by Bruce Catton
The battle was over. It had been a complete stand-off, and Assistant Secretary of the Navy Gustavus V. Fox said the most that could be said when he telegraphed McClellan that night that the battle showed “a slight superiority in favor of the Monitor.” He added that the Confederate ironclad “is an ugly customer, and it is too good luck to believe that we are yet clear of her”; and a few days later he warned the Navy Department that although Monitor was more than a match for her opponent she might easily be put out of action in her next fight and it was unwise to place too great dependence on her. Monitor’s chief engineer, Alban C. Stimers, was more optimistic, and he telegraphed congratulations to Ericsson, telling him that “you have saved this place to the nation by furnishing us with the means to whip an ironclad frigate that was, until our arrival, having it all her own way with our most powerful vessels.”9
In a way, Monitor had won something important; she had at least restored the status quo. As long as she remained afloat, McClellan could bring his army down in transports and put men and supplies ashore near Fort Monroe. The army’s campaign against Richmond could go ahead, even though Virginia’s presence would impose certain handicaps. But the weight of the whole campaign rested on this queer, mastless warship with the revolving turret. Monitor could not be risked; she could neutralize Virginia, but she could do nothing more than that; dared do nothing more, because of all the ships in the United States Navy this was the one that must not be lost.
Meanwhile, Mr. Mallory had a nice answer for the impatient men in the Confederate Congress who had been demanding that he leave the cabinet because he had not given the Confederacy a navy.
2: The Vulture and the Wolf
Major General Braxton Bragg found the Mississippi town of Corinth badly overcrowded and wholly lacking in proper control. Troops were swarming into the place, disorganized and without supplies; the weather was atrocious, with rain and cold wind, and no one had made any arrangements for the sick, who were numerous. The one hotel was in danger of being sacked by hungry soldiers who crowded into the dining room in defiance of military restraint and even went into the kitchen to snatch hot meats off of the stoves, threatening to slaughter the hotel proprietor when he tried to stop them. Part of this disorder was probably due, as General Bragg now and then remarked, to the fact that these were raw troops led by untrained officers, which in turn could be blamed on “universal suffrage, the bane of our military organization”; a deeper reason was the fact that this little railroad junction town in northern Mississippi had suddenly become the Confederacy’s most important troop center west of Richmond—the place from which General Albert Sidney Johnston would try to regain all that had been lost and chase the invading Yankees back to the Ohio River.1
Driven out of Kentucky and middle and western Tennessee, General Johnston had discovered that his government would give him in disaster that which he had never been able to get in more prosperous times: reinforcements and some attention to his problem. He commanded more men now than he had ever had before, despite the heavy loss at Fort Donelson; by the final weeks of March he had between 40,000 and 45,000 men in Corinth, in addition to possibly 8500 who held New Madrid and Island Number Ten, on the Mississippi. Beyond this he could use, if he could get them across the river, the 20,000 Confederates now operating in Arkansas.
General Bragg had brought 10,000 men up from Mobile and Pensacola, and 5000 more had come from New Orleans, under Brigadier General Daniel Ruggles. (These would go under Bragg’s command, and Mrs. Bragg assured her husband, by letter, that Louisiana troops were “obedient, good marksmen, habituated to exposure, and free from the besetting sin of our Confederacy, drunkenness.”)2 Leonidas Polk had brought down approximately 10,000 men who until March 2 had been stationed at Columbus, Kentucky, and, on the long march over from Murfreesboro, General Johnston had brought 17,000 and odd who had been at Bowling Green. All in all, there were plenty of soldiers at Corinth. The trouble was that they were not yet an army, but the raw materials of an army; putting them together and giving them the indefinable combination of training and inspiration which would make them feel and act as a unit would take time, which the Yankees might not allow.
