by John Keegan
Bragg’s abandonment of the attempt on Kentucky completed a general Confederate failure on the central front in the West. Just before Perryville, Generals Price and Van Dorn had been defeated by the Union general Rosecrans at Corinth in Mississippi. It followed another Confederate defeat at nearby Iuka. Grant, who was engaged in the campaign at a distance, had hoped to trap the Confederates either at Corinth or Iuka and was disappointed not to do so. He blamed Rosecrans, for a movement of his troops he thought dilatory, though the recurrence of acoustic shadow may have played a part. For whatever reason, however, the Confederates had failed in their efforts to reverse the balance of power both in Kentucky and Tennessee, in what proved to be the last unforced Confederate offensive west of the Appalachians. As the fighting died down, Grant gathered his forces to renew his campaign against Vicksburg. The citizens of Cincinnati and Louisville relapsed into calm, after what had been some disturbing weeks. Though it was not realised in Richmond, the failure in the West was a grave blow to the Confederacy, reducing their range of strategic options to the well-worn pattern of keeping alive Union fears of an advance against Washington or feints at Pennsylvania and Maryland, theatres where the North enjoyed permanent advantages. The drive into Kentucky and threats against Tennessee were the only imaginative moves made by the Confederacy throughout the war; their failure and the failure to repeat them confirmed to objective observers that the South could now only await defeat. It might be long in coming, but after the end of 1862 it was foreordained and inevitable.
There were objective observers. Two were Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, then in exile in England, where in March 1862 they composed an analysis of the progress of the Civil War of quite remarkable prescience. Marx and Engels’s interest in the Civil War was not political. As revolutionaries they hoped for nothing from the United States. It was simply that as men with a professional interest in warfare and the management of armies they could not prevent themselves from studying military events, and prognosticating based on their lessons. Marx concluded that, following the capture of Fort Donelson, Grant, for whom he had formed an admiration, had achieved a major success against Secessia, as he called the Confederacy. His reason for so thinking was that he identified Tennessee and Kentucky as vital ground for the Confederacy. If they were lost, the cohesion of the rebel states would be destroyed. To demonstrate his point, he asked, “Does there exist a military centre of gravity whose capture would break the backbone of the Confederacy resistance, or are they, as Russia still was in 1812 [at the time of Napoleon’s invasion], unconquerable without, in a word, occupying every village and every patch of ground along the whole periphery.”
His answer was that Georgia was the centre of gravity. “Georgia,” he wrote, “is the key to Secessia.” “With the loss of Georgia, the Confederacy would be cut into two sections which would have lost all connection with each other.” It would not be necessary to conquer the whole of Georgia to achieve that result, but only the railroads through the state.
Marx had foreseen, with uncanny insight, exactly how the decisive stage of the Civil War would be fought. He was scathingly dismissive of the Anaconda Plan, and he also minimised the importance of capturing Richmond. To that extent, his foresight was defective. The blockade, a major element of the Anaconda strategy, was crucial to the defeat of the Confederacy, and it was indeed the capture of Richmond that brought the war to an end. In almost all other respects, however, Marx’s analysis was eerily accurate, testimony to his grisly interest in the use of violence for political ends. The analysis was published in German, in Vienna, in the review Die Presse. It may not have been noticed in the United States.2
Marx, who had the keenest eye for strategic geography, did not discuss the importance of Tennessee and Kentucky as a weak spot in the defences of the Union. Materialist as he was, he had already assured himself that the vastly preponderant industrial and financial power of the North guaranteed its victory. He made insufficient allowances, however, for the necessity of fighting for that outcome and for how relentless the struggle would be.
