Terrible Swift Sword

by Bruce Catton

  As a matter of fact everybody was off balance, victors and defeated alike. The capture of the two forts stunned everyone. Both Federals and Confederates had to adjust not merely their plans but their ways of thinking about their plans: the Federals because they had won, with a single stroke, something which they had thought needed the most elaborate organization and preparation; the Confederates because they suddenly found themselves losing the whole western half of the war. The war which had been moving so slowly had abruptly passed the first of its great turning points. Now it was going at full speed, pulling men along with it, setting a pace which would be ruinous to all who could not themselves move with equal speed. Its entire climate had changed.

  In the North there was much rejoicing. Here at last was a victory to make men forget about Bull Run, and with the victory there was a new hero whose appearance was all the more refreshing because up to now no one had paid much attention to him. Grant’s laconic “unconditional surrender” note touched precisely the right key—men played with his initials and began to call him “Unconditional Surrender Grant”—and Secretary Stanton asserted that the aggressive spirit that would win the war seemed to him to be expressed perfectly in Grant’s threat, “I propose to move immediately on your works.”5 President Lincoln made Grant a major general of volunteers, and the Senate quickly voted confirmation; now Grant outranked everybody in the west except Halleck himself.

  There were off-stage mutterings that the man had simply been lucky, and although Halleck had recommended his promotion he had reservations about him. Halleck assured Stanton that C. F. Smith was the real hero of Fort Donelson, and he urged that the elderly Brigadier General Ethan Allen Hitchcock be promoted and sent west, because “an experienced officer of high rank is wanted immediately on the Tennessee line”—the line, that is, where Grant was commanding. Hardly a fortnight after Fort Donelson surrendered, Halleck complained angrily that Grant was ignoring his orders and failing to make proper reports: “Satisfied with his victory, he sits down and enjoys it without any regard to the future.” (This was an odd complaint, in view of the fact that Grant would have had Federal troops and gunboats at Nashville while Forrest was still trying to remove commissary and quartermaster stores, if Halleck had not immobilized him.) Then Halleck told McClellan that rumors said Grant “has resumed his former bad habits,” and for a time—although the general public knew nothing about it—Grant was under a cloud.6

  Grant unquestionably had been lucky. After all, it was Foote who had made Fort Henry surrender and Grant who got most of the credit for it. Grant’s delay in getting from Fort Henry to Fort Donelson had actually worked out in Grant’s favor, and, at Fort Donelson, Grant’s opponents had committed the most fantastic blunders. Nevertheless, the fact remained that Grant had displayed a trait which, as the coming years would show, he shared with Robert E. Lee—the ability to take immediate and devastating advantage of his foe’s mistakes; and in any case no one in Washington was prepared to find very much fault with a soldier who had just captured the largest bag of prisoners in American military history.7 The War Department presently quieted Halleck by curtly telling him that if he had anything against Grant he must file formal charges and make them stick, and Halleck dropped the matter. (Apparently the man did not really want to get rid of his subordinate; he was just being petulant, and once he had blown off steam he was ready to forget about it.) In Thomas, the western armies had produced a soldier who could fight and win; now, in Grant, they had come up with another. And there was also Flag Officer Foote.

  The Confederates found much reason for gloom. There had been a disastrous failure in generalship, and no amount of explanation could gloss over the strange performance at Fort Donelson; President Davis removed Floyd and Pillow, Floyd was never again employed in a field command, and Pillow was used only sparingly. Johnston came in for severe criticism, which he took in soldierly silence. He could have argued that even if he had been mistaken in putting so many men into a fort that could not be held, things would have gone well enough if his subordinates had been equal to their opportunities, but he felt that this was no time to make excuses and he stoutly told President Davis: “I observed silence, as it seemed to me the best way to serve the cause and the country.”8 He had been beaten, but he would offer no alibis.