In a sense, everything depended on whether or not the Federal invaders would come on with energy. If they did, neither General Johnston nor anyone else would have a chance to turn this convocation of soldiers into an army. Moving up the Tennessee River were 40,000 men under General Grant, their advance guard no more than twenty miles away. Coming overland from Nashville were 35,000 more under General Buell; they were a good deal farther off, and it seemed unlikely that they would move very rapidly no matter where they were. On the Mississippi, trying with the Navy’s help to destroy all Confederate installations north of Memphis, were 25,000 men led by John Pope, a man with much raw energy, engaged now in an effort to isolate the strong mid-river fort at Island Number Ten. And from the far side of the Mississippi, because of recent events in the Arkansas foothills, the Federal power could draw reinforcements whenever it chose.
Yet the dominant factor might be General Johnston himself. General Johnston refused to feel that he was licked. Even as he led his dejected troops southeast from Nashville late in February, a storm of bitter criticism swirling about his head, winter rains and gales tormenting the soldiers, Johnston kept thinking about how he was going to beat the Yankees rather than about how they were beating him. He had been outgeneraled and he had been beaten, and he was woefully outnumbered, but his one thought was to regain the initiative. He planned not merely to check the invader but to win back everything that had been lost, and each day given him by the slow advance of the opposing armies was a day he would use to the utmost. As he rebuilt his army at Corinth he still had a chance, and it was a chance he did not propose to miss.
To wait was to lose. Grant had as many men as he had, and Grant had come up the Tennessee River almost to the Mississippi line, his headquarters at the town of Savannah, most of his troops thrust forward to the high ground back of Pittsburg Landing on the west bank of the Tennessee, around a country meetinghouse known as Shiloh Church. Once Buell joined Grant, Johnston would be compelled to use 40,000 to beat 75,000; the task would be impossible, and Johnston knew it. His only hope was to destroy Grant before Buell reached the scene. If he could do this he could turn the war upside down.
The chance was thin, of course. By any reasonable standard Johnston’s army was no more ready to take the offensive than McDowell’s had been at Bull Run. General Bragg was gloomily saying that few of the regiments had ever so much as made a full day’s march and that most of the rank and file had never done a day’s work in their lives,3 and although General Bragg was a dour pessimist who usually believed the worst the situation was not promising. If the army did not come unraveled when it marched up to Pittsburg Landing it might very well fall apart when it made its attack. A cautious general, naturally, would wait until he had the army in better shape; yet a cautious general, waiting thus, getting everything ready before he moved, would simply condemn himself to fight a little later against overwhelming odds. General Johnston could not afford to be cautious.
He was greatly helped by the fact that General Halleck, who commanded all of the foes that were coming in on him, was the very embodiment of caution. Halleck had sent Grant up the Tennessee but had ordered him to be extremely careful; whatever happened, Grant was not to stir up a fight until Buell joined him. This was playing it safe: it was also giving General Johnston several priceless weeks of time which might have been denied him. Most of Grant’s troops reached Pittsburg Landing by the end of the third week of March, and if they had moved on to Corinth at once they could have torn Johnston’s army apart before its diverse elements had fully assembled. Such an advance, of course, would have been a bit risky, and Halleck would permit no risks. Grant must keep his army in its camps until Buell’s men arrived. Then, no doubt, they could do something about getting on with the war.
It must be said in General Halleck’s behal
f that he had had other things to think about, and that one of his armies had in fact effectively disrupted a part of General Johnston’s plan for a great counteroffensive.
Johnston planned to advance on both sides of the Mississippi River—to regain western Tennessee and Kentucky with his own army while with another army he drove the Yankees out of Missouri, going up to Cairo and beyond, perhaps even to St. Louis. West of the Mississippi there was a fairly substantial number of Confederate soldiers, and in January the Confederate government had sent out a new man to take command of these, to weld them into an army, and to use them under Johnston’s direction. This new man was Major General Earl Van Dorn, a slim, elegant little soldier with curly hair, charming manners and a strong taste for fighting. A West Pointer in his early forties, Van Dorn had an excellent record. He had been an Indian fighter of note, with four wounds received in action on the western plains, and he had done well in the Mexican War, taking another wound and winning promotion for gallantry. He had dash and energy, and he seemed just the man to carry out Johnston’s plan for action beyond the Mississippi.