CHAPTER NINE
Lee’s War in the East,
Grant’s War in the West
THE SECOND HALF of 1862 inaugurated a transformation of the war, which suddenly became much more serious, bitter, and hard-fought than that of the first year. The change had something to do with a shift in personnel. McClellan, whose career was about to peter out, not only lacked the killer instinct, a failing which unfitted him for both of the posts Lincoln had given him, chief of the Army of the Potomac and general in chief. Worse than that, McClellan actually had a philosophy of war, at least of the Civil War, which deprecated hard knocks. Like many other Northerners, he found the effects of division almost as painful as division itself. He regretted the hatreds the war had fostered and sought to fight in a way that would not intensify them—so no confiscation of enemy property, no living off the land, certainly no emancipation of the slaves. Though reemployed by Lincoln after the retreat from Richmond at the end of the Seven Days’ Battles, for want of anyone else, he had by now lost the president’s confidence and it was certain that one more failure in command would lead to his supersession for good. Lincoln was so uncertain of his reliability that, following the withdrawal to Harrison’s Landing, he divided the Union forces in northern Virginia to form two armies, leaving, however reluctantly, McClellan in charge of the Army of the Potomac, but combining the forces from West Virginia together with McDowell’s corps from the Army of the Potomac to form the Army of Virginia under John Pope. Pope, quite unlike McClellan, was extreme in his views and believed the war could be won quicker if the Southern people were made to suffer. He was not given a chance to see whether his harsher methods might have worked, for while Halleck, appointed general in chief to succeed McClellan in July 1862, was bringing back McClellan’s army from the Virginia Peninsula, Lee glimpsed the opportunity to invade the North and perhaps inflict a defeat, while the two big Union armies, those of Virginia and the Potomac, were out of touch with each other. Lee’s line of departure was the Rappahannock. Close at hand he had Jackson’s tried and tested troops. Jackson struck the first blow, inflicting a sharp reverse on Pope at Cedar Mountain in the Blue Ridge. Cedar Mountain was a significant battle because, although comparatively small in scale, it required Jackson to show his battle-winning talents rather than, as during the valley campaign, his strategic guile. Such talents were not displayed. His old valley opponent, Nathaniel Banks, commanded the Union army, which Jackson’s outnumbered, but by refusal to concede defeat and by the hard fighting of his soldiers, Banks denied Jackson a victory at Cedar Mountain and left him only the consolation of occupying the field at the battle’s end, which cost both sides about three hundred killed, though the Union missing exceeded the Confederate.
In a campaign which, if properly conducted by the Union, should have resulted in Lee’s army being caught between the two big Union forces, Lee now glimpsed an opportunity to crush Pope. In practice Pope, by skilful manoeuvre, evaded Lee’s efforts to pin him between the Rapidan and the Rappahannock and decided that he could now take Jackson at a disadvantage. His decision was based on the supposition that Jackson, who was manoeuvring to cooperate with Lee, was in retreat to the Shenandoah. He was not. Instead, by resuming his foot cavalry technique, he was marching—at a speed of thirty-six miles in fifty-four hours—to place himself in Pope’s rear. The spot he chose to occupy could not have been more dangerous to Pope. It was at Manassas Junction, where Pope had set up his supply base. The lightning march provided Jackson’s soldiers with an abundance of food and necessities, while the position threatened Pope, as Lee intended, with being cut off from his line of retreat towards Washington. Indeed, the result of Jackson’s occupation of Manassas Junction obliged Pope to fight a repetition of the first battle of the war. Second Manassas, or Second Bull Run, was a much fiercer encounter than the first, evidence of how much both sides had learned in thirteen months of fighting. Jackson, hoping to take Pope at a dis
advantage, launched his men out of the woods against Pope’s when he received word from Lee that Longstreet was approaching, with strong numbers, from the valley. The disposition of forces should have ensured a crushing Confederate victory by envelopment, had it not been for the combat qualities of the Union troops. They included four midwestern regiments, one of which, the 2nd Wisconsin, had fought at First Bull Run. These regiments, forming the so-called Black Hat Brigade because they were dressed in pre-war regular army uniforms, fought with such determination that they held off all efforts by the Stonewall Brigade to break the Union line and so ensured that at the end of the day Lee’s hope of inflicting a crushing defeat had been nullified. Once again Jackson displayed his less-than-complete powers of leadership in the heat of action. The culmination of his effort was an attempt to envelop Pope’s right by a march around his flank to Chantilly, east of Manassas, which led to a small, confused battle, also known as Ox Hill. Jackson failed to envelop Pope, who kept open his line of communication with Washington. The Confederates foundered largely because there were by now overwhelming numbers of Union troops in and around the old battlefield, including most of McClellan’s Army of the Potomac. Their numbers were so large that Second Bull Run should have been a clear-cut Union victory. That it was not was McClellan’s fault. He had a dislike of Pope and in a fit of pettiness, which did the Union cause serious disservice, refused to go to Pope’s assistance.