  Yet defective generalship was not the real trouble. The dreadful truth which the Fort Donelson affair revealed was that the Confederates in Kentucky were simply overextended. Johnston had been compelled to try to do too much with too little, and even if the abysmal mistakes had been avoided his line was due to break whenever the Federals really hit it hard. Halleck, Buell, and the United States Navy had the power to repossess Kentucky and conquer Tennessee whenever they nerved themselves to use it, and the fact that Grant and Foote had forced the hands of their reluctant superiors was incidental; the break was bound to come sooner or later.

  Upheld by Mr. Davis, Johnston undertook to serve cause and country as best he could. He prepared to reassemble his army and make ready for a new fight farther south, and his task was extraordinarily difficult. He had 17,000 men near Murfreesboro, and Beauregard, then at Jackson, Tennessee, was finding that there were some 21,000 along the Mississippi. Even when these forces got together the army would be much weaker than the force which the Federals could be expected to bring south, and getting them together would be hard. They were 300 miles apart, and before February ended Halleck was preparing to get Grant and the gunboats over to the Tennessee and drive upstream; if this move was made with vigor, Johnston and Beauregard might not be able to get together at all. Beauregard was in poor health, and from Jackson he wrote: “I am taking the helm when the ship is already on the breakers … How it is to be extricated from its present precarious position, Providence above can determine.” He brightened up when he reached the Mississippi Valley, and February 23 worked out an ambitious scheme to regain the offensive. If the governors of Tennessee, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Arkansas could raise from 20,000 to 40,000 new troops, and if reinforcements could be brought over from west of the Mississippi, Beauregard believed he could march north, take Paducah and Cairo and threaten St. Louis … This plan, however, was wholly impractical, and it died in its cradle. Beauregard had written that the loss of Fort Donelson would bring “consequences too lamentable to be now alluded to,” and these consequences were upon him. He could do nothing but leave garrisons to hold a few forts on the Mississippi north of Memphis and take his field force down to Corinth, Mississippi, while the War Department ordered 15,000 men sent up from Mobile, Pensacola, and New Orleans.9 Johnston might be able to reconstitute an adequate army provided the Federals gave him plenty of time.

  This, it developed, the Federals would do. To organize, equip, and move a proper army of invasion took time. There were a thousand details to arrange; tangled lines of command must be set straight; what was done here must be co-ordinated with what was done elsewhere; and above everything else it was necessary to be prudent, lest all that had been gained be lost through front-line rashness. Altogether, displaying an admirable capacity for taking infinite pains, the careful men at headquarters took a good deal of time—and, quite unintentionally, presented it to General Johnston.

  The commanders at the front could see that this was the moment to push ahead, ready or not, the moment to drive the enemy into a corner before he could regain his footing or recover his wind. But there is an unformulated military law by which understanding of urgency and front-line reality diminishes with each mile of distance to the rear echelon; so that it was actually possible for a department commander to tell Washington that he had a golden opportunity to strike a blow, and in the same breath to restrain the subordinates who were on the verge of striking it. It was at this time that Secretary Stanton began to reflect that in choosing top commanders he would probably pick men who went personally where their troops went: “I am very much inclined to prefer field work rather than office work for successful military operations.”10

 
Yet the respite which Johnston was about to get was of no immediate comfort to worried folk in the South. Things were bad no matter where they looked. In southwestern Missouri, Union Brigadier General Samuel R. Curtis had reoccupied the town of Springfield and had driven Price all the way into Arkansas; he apparently had completed Federal reconquest of Missouri and he seemed to be about to attempt an invasion of Arkansas as well, and he had already crossed the border of that state with something over 10,000 men, his numbers rising to 30,000 or 40,000 in the panicky rumors that went rippling eastward. On the Gulf Coast, northeast of the separated mouths of the Mississippi there was a barren sand patch known as Ship Island, once held by Confederate troops, abandoned in September as untenable; the scene just now of a steady, ominous build-up of Federal troops and an in-gathering of many supply vessels, while black-hulled warships cruised off the entrances to the big river and sent light craft up to Pilot Town and the Head of the Passes. Flag Officer Farragut himself arrived on February 20, and Major General Benjamin Butler would presently be there as Army commander, and the two officers obviously meant to attack New Orleans—which unhappy metropolis, by no means ready for an attack, was at precisely this moment compelled to send troops north to strengthen General Johnston.