Van Dorn had to begin by getting Ben McCulloch and Sterling Price to work together. President Davis wanted no repetition of the Wilson’s Creek business, where a victory had lost most of its value because these soldiers could not agree, and he had given Van Dorn authority over both. Armed with this authority, Van Dorn conferred with Johnston shortly before the evacuation of Bowling Green, and worked out a bold plan for leading Price and McCulloch up through Missouri to St. Louis and thence eastward into Illinois—a move which, if it worked, would unquestionably hamstring the Federal thrust up the Tennessee River. Then he set out to cross the Mississippi and take over his new command.
He was met by a letter from General Price which convinced him that he had better hurry. The Confederates were about to retreat from Missouri to northwestern Arkansas, and Price and McCulloch were arguing more bitterly than ever. They could not agree about who ranked whom or what ought to be done next, and altogether it was time for someone to take charge. Van Dorn found the antipathetic generals camped, with their respective commands, in the Boston Mountains in northwestern Arkansas, seventy miles below the Missouri line. He was struck by the physical contrast between the two men. Price was tall, handsome, his ruddy face fringed by silvery hair and whiskers, his bearing courtly; Van Dorn’s chief of staff remembered that Price housed his visitors in some luxury and gave them kidneys stewed in sherry for breakfast. McCulloch was spare, wiry, a little stoop shouldered, with sharp eyes peering carefully out from under shaggy brows, a man who looked and was a tough frontiersman. Texas to the core, with a Texan’s flair for gaudy costumes, he had for battle a suit of black velvet, with high-topped patent leather boots and a broad-brimmed Texas hat. Jefferson Davis regarded him highly, and wrote long after the war of his “vigilance, judgment and gallantry.”4
Van Dorn was what the two men needed. Simply because he had superior authority and was present, the quarrel over rank and planning ended. Price and McCulloch grew enthusiastic about the scheme for a counteroffensive, and Van Dorn presently notified Johnston that he had close to 20,000 men ready for action. Among these was a contingent unusual even for this western army, in which the extraordinary was routine: a brigade of two regiments of Cherokees and one of Creeks from the Indian Territory led by Brigadier General Albert Pike, an Arkansas lawyer with a benign eye and a flowing beard, a reputation as a Masonic poet and philosopher, and a knack for persuading red men to go along with the doctrine of states’ rights. Van Dorn believed that more troops could be raised without difficulty and he was confident that the western half of the revived offensive would move on schedule.5
The first step was to whip the nearest Federal Army, a hard-fighting, hard-foraging outfit of fewer than 12,000 men, led by Brigadier General Samuel R. Curtis, who in the last few weeks had ended the long stalemate in southwestern Missouri, driving Price’s Missourians out of Springfield and chasing them all the way into Arkansas. Curtis would have brought more men except for the fact that he was such a prodigious way from home—300 miles from St. Louis, 200 miles from the nearest railhead at Rolla, Missouri—and he had to make numerous detachments to protect this long supply line. He was in fact a good deal farther from his base than any other Union general had yet gone, and in rough winter weather he had made one of the longest marches of the war. His advance had a spectacular quality that was lost to sight because bigger armies elsewhere were getting most of the attention.
