet, the highest placed of Lee’s generals to survive the war, welcomed The Century’s invitation to write of the Confederates’ attempt to exploit their victory over Pope by invading Maryland, a move fired by Lee’s ambition to gain a victory on Northern soil. That ambition was enhanced when he learned that McClellan was back in command in place of Pope; having bested McClellan on the Peninsula, Lee expected to best him again in their next encounter.
At the same time that Lee was turning the tables on the Yankees in the East, Confederate forces in the West had slipped out of the Federals’ grasp and were invading Kentucky. By September it appeared the war had abruptly turned 180 degrees in the South’s favor.
Longstreet opens his account with the statement, “When the Second Bull Run campaign closed we had the most brilliant prospects the Confederates ever had.” He favored the move into Maryland but not Lee’s subsequent decision to divide his army in order to capture the Federal garrison at Harpers Ferry. Lee’s decision became a fateful one, for a copy of his orders for the Harpers Ferry operation was lost, found by a Federal soldier, and passed on to General McClellan. The Lost Order represented the intelligence coup of the war, and although McClellan failed to exploit most of its promise, it did bring Lee to battle in a place he had not intended and before he was prepared. The titanic struggle along Antietam Creek in western Maryland on September 17 took the greatest one-day toll of the war, almost 23,000 total casualties. The two armies fought to mutual exhaustion, and two days later General Lee put his army on the road back to Virginia. His primary accomplishment was the capture of the 13,000-man Harpers Ferry garrison. In Longstreet’s tart judgment, “The great mistake of the campaign was the division of Lee’s army. If General Lee had kept his forces together, he could not have suffered defeat.”
The Century commissioned Jacob D. Cox to chronicle the Union side of the Battle of Antietam, or Sharpsburg as the Confederates termed it. Cox finished the war as a major general with wide combat experience in both theaters of war. He had earlier published two well-regarded works on Sherman’s operations for the publisher Scribner’s “Campaigns of the Civil War” series, and for The Century’s War Papers he had written “War Preparations in the North.” During the Maryland fighting at South Mountain and Antietam, Cox led the Kanawha Division, and under the peculiar Union command setup that he describes, he also temporarily led the Ninth Corps. Cox highlights here the piecemeal manner in which McClellan put in his forces, and he attributes the missed Union opportunity to win a decisive victory at Antietam to “McClellan’s theory of the enormous superiority of Lee’s numbers.”
Well satisfied that he had escaped being defeated at Antietam by the imagined Confederate host, McClellan was content to see the Rebels leave Maryland, and he mounted only a brief, token pursuit. In Washington the battle was regarded as short of the victory it might have been, but at least a victory of sorts, enough for Mr. Lincoln to issue the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation. It was now a war for human freedom as well as a war for union. Antietam, the subsequent repulse of the Confederate offensive in Kentucky, and the Emancipation Proclamation combined to mark a turning point in the war.
Something over six weeks after Antietam, under peremptory orders from Washington, McClellan led the Army of the Potomac back into Virginia and pushed slowly, apparently reluctantly, toward the enemy’s new position. On November 5, Lincoln issued an order relieving General McClellan of the command: “I began to fear he was playing false—that he did not want to hurt the enemy.” Lincoln told his secretary, “If he let them get away I would remove him. He did so & I relieved him.” To a White House visitor the president said simply that he “had tried long enough to bore with an auger too dull to take hold.”
The new commander of the Army of the Potomac was Ambrose E. Burnside, who under pressure from Washington initiated a winter campaign against Lee’s latest position, at Fredericksburg on the Rappahannock River. For Burnside everything went wrong from the start, and on December 13 the repeated charges he ordered against the impenetrable enemy front resulted in disaster. James Longstreet, in command of that section of the Confederate line, narrates the grim story of Fredericksburg. Before the fighting started, Longstreet’s chief of artillery positioned his batteries and said, “General, we cover that ground now so well that we will comb it as with a fine-tooth comb. A chicken could not live on that field when we open on it.” It was an exact prediction. Utterly defeated, Burnside fell back across the Rappahannock.
The year 1862 in the Eastern Theater closed with the battered, demoralized Army of the Potomac in winter quarters at Falmouth on the Rappahannock, apparently without prospects. In the West a savage two-day battle at Murfreesboro in Tennessee at the turn of the year left those two armies spent and without evident prospects either. And so 1862 ended as it began, with the Union war effort seemingly stalled on dead center. “Our military condition I am sorry to say, does not appear as yet to improve,” Lincoln’s secretary John G. Nicolay wrote to a friend on January 15, 1863. “Little disasters still tread on each other’s heels. Nevertheless every point is being strained by the government, and we must continue to hope in patience.”
ARMY TRANSPORTS AT THE CAIRO LEVEE. FROM A WAR-TIME SKETCH.
CHAPTER 1
THE GUN-BOATS AT BELMONT AND FORT HENRY.
Henry Walke, Rear-Admiral, U.S.N.
