by Bruce Catton
There were Southerners, then and later, who argued that President Davis should have had his government buy all of the cotton in the South, rush it to Europe, and use the proceeds to buy munitions, warships, and industrial equipment. Theoretically the idea was sound enough, but as a practical matter it was all but out of the question. A far-reaching action of that kind was almost unthinkable in a new nation which owed its existence, primarily, to the belief that the central government ought to have and to use as few powers as possible. So immense a purchase would have given the inflationary wave much impetus. The ships to carry the cotton did not exist. For the moment it seemed best to leave the cotton where it was. Let Europe get hungry for it.
In addition there was the Yankee blockade. Although this now was not much more than a nuisance, it was imperceptibly but inexorably tightening, week by week. Secretary Welles had told the Federal Congress that the navy had twenty-two blockaders in service along the Atlantic Coast and twenty-one more on duty in the Gulf. It had already bought twelve steamers and chartered nine more, and was giving them guns; as combat ships they would be of no account, but as blockaders they would be quite serviceable. Contracts had been let for the building of twenty-one gunboats, to be delivered in ninety days, and a number of larger warships were under construction. Since anything that would float and carry a gun could halt an unarmed merchantman, even sailing ships were being chartered, armed, and put into service, and most of the warships in the overseas squadrons were being recalled.11 The blockade was extremely loose right now and it never would become air-tight, but in the long run it would produce strangulation.
Business in the South presented contrasts this summer. Some lines were almost in collapse. In Mississippi, a Vicksburg businessman was complaining that “there is no business doing. The shelves are bare—the merchants lolling on the counters. There is no money, no credit, and provisions scarce and dear.”12 But other lines were booming. The trade in arms, shoes, clothing, and anything else the army might use was going at a great rate. Along the Kentucky border, business was exceptionally lively. As a neutral state, Kentucky offered a notable field for trade with the Yankees, and the opportunity was not being missed. (As Lincoln had perceived, neutrality here was a positive asset to the South.) Confederate agents were in Europe, or on their way there, to buy arms—finding themselves, more often than not, in direct competition with Federal agents who had gone abroad to do the same thing.
To buy at home or abroad the goods the army needed was one thing; to move them to the places where the army wanted them was quite another. Lacking a financial and industrial system equal to the demands of a large war, the South lacked also a proper transportation system. It had many railroads but no real railroad network, because hardly any of its railroads had been built with through traffic in mind. Most of them had been conceived as feeder lines, to move cotton to the wharves at river towns or at seaports, and they had been built in many different gauges so that no interchange of cars was possible. On the map Richmond had good rail connections with the rest of the Confederacy, but it was not possible to send a loaded freight car from the deep South to Richmond. At numerous junction points each car had to be unloaded, the freight moved cross-town by dray and then reloaded on different cars, and if there was any sort of delay (which was usually the case), the freight had to be stored in a warehouse until the delay was over. There could be no smooth flow of freight traffic; it was bound to move slowly and jerkily, with more or less spoilage and wastage along the way.
This handicap, to be sure, existed also in the North. But there it was not so serious. It had been recognized earlier, and it was being removed; and the significant point was that in the North it could be removed, but that in the South it could not. The South was almost helpless in this respect. Nearly all of its locomotives, rails, spikes, car wheels, car bodies, and other items of equipment had come from the North. The famous Tredegar Iron Works at Richmond could make some of these things, but it could not make nearly enough, and, besides, it was swamped now with war orders. The South would have to get through the war on the railroad layout it had when the war began: a layout which was inadequate even at the start and which could never be properly repaired or maintained. As the nation’s need for an adequate transportation system increased, the system would grow weaker and weaker and there was no earthly help for it. Much freight would of course move in wagons along country roads, in the age-old way, but the same pinch would apply here; the wagons came from Yankee shops, and replacements would have to be improvised out of inadequate means. The Confederacy’s transportation problem, like its problem of finance and production, was fundamentally insoluble unless the war could be kept short.13
These problems, indeed, were so grave and pointed so surely toward final defeat that one is forced to wonder how the founding fathers of the Confederacy could possibly have overlooked them. The answer perhaps is that the problems were not so much unseen as uncomprehended. At bottom, these were Yankee problems; concerns of the broker, the money changer, the trader, the mechanic, the grasping man of business; they were matters that such people would think of, not matters that would command the attention of aristocrats who were familiar with valor, the classics, and heroic attitudes.14 Secession itself had involved a flight from reality rather than an approach to it. Howell Cobb had spoken for his class when, in February, he declared that the South’s near-monopoly on cotton production was an asset stronger than armies or navies. “We know,” he said, “that by an embargo we could soon place not only the United States but many of the European powers under the necessity of electing between such a recognition of our independence as we require or domestic convulsions at home.”15 Essentially, this was the reliance of a group which knew a little about the modern world but which did not know nearly enough and could never understand that it did not know enough. It ran precisely parallel to Mr. Davis’s magnificent statement that the duration of the war could be left up to the enemy—the war would go on until the enemy gave up, and it did not matter how far off that day might be.