Curtis was halfway through his fifties, a quiet West Pointer who had left the Army a few years after graduation to work as a civil engineer. He had built railroads and levees, had been chief engineer in St. Louis and mayor of Keokuk, and late in the 1850s he had been elected a Republican Congressman from Iowa, resigning in the summer of 1861 to take a brigadier’s commission. Proud of the advance his army had made, he was deeply disturbed by the horrors war inflicted on civilians. Many of these horrors, he was aware, came from his own troops. He had Franz Sigel’s German regiments, which had earned a reputation for relentless foraging, and his native-American regiments really were not much more orderly; when his soldiers lost touch with their own supply trains they plundered farm and homestead with grasping hands. Price’s retreating Missourians had done a good deal of looting and burning, too, and there were guerrilla bands to carry on where the soldiers left off; all the countryside had been ravaged, and was pock-marked with the blackened timbers of burned homes, barns and mills—“a sickening sight,” Curtis wrote, “which for the sake of humanity I could pray were effaced from the record of events.” Back of the pomp and glitter of war, he said, there was so much misery that “all should forever more earnestly implore Heaven to deliver us from ‘war, pestilence and famine.’ ”6
Van Dorn got his army under way on March 3, Pap Price and his men at the head of the column, McCulloch’s division following, Pike and the Indians bringing up the rear; altogether, there were nearly 15,000 Confederates in the line of march. (This was one of the few times when a major battle saw the Confederates with a substantial advantage in numbers.) Curtis lay to the north, with part of his army, under Sigel, thrust forward to the town of Bentonville, and Van Dorn tried to cut this force off and destroy it. Sigel was alert, fended him off, and got his command away unscathed; and a measure of the evil nature of Van Dorn’s luck in this campaign is the fact that during this one important week Franz Sigel behaved like a competent general … Van Dorn pursued and found the Union Army drawn up south of Pea Ridge, back of Little Sugar Creek, facing south.
Curtis’s troops were astride of the main road into southwestern Missouri—the road to Springfield, the one both armies had used on their recent march down, known locally as the Telegraph or Stagecoach Road. This road ran north from Curtis’s camp past a country inn called Elkhorn Tavern, went on over Pea Ridge, dropped down into Cross Timber Hollow, and in its progress through these back-country names and places went on to the Missouri line and then continued up to Springfield. Van Dorn proposed to make a wide detour to his left, marching at night along a byroad that would bring him into the Telegraph Road north of Elkhorn Tavern first thing in the morning. He would then be in Curtis’s rear and squarely across his supply line and his only avenue of escape, and if the Confederates moved smartly he ought to disperse or capture the whole Union Army. Van Dorn put his troops in motion on the night of March 6; by his timetable, the battle would open shortly after dawn on March 7.
However, there were delays. Curtis had suspected that something of this kind might be done, and he had had parties out obstructing the road which Van Dorn had to use—hard-working details directed by a man skilled at road work, an Iowa colonel named Grenville Dodge, who would be famous a decade later as one of the chief builders of the Union Pacific Railroad. Dodge had this byroad pretty well blocked, the march took a good deal longer than had been planned, and it was midmorning or later before the Confederates had reached their chosen position. The long column somehow broke in half d
uring the night, and when Van Dorn and Price were ready to make their attack by Elkhorn Tavern it developed that McCulloch and the other half of the army were miles in the rear, only halfway around the long semicircle of the flanking route. Curtis, meanwhile, had had just time enough to swing his army around and get ready to meet this attack on his rear; and when McCulloch attacked along the western end of Pea Ridge, two miles or more from the scene of Price’s attack, Curtis sent divisions under Colonel Peter J. Osterhaus and Colonel Jefferson C. Davis over to handle him.
If Van Dorn had had a fully trained army with a competent staff and a little more professional leadership he probably would have won his battle, but he had none of those things and he did not get a victory. McCulloch’s cavalry and Pike’s Indians attacked first, captured a three-gun battery, and then came under artillery fire, which the tribesmen found strange and terrifying: they took to the woods, where each man got behind a tree in the old wilderness-fighting tradition, and the Indians were of little more account on this battlefield. McCulloch rode far to the front to get his division into action and was shot dead by a Northern sharpshooter; his chief brigadier was killed, another one was captured, his attack broke up in disorder, and by late afternoon the battle centered around Price’s assault along the road by Elkhorn Tavern. The fight was a hard one, and at sundown the Federals had been forced to retreat half a mile or more, but their line was unbroken and Van Dorn in effect was fighting with hardly more than half his army.