At the beginning of the war, the army and navy were mostly employed in protecting the loyal people who resided on the borders of the disaffected States, and in reconciling those whose sympathies were opposed. But the defeat at Manassas and other reverses convinced the Government of the serious character of the contest, and of the necessity of more vigorous and extensive preparations for war. Our navy yards were soon filled with workmen; recruiting stations for unemployed seamen were established, and we soon had more sailors than were required for the ships that could be fitted for service. Artillerymen for the defenses of Washington being scarce, five hundred of these sailors, with a battalion of marines (for guard duty), were sent to occupy the forts on Shuter’s Hill, near Alexandria. The Pensacola and the Potomac flotilla and the seaboard navy yards required nearly all of the remaining unemployed seamen.
While Foote was improvising a flotilla for the Western rivers he was making urgent appeals to the Government for seamen. Finally some one at the Navy Department thought of the five hundred tars stranded on Shuter’s Hill, and obtained an order for their transfer to Cairo, where they were placed on the receiving ship Maria Den
ning. There they met fresh-water sailors from our great lakes, and steamboat hands from the Western rivers. Of the seamen from the East, there were Maine lumbermen, New Bedford whalers, New York liners, and Philadelphia sea-lawyers. The foreigners enlisted were mostly Irish, with a few English and Scotch, French, Germans, Swedes, Norwegians, and Danes. The Northmen, considered the hardiest race in the world, melted away in the Southern sun with surprising rapidity.
FLAG-OFFICER FOOTE IN THE WHEEL-HOUSE OF THE “CINCINNATI” AT FORT HENRY.
On my gun-boat, the Carondelet, were more young men perhaps than on any other vessel in the fleet. Philadelphians were in the majority; Bostonians came next, with a sprinkling from other cities, and just enough men-o’-war’s men to leaven the lump with naval discipline. The De Kalb had more than its share of men-o’-war’s men, Lieutenant-Commander Leonard Paulding having had the first choice of a full crew, and having secured all the frigate Sabine’s reënlisted men who had been sent West.
WHARF-BOAT AT CAIRO. FROM A WAR-TIME PHOTOGRAPH.
During the spring and summer of 1861, Commander John Rodgers purchased, and he, with Commander Roger N. Stembel, Lieutenant S. L. Phelps, and Mr. Eads, altered, equipped, and manned, for immediate service on the Ohio and Mississippi rivers, 3 wooden gun-boats—the Tyler, of 6 8-inch shell-guns and 2 32-pounders; the Lexington, of 4 8-inch shell-guns and 2 32-pounders, and the Conestoga, of 4 32-pounder guns. This nucleus of the Mississippi flotilla (like the fleets of Perry, Macdonough, and Chauncey in the war of 1812) was completed with great skill and dispatch; they soon had full possession of the Western rivers above Columbus, Kentucky, and rendered more important service than as many regiments could have done. On October 12th, 1861, the St. Louis, afterward known as the De Kalb, the first of the seven iron-clad gun-boats ordered of Mr. Eads by the Government, was launched at Carondelet, near St. Louis. The other iron-clads, the Cincinnati, Carondelet, Louisville, Mound City, Cairo, and Pittsburgh, were launched soon after the St. Louis, Mr. Eads having pushed forward the work with most commendable zeal and energy. Three of these were built at Mound City, Ill. To the fleet of iron-clads above named were added the Benton (the largest and best vessel of the Western flotilla), the Essex, and a few smaller and partly armored gun-boats.
Flag-Officer Foote arrived in St. Louis on September 6th, and assumed command of the Western flotilla. He had been my fellow-midshipman in 1827, on board the United States ship Natchez, of the West India squadron, and was then a promising young officer. He was transferred to the Hornet, of the same squadron, and was appointed her sailing-master. After he left the Natchez, we never met again until February, 1861, at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, where he was the executive officer. Foote, Schenck, and myself were then the only survivors of the midshipmen of the Natchez, in her cruise of 1827, and now I am the only officer left.
THE GUN-BOATS “TYLER” AND “LEXINGTON” ENGAGING THE BATTERIES OF COLUMBUS, KY., DURING THE BATTLE OF BELMONT. AFTER A SKETCH BY REAR-ADMIRAL WALKE.
In a letter written early in January, 1862, General Polk says of the works at Columbus: “We are still quiet here. I am employed in making more and more difficult the task to take this place.… I have now, mounted and in position, all round my works, 140 cannon of various calibers, and they look not a little formidable. Besides this, I am paving the bottom of the river with submarine batteries, to say nothing of a tremendous, heavy chain across the river. I am planting mines out in the roads also.”
During the cruise of 1827, while pacing the deck at night, on the lonely seas, and talking with a pious shipmate, Foote became convinced of the truth of the Christian religion, of which he was an earnest professor to the last. He rendered important service while in command of the brig Perry, on the coast of Africa, in 1849, in suppressing the slave-trade, and he greatly distinguished himself by his skill and gallantry in the attack upon the Barrier Forts, near Canton (1856), which he breached and carried by assault, leading the assailing column in person. He was slow and cautious in arriving at conclusions, but firm and tenacious of purpose. He has been called “the Stonewall Jackson of the Navy.” He often preached to his crew on Sundays, and was always desirous of doing good. He was not a man of striking personal appearance, but there was a sailor-like heartiness and frankness about him that made his company very desirable.