The trouble was that it did matter. It mattered enormously. Mr. Davis was assuming that courage and dedication, because they burned so brightly, would make up for all other deficiencies. This they might very well do for a time, but their magic would grow a little bit less compelling, week by week and month after month, and if the war went on indefinitely, the day would certainly come when other matters would become dominant. The head so full of fire could make an inadequate body surpass its limitations only for a time.
4: The Road to Bull Run
Perhaps a sullen desire to avenge the beating at Big Bethel had something to do with it. So did General McClellan’s glittering triumph in the western Virginia mountains, the enticement of victory being added to the sting of defeat. Running just beneath these was the impatient anger of the non-combatants, sensed by General Scott from the beginning, taking fire now that the war was actually under way; the whole creating an atmosphere in which an unready army was driven into battle by an impulse which nobody knew how to resist. Bull Run was the consequence.
Big Bethel came first. This was an unremarkable little fight which took place a few miles below Yorktown, Virginia, on June 10, brought on because the Federal power was clumsily flexing its muscles. It would hardly be remembered even as a skirmish except that it was the first real trial by combat. Militarily, it affected the course of the war not at all, and yet because it brought a feeling of humiliation to people who had supposed the war would be won easily, it helped to create a certain state of mind.
Ben Butler commanded Federal troops in and around Fort Monroe, at the tip of the Virginia peninsula, and early in June he learned that the Confederates had built a battery at a river crossing, near a church known as Big Bethel, eight miles from Butler’s own outposts, thirteen miles from the historic village of Yorktown. He was by no means ready to begin a real campaign, but it seemed to him that these Rebels ought to be driven away, and he mounted an expedition to do this; a compli
cated affair which involved a night march and the convergence of four separate regiments on the point to be attacked. He considered that proper precautions had been taken; the troops were to shout the watchword “Boston,” and one group would wear white badges on its sleeves so that the others would recognize it. These devices failed; the advancing soldiers could not even recognize the roads they were supposed to take and they went straggling up to the scene of action after a premature encounter in which two Federal regiments had fired briskly into each other. An officer who reached the place at dawn reported that disorganized men were wandering all about, “looking more like men enjoying a huge picnic than soldiers awaiting battle.”
When the attack at last was made it failed miserably. Young Theodore Winthrop, the ardent New Englander who had thought that the joy of marching down Broadway under the flags was worth life itself, tried to lead an assault through a swamp; waved his sword, shouted “Come on, boys—one more charge and the day is ours!” and was immediately shot to death. Lieutenant J. T. Greble, of the regular artillery, was killed, the first regular-army officer to die in this war, working his guns while the Confederates squatted in the underbrush and maintained a relentless fire; their commander wrote that they “seemed to enjoy it as much as boys do rabbit shooting.” In the end the Federals fled back to their base, utterly routed, leaving seventy-six dead and wounded men behind them. The Confederates had lost but eight, and trophies from the battlefield were displayed in Richmond shop windows to delight the patriotic.1
The situation on the Virginia peninsula remained precisely as it had been before, but the situation in Washington began to change. Was the war not being bungled? There had been riots in Baltimore; now there was humiliating defeat on the battlefield; a fortnight earlier there was the death of Elmer Ellsworth, arousing powerful emotions; and on the heels of all of this there came McClellan’s advance in the west, a demonstration, apparently, that when things were handled with energy, the war news could be good. Lincoln’s secretaries wrote afterward that “overstrained enthusiasm was slowly changing into morbid sensitiveness and a bitterness of impatience which seemed almost beyond endurance.” Before long, Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune was repeating “Forward to Richmond! Forward to Richmond!” demanding that the Confederate capital be taken before the Confederate Congress could assemble on July 20. Opinionated Count Gurowski spoke for many when he wrote, with all the certainty of the doctrinaire: “The people’s strategy is best; to rush in masses on Richmond; to take it now, when the enemy is there in comparatively small numbers.… So speaks the people, and they are right; here among the wiseacres not one understands the superiority of the people over his little brain.”2
To rush in masses upon Richmond might be well, provided the masses were in shape to make the rush, although the ghost of Theodore Winthrop could have testified that something more than enthusiasm was needed. General Scott had a better grasp of the matter. Understanding something of the way in which wars are won, he had worked out a plan to win this one—a plan whose essentials, finally applied, would at last actually win it—but the rising tension all around him would compel him to resort to expedients. Doubting that the thing could be done all in a rush, he began to seem unduly cautious and slow; a failing made even worse by his belief that Richmond was not really the best place to rush upon anyway.
Scott put his plan together early in the spring, the genesis of it, apparently, being a letter from General McClellan. McClellan wrote to him on April 27, suggesting that the nation’s major offensive effort be made from the Middle West. Hold the line of the Ohio and the upper Mississippi firmly (said McClellan) and then, with an army of at least 80,000 men, strike eastward by way of the Great Kanawha Valley to Virginia and Richmond, or possibly drive down across Tennessee toward Montgomery. This, he said, could be combined with a thrust by an eastern army through Charleston and on into Georgia, the ultimate goal of everybody being the Gulf Coast and the cities of Pensacola, Mobile, and New Orleans. McClellan thought all of this should be done quickly. (“The movement on Richmond,” he wrote, in words that may have returned to haunt him a year later, “should be conducted with the utmost promptness.”)