Second Bull Run therefore became a Union defeat, though with closely equal and very heavy losses by both sides, 1,724 Union soldiers killed to 1,481 Confederates. In the aftermath, Lincoln relieved Pope of command and recombined his Army of Virginia with the Army of the Potomac, which he brought to Washington to assure its defence—always the president’s first consideration. The Union failure at Second Bull Run encouraged Lee to adopt a new strategy. Instead of using all his force to defend the territory of Virginia, he would alter the tempo of the war altogether and take it to the enemy by invading his territory, a strategy to which he would adhere for the next ten months of the war. Lee had thus far given no indication that he possessed any offensive impulse or the ability to bring attacking moves to a successful conclusion. Indeed, he had won an unwelcome reputation for defensiveness and dislike of risk-taking. The reason for his change of tempo was simple. The offensive raised the pressure of war from Virginia, his home state, and it made directly available the natural resources of the North to an invading army. Strategically, it altered the balance of the war, wresting the initiative from the North and threatening it with the spectre of defeat within its own territory. Such a change of strategy would also bring encouragement to the civilian South and to the Confederacy’s supporters in Europe. The goal of diplomatic recognition always floated somewhere behind the South’s war plans.
Lee crossed the Potomac northwest of Washington on September 4-6, 1862, and advanced into Maryland as far as Frederick, where Barbara Fritchie defied the invaders—in John Greenleaf Whittier’s famous poem: “‘Shoot, if you must, this old gray head, / But spare your country’s flag,’ she said.” There he unilaterally divided his army into three, sending Jackson to Harpers Ferry; Longstreet to Hagerstown, on the upper Potomac; and keeping only the formations of D. H. Hill and J. E. B. Stuart with him. A strange episode then compromised his strategy. Lee’s plans, set out in a special order, No. 191, detailing the separate movements of his army, were found by a Union soldier wrapped around three cigars in an abandoned Confederate camp. The paper was taken to McClellan’s assistant adjutant general, who knew the man who had written it and so could authenticate the handwriting. Even the ever-timorous McClellan was persuaded that he had been granted the most extraordinary stroke of good fortune. The news reached him by September 13 and persuaded him to position his army behind South Mountain, near the little town of Sharpsburg. Characteristically, McClellan delayed issuing orders to march overnight and continued to proclaim, as usual, that he was outnumbered, even though the captured orders revealed precisely the opposite. Lee, though threatened by McClellan’s deployment, rallied; informed by a breach of security at Union headquarters that Special Order No. 191 had fallen into enemy hands, he kept his nerve and positioned his 25,000 men, to the Union’s 80,000, along a tributary of the Potomac known as Antietam Creek, which would give its name to the coming battle in Northern accounts; to the South it would be known as Sharpsburg. Both names would cast a chill for years to come; indeed, they still do. For September 17, 1862, was to become not only the bloodiest day of the Civil War, but the bloodiest of any day in any of America’s previous wars and of wars to come, bloodier than June 6, 1944, during the landing on Omaha Beach on D-Day, or February 19, 1945, the landing on Iwo Jima. The reason for the costliness of Antietam was the nature of the battlefield, a constricted space only two miles square between two waterlines, that of the Potomac and its tributary Antietam Creek. The interior of the tiny battlefield was further cramped by the existence of a number of killing grounds, such as the one that became known as the Cornfield, and a sunken road to be known as Bloody Lane. Into this maze both Lee and McClellan thrust their forces as they became available. Lee’s were arriving from Harpers Ferry, and the whole mass, 120,000 strong, was thereby compelled to do its worst. At the Dunker Church, a rustic prayer house, and at