Flag-Officer Foote arrived at Cairo September 12th, and relieved Commander John Rodgers of the command of the station. The first operations of the Western flotilla consisted chiefly of reconnoissances on the Mississippi, Ohio, Cumberland, and Tennessee rivers. At this time it was under the control of the War Department, and acting in coöperation with the army under General Grant, whose headquarters were at Cairo.
On the evening of the 6th of November, 1861, I received instructions from General Grant to proceed down the Mississippi with the wooden gun-boats Tyler and Lexington on a reconnoissance, and as convoy to some half-dozen transport steamers; but I did not know the character of the service expected of me until I anchored for the night, seven or eight miles below Cairo. Early the next morning, while the troops were being landed near Belmont, Missouri, opposite Columbus, Kentucky, I attacked the Confederate batteries, at the request of General Grant, as a diversion, which was done with some effect. But the superiority of the enemy’s batteries on the bluffs at Columbus, both in the number and the quality of his guns, was so great that it would have been too hazardous to have remained long under his fire with such frail vessels as the Tyler and Lexington, which were only expected to protect the land forces in case of a repulse. Having accomplished the object of the attack, the gun-boats withdrew, but returned twice during the day and renewed the contest. During the last of these engagements a cannon-ball passed obliquely through the side, deck, and scantling of the Tyler, killing one man and wounding others. This convinced me of the necessity of withdrawing my vessels, which had been moving in a circle to confuse the enemy’s gunners. We fired a few more broadsides, therefore, and, perceiving that the firing had ceased at Belmont, an ominous circumstance, I returned to the landing, to protect the army and transports. In fact, the destruction of the gun-boats would have involved the loss of our army and our depot at Cairo, the most important one in the West.
Soon after we returned to the landing-place our troops began to appear, and the officers of the gun-boats were warned by General McClernand of the approach of the enemy. The Confederates came en masse through a corn-field, and opened with musketry and light artillery upon the transports, which were filled or being filled with our retreating soldiers. A well-directed fire from the gun-boats made the enemy fly in the greatest confusion.
MAP OF THE REGION OF FOOTE’S OPERATIONS.
Flag-Officer Foote was at St. Louis when the battle of Belmont was fought, and made a report to the Secretary of the Navy of the part which the gun-boats took in the action, forwarding my official report to the Navy Department. The officers of the vessels were highly complimented by General Grant for the important aid they rendered in this battle; and in his second official report of the action he made references to my report. It was impossible for me to inform the flag-officer of the general’s intentions, which were kept perfectly secret.
During the winter of 1861–62, an expedition was planned by Flag-Officer Foote and Generals Grant and McClernand against Fort Henry, situated on the eastern bank of the Tennessee River, a short distance south of the line between Kentucky and Tennessee. In January the iron-clads were brought down to Cairo, and great efforts were made to prepare them for immediate service, but only four of the iron-clads could be made ready as soon as required.
On the morning of the 2d of February the flag-officer left Cairo with the four armored vessels above named, and the wooden gun-boats Tyler, Lexington, and Conestoga, and in the evening reached the Tennessee River. On the 4th the fleet anchored six miles below Fort Henry. The next day, while reconnoitering, the Essex received a shot which passed through the pantry and the officers’ quarters and visited the steerage.1 On the 5th the flag-offic
er inspected the officers and crew at quarters, addressed them, and offered a prayer.
Heavy rains had been falling, and the river had risen rapidly to an unusual height; the swift current brought down an immense quantity of heavy drift-wood, lumber, fences, and large trees, and it required all the steam-power of the Carondelet, with both anchors down, and the most strenuous exertions of the officers and crew, working day and night, to prevent the boat from being dragged down-stream. This adversity appeared to dampen the ardor of our crew, but when the next morning they saw a large number of white objects, which through the fog looked like polar bears, coming down the stream, and ascertained that they were the enemy’s torpedoes forced from their moorings by the powerful current, they took heart, regarding the freshet as providential and as a presage of victory. The overflowing river, which opposed our progress, swept away in broad daylight this hidden peril; for if the torpedoes had not been disturbed, or had broken loose at night while we were shoving the drift-wood from our bows, some of them would surely have exploded near or under our vessels.
The 6th dawned mild and cheering, with a light breeze, sufficient to clear away the smoke. At 10:20 the flag-officer made the signal to prepare for battle, and at 10:50 came the order to get under way and steam up to Panther Island, about two miles below Fort Henry. At 11:35, having passed the foot of the island, we formed in line and approached the fort four abreast,—the Essex on the right, then the Cincinnati, Carondelet, and St. Louis. For want of room the last two were interlocked, and remained so during the fight.
As we slowly passed up this narrow stream, not a sound could be heard nor a moving object seen in the dense woods which overhung the dark and swollen river. The gun-crews of the Carondelet stood silent at their posts, impressed with the serious and important character of the service before them. About noon the fort and the Confederate flag came suddenly into view, the barracks, the new earth-works, and the great guns well manned. The captains of our guns were men-of-war’s men, good shots, and had their men well drilled.
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