Scott replied on May 3. His chief objection to this plan, he said, was that it proposed to subdue the seceded states by piecemeal, instead of overwhelming them in one broad, co-ordinated campaign. He pointed out, also, that the government was going to rely on three-year volunteers instead of on the ninety-day militia regiments; there would be time, therefore, to organize properly for the long pull. Then he set forth his own scheme: blockade the Confederate coast rigorously, send a powerful army (accompanied by gunboats) down the Mississippi, seize New Orleans with an amphibious expedition coming up from below, and establish a firm grip on the Mississippi all the way to the Gulf. The object of this, he wrote, was “to clear out and keep open this great line of communication … so as to envelop the insurgent states and bring them to terms with less bloodshed than by any other plan.” It would be necessary to give the volunteers at least four and one-half months of training, river gunboats must be built, and much equipment would have to be assembled; Scott believed that the big drive down the river could not begin before the middle of November. Then he added a note of warning:
“A word now as to the greatest obstacle in the way of this plan—the great danger now pressing upon us—the impatience of our patriotic and loyal Union friends. They will urge instant and vigorous action, regardless, I fear, of consequences.”3
They were already doing it, although the pressure for instant and vigorous action, strong enough even then to worry General Scott, was nothing compared with what it would be by July. It would become something Federal officers would feel all through the war; McClellan himself would be under its crudest compulsion before the year was out, and any general who at any time seemed reluctant to rush in masses, pell-mell, upon the enemy would risk intense criticism and the loss of his job. Even now Scott could feel it, and could see that it was going to increase—one indication being the reception his plan got. President Lincoln liked it, to be sure; the more so, perhaps, because he was a Westerner who knew the profound importance of the Mississippi Valley. Other people, however, did not. The proposal leaked out, military secrets at that time being less than sacred, and it brought Scott a good deal of derision. Newspapers called it “the Anaconda plan,” and something about the picture of heavy serpentine coils slowly constricting the life out of the enemy struck many patriots as ridiculous. There was no dash to it, nothing to stir the pulses; it had no room for “Forward to Richmond” or for the decisive rush of inspired masses, and the last thing anyone wanted to think about was the prospect of a long war.
The business began to come to a head late in June, when General McDowell submitted a plan of operations to the War Department.
McDowell was not concerned with broad strategy. He commanded what was called the Department of Northeastern Virginia, with headquarters at Arlington, in the pillared house occupied until recently by Robert E. Lee, and he knew that he was expected to take action against the enemy in his immediate front. This enemy was General Beauregard, who had an army drawn up in front of Manassas Junction, thirty-odd miles from Washington, behind a sluggish stream known as Bull Run. McDowell had nothing resembling an adequate staff, but his intelligence service was good, and he had an only mildly exaggerated count of Beauregard’s numbers: about 25,000 of all arms, he believed, with perhaps 10,000 more up in the Shenandoah Valley led by Joe Johnston. Since there was a railroad line from Manassas to the Valley, Johnston could quickly come to Beauregard’s aid when the Yankees moved. Let the Federals along the upper Potomac, then, keep Johnston so busy that he could send no help; McDowell himself, with 30,000 men in column and another 10,000 in reserve, could march down to give Beauregard a battle.
McDowell’s plan was a workmanlike job. He knew that his militia regiments were poorly trained and, in almost all cases, were commanded by men totally without experience in war. He would organ
ize them, therefore, into small brigades (which later would be grouped into divisions), each brigade to be led by a regular-army colonel, each colonel to be assisted by as many junior regulars as might be available, “so that the men may have as fair a chance as the nature of things and the comparative inexperience of most will allow.” He had no grandiose ideas about taking Richmond; he said flatly that “the objective point in our plan is Manassas Junction,” and because he felt that his raw troops would be more likely to stick together in advance than in retreat, he specified that once the move began, there should be no backward step. On June 29 Lincoln called his cabinet and his military advisers to the White House to consider this plan.
General Scott did not like it. Repeating what he had told McClellan, he told Lincoln that he “did not believe in a little war by piece-meal”; he wanted the Anaconda scheme, with the decisive campaign going down the Mississippi in the autumn—“fight all the battles that were necessary, take all the positions we could find and garrison them, fight a battle at New Orleans and win it, and thus end the war.” He leaned, it must be confessed, on the old delusion: the South contained many Union men, and these would come forward once the Mississippi was opened and the blockade was made tight, and “I will guarantee that in one year from this time all difficulties will be settled.” In any case, Scott’s program looked too remote. President and cabinet clearly wanted action now, in Virginia, and Scott withdrew his opposition and listened while McDowell laid a map on the table and explained just what he proposed to do. McDowell’s exposition was soldierly and lucid, and his plan was approved. He was told to start his forward movement on July 9.4