  These were the threats. There was also another actual defeat. Just when Forts Henry and Donelson were being lost, the Federals struck hard inside the North Carolina sounds, moving at last to exploit the Hatteras Inlet breakthrough, threatening to overrun the entire coast from Chesapeake Bay to the vicinity of Wilmington. This thrust was costly in itself and even worse in its implications, for it pointed again to the grim moral underlined in Tennessee: the South’s defensive line was too long and too thin, and it could be broken whenever the Federals came down hard. (Mr. Lincoln’s strategic concept was getting a certain verification this winter.) Roanoke Island illustrated the matter perfectly.

  Roanoke Island was haunted: the place where England’s first American colony, planted at the gateway to the unknown darkness, had vanished forever, leaving the dim memory of little Virginia Dare and the ominous word “Croatan” for an eerie, tragic legend. The island was flat, swampy, ten miles long, lying at the meeting place of North Carolina’s inland seas, Pamlico Sound and Albemarle Sound; if the Federals could occupy it they could control both sounds, the cities that lay on their shores, the rivers that came into them, and a feasible back-door approach to Norfolk. Roanoke Island, in other words, was a place the Confederacy had to hold, but it was just one of a great many places that had to be held and when the blow fell Roanoke Island was not prepared.

  The place was commanded by Brigadier General Henry A. Wise, who was given the post in December 1861, when it seemed advisable to get him out of western Virginia. Wise had had no military training whatever but he had been learning things about warfare, and he had abundant energy; he did his best to set matters right, but he was fatally handicapped not only by the basic lack of resources but by his inability to make the high command see that this case was important. His immediate superior was the department commander, Major General Benjamin Huger, a first-family career soldier from Charleston, grown rigid and unimaginative in long years of Army routine, an aristocrat described by an irreverent kinsman of Wise as “one of those old West Point incompetents with whom the Confederacy was burdened.” Wise notified Huger that he desperately needed reinforcements, only to be told: “I think you want supplies, hard work and coolness among the troops you have, instead of more men.” As a former governor of Virginia, Wise knew how to pull political strings, so he hurried to Richmond to appeal to Secretary of War Judah Benjamin, but Benjamin also was unresponsive; he simply told Wise to get back to Roanoke and do the best he could with what he had. Haggard and in poor health, Wise obeyed, anticipating disaster; then, early in February, he came down with pneumonia and had to take to his bed in a shore-side hotel, leaving the island and its 2500 defenders in command of Colonel H. M. Shaw.11

  If the Confederates left everything to the man on the spot the Federals gave Roanoke Island top-level planning and support. Back in September the War Department had organized an oversized division with the idea that it could be used, with gunboats and small craft, to clear the Confederates out of the eastern shore of the Chesapeake. Then McClellan scented larger possibilities inside Hatteras Inlet and concluded that this force could accomplish a great deal more if it went into the Carolina sounds. President Lincoln backed the idea, the Navy named Flag Officer L. M. Goldsborough to handle the gunboats, and the Army’s part of the program was entrusted to Brigadier General Ambrose E. Burnside, a West Pointer who had left the Army to go into business before the war and who had commanded Rhode Island’s three-months recruits at Bull Run.