the Rohrbach Bridge over Antietam Creek, later to be known as Burnside’s Bridge because of that general’s repeated efforts to take it, Union troops struggled with Confederates, time and again nearly breaking Lee’s line but always failing to do so because McClellan shrank from committing all the strength he had. As the dreadful day drew out, the number of dead and wounded mounted. The eventual total was 12,400 casualties on the Union side, 10,300 on the Confederate. Particular unit losses were staggering. The 1st Texas lost 80 percent of its strength killed or wounded. Of the 250 men of the 6th Georgia, only 24 survived unhurt. Colonel David Thompson of the 9th New York recorded a peculiar phenomenon of the battle: he saw at a particular moment “the singular effect mentioned I think, in the Life of Goethe, on a similar occasion—the whole landscape for an instant turned slightly red.”1 Lee’s son, serving in the Army of Northern Virginia during the battle of Antietam, recalled the following incident:
As one of the Army of Northern Virginia, I occasionally saw the commander-in-chief, on the march, or passed the headquarters close enough to recognise him and members of his staff, but as a private soldier in Jackson’s corps did not have much time, during that campaign, for visiting, and until the battle of Sharpsburg I had no opportunity of speaking to him. On that occasion our battery had been severely handled, losing many men and horses. Having three guns disabled, we were ordered to withdraw, and while moving back we passed General Lee and several of his staff, grouped on a little knoll near the road. Having no definite orders where to go, our captain, seeing the commanding general, halted us and rode over to get some instructions. Some others and myself went along to see and hear. General Lee was dismounted with some of his staff around him, a courier holding his horse. Captain Poague, commanding our battery, the Rockbridge Artillery, saluted, reported our condition, and asked for instructions. The General, listening patiently looked at us—his eyes passing over me without any sign of recognition—and then ordered Captain Poague to take the most serviceable horses and men, man the uninjured gun, send the disabled part of his command back to refit, and report to the front for duty. As Poague turned to go, I went up to speak to my father. When he found out who I was, he congratulated me on being well and unhurt. I then said: “General, are you going to send us in again?” “Yes, my son,” he replied, with a smile; “you all must do what you can to help drive these people back.”2
On the night following the battle, Lee withdrew his survivors across the Potomac. It was the beginning of his retreat from Maryland. McClellan could therefore claim, and did, that he had won a victory. Lincoln was not persuaded. As McClellan waited longer and longer to follow Lee’s retreat, Lincoln grew ever more impatient with his failure and on November 7 removed him from comm
and. That was not the end of McClellan. He was to run, unsuccessfully, against Lincoln as the Democratic candidate in the 1864 presidential election. It was, however, the end of his military career. His departure did not in any way dent his self-esteem, merely hardened his conviction that he was surrounded by dunderheads. Lincoln’s hints of impatience at his inactivity grew broader and broader. He pointed out that McClellan could slip troops between Lee and Richmond. Hints were ignored. The general argued that his army could not march without boots or food, even though, as Lincoln told him, Lee’s men did both. Lincoln eventually lost the patience he had preserved for so long. It was McClellan’s intransigence that led to his replacement by Burnside as much as his incompetence. Burnside was a fighting general and a brave man, but he lacked McClellan’s talents, which, though offset by much failure, were considerable. McClellan had also inspired the Union soldier, who believed fervently in the general’s leadership no matter what setbacks he was led into. McClellan’s departure was clearly and genuinely regretted in the ranks. No other general would find a comparable place in the army’s respect and affection until the coming of Grant from the West in 1864.