  Before the war ended the Northern people would hear a great deal of Burnside, much of it bad, for it was his evil fate to be tested far beyond his strength, which was moderate; but this first assignment was just his size and he did very well with it. He was a likable sort—big, florid, friendly, his handsome face adorned by a beard which was elaborate even by Civil War standards—and he always recognized his own limitations even if he was never able to surmount them. He had 11,500 men, and in mid-January he and Goldsborough sailed from Hampton Roads with a fleet of more than sixty vessels—shallow-draft gunboats, transports, tugs, open barges designed for use as landing craft and a number of ferryboats never intended for work on blue water. They ran into a southeast storm that gave them a vicious tossing, wrecking two ships and almost bringing the whole expedition to grief, but they reached Hatteras Inlet at last and after waiting a week for the seas to moderate they came inside. Burnside put about a third of his men ashore there and made ready to attack Roanoke Island, forty-five miles to the north.

  The business was well organized. Burnside had three brigades afloat, and for each brigade there was a steam transport towing twenty landing craft. Goldsborough put the fighting ships up in front, and on the afternoon of February 7 the fleet came up Pamlico Sound in a line two miles long, while a cold wind whipped a spatter of rain out of a leaden sky and the pine trees on the low shores looked as if they grew directly out of the water. Transports and landing craft remained at the southern end of the island while the warships steamed up the western side to force their way through Croatan Channel, which was narrow, obstructed by sunken hulks and pilings, guarded by forts, batteries, and a small Confederate fleet; a defensive layout which looked tough but which quickly turned out to be extremely weak.12

  Goldsborough came in close to the shore of the island, thus avoiding the fire of most of the batteries, which had been built so that their guns could play on the middle of the channel and on nothing else. His guns were much heavier than anything the Confederates had, and they quickly overpowered the nearest defensive work, Fort Bartow, silencing its guns and setting its barracks on fire. The Confederate fleet comprised seven tugboats and river steamers, mounting a total of eight guns, and this collection—a “pasteboard fleet,” as one Southerner remarked bitterly—could make no more than a token resistance. C.S.S. Curlew went to the bottom from a direct hit by a 100-pound shell, another vessel was disabled, the little fleet drew off, returned for a second encounter, and then took off for the far end of Albemarle Sound, completely out of the fight. There were other forts on the Roanoke shore north of Fort Bartow, and these took comparatively little damage, but as the day ended it was evident that they could be left to the army, which would be on hand very shortly.

  For while the bombardment was going on Burnside had put his brigades ashore at the southern tip of the island, and on the morning of February 8 the troops came up the island’s one road to the main defensive line, a redoubt mounting three inadequate fieldpieces and flanked on each side by a quarter of a mile of entrenchments, manned by perhaps 1500 men. If Wise had had enough men, guns, and time he might have made this place impregnable, for the island was narrow here and the cramped approach to the redoubt had a tangle of swamps on each side, but his line was too short and too thin. Burnside se
nt flanking columns along through mud and waist-deep water, and he had a prodigious advantage in numbers. His men stormed the place with moderate loss, and by afternoon his column moved on up the island to take the forts in the rear. The Confederates could do nothing but surrender; Burnside had the island, with upwards of 2000 prisoners, thirty-two guns, 3000 stand of small arms and stacks of supplies, and the Federals had the whole area of the Carolina sounds at their mercy, with ample time to remove the obstructions from Croatan Channel and plenty of soldiers and warships to mop up all of the isolated forts on the mainland.13

  The unhappy General Wise, recuperating from his illness, moved off to Currituck County, North Carolina, and wrote an indignant letter to President Davis, declaring that the island could have been held if a proper effort had been made and complaining bitterly: “The North Carolina troops had not been paid, clothed or drilled, and they had no teams or tools or materials for constructing works of defense, and they were badly commanded and led, and, except a few companies, they did not fight.” If this was less than just to the unlucky soldiers who had been trapped on the island, the general’s feeling that he had been badly let down by the higher authorities was understandable, and when Congress appointed an investigating committee to hold hearings on the matter he exploded: “I intend to ‘accuse’ General Huger of nothing! nothing!! nothing!!! That was the disease which brought disaster at Roanoke Island.” The committee eventually agreed with him, reporting that blame for the loss ought to be divided between General Huger and Mr. Benjamin.14