Terrible Swift Sword

by Bruce Catton

  That night Farragut sought revenge. The spot where Arkansas had tied up was noted, and range lights were fixed on the opposite shore to mark the place; and after dark, while a thunderstorm raged, Farragut’s squadron went steaming down past Vicksburg, each one firing a broadside at Arkansas’s berth. This would probably have destroyed her if she had been there, but she was not: the Confederates had noticed the range lights and, guessing what was coming, had shifted Arkansas to a different position. The Federals made a huge noise and expended much ammunition but did no especial harm, and Farragut unhappily confessed his “great mortification” in a message to Secretary Welles, admitting frankly that the Confederates had taken him entirely by surprise. Welles testily told him he had better not leave Vicksburg until Arkansas was sunk; then, after a day or so, thought better of it, and telegraphed the admiral that he could leave whenever he chose. Farragut chose to leave at once and went steaming off to New Orleans, dropping General Williams and the troops at Baton Rouge as he went. A few days later Davis pulled his own fleet up to the mouth of the Yazoo, retiring shortly thereafter all the way to Helena, Arkansas, and the Confederates had Vicksburg all to themselves.7

  Actually, they had a good deal more than that. Jubilant over Farragut’s departure, Van Dorn ordered General Breckinridge to take five thousand men down the river and recapture Baton Rouge. Breckinridge tried, on August 5, and was beaten off after a fight in which General Williams lost his life, but although Breckinridge lost this fight the Confederacy had unquestionably won the campaign. In mid-June it had owned no more than three miles of the Mississippi; by mid-August it held several hundred miles of it—everything from Helena to Port Hudson, Louisiana, a few miles above Baton Rouge, where Breckinridge built a fort. It continued to have ready access via the Red River to all of its resources in the trans-Mississippi region, and the Federals were farther from opening the river than they had been at the end of the spring, when the job was all but completed. Arkansas presently ran hard aground because of an engine failure and had to be blown up, but she had served her purpose. Considering the fact that the southland contained hardly any sailors, mechanics, shipwrights, naval architects, or iron workers, Mr. Mallory and his men were showing an amazing aptitude for building and using armored warships.

  Colonel Morgan, General Forrest, and Lieutenant Brown were the living signs that something was wrong with the Federal conduct of the war in the west. Three cavalry raids involving fewer than three thousand troopers all told, and one wild cruise by a square-cornered gunboat jerry-built by amateurs on the edge of a cornfield—these would have been no more than incidents, except that the Federal power had let the war get into a condition of unstable equilibrium in which mere incidents could jar it into a new shape. If blows so light would mean so much, a really hard blow might have prodigious effect.

  A hard blow was in fact being prepared, and would be launched by General Braxton Bragg.

  Bragg was a strange combination, a hard case with an unpredictable streak of irresolution; stern, angular, contentious, a man who would seem to have been utterly lacking in personal magnetism except that he remained a romantic hero to his wife, Elise Bragg, and to the end retained the affection and trust of Jefferson Davis, who was somewhat angular and contentious in his own right. Mrs. Bragg wrote sensitive love letters to her husband. Like any soldier’s wife, she was haunted by the fear that he might be killed in action, and she comforted herself with the thought that his high rank would keep him away from the firing line. Then came Shiloh, where the army commander himself was killed, and she wrote pathetically: “I had taught myself to believe you could not be hurt, danger had so often surrounded you, your high rank in a measure protected you. The first awakening from this hope was the death of Johnston—his rank was higher—his poor wife had probably thought the same with me.” She wanted his physical presence, and she could write: “Oh that you could come to your wife’s arms for a few days, until soothed and calmed she could restore you to your country.”8

  Bragg got command of the Confederate Army at Tupelo, after Beauregard was removed, and he took hold with firmness, ordering the death penalty for stragglers and looters and enforcing his orders rigorously. A general who behaves so does not win the affection of his soldiers, yet this harshness—applied to an army which had been almost entirely out of hand on the short march up to Pittsburg Landing in April—seems to have improved morale. After one private was court-martialed and executed for shooting at a chicken, missing, and hitting a Negro, one of the man’s comrades ruefully admitted that the army’s discipline was improved “because it felt it had at its head a man who would do what he said and whose orders were to be obeyed.” Bragg drove himself as hard as he drove anyone else, ruining first his digestion and then his temper by constant overwork; a fellow officer who admired his zeal and felt that he was getting good results confessed that his ways were so stern that he “could have won the affection of his troops only by leading them to victory.” Bragg found Army command a strain, but at the moment his health was good and he told Mrs. Bragg that he hoped to “mark the enemy before I break down.” He added that the tide had turned in favor of the Confederacy and he saw the prospect of “a long and strong flood.”9

  The turning tide would strike Buell first. With more than 40,000 men, that methodical officer was carefully getting ready to move on Chattanooga, but he was taking ever so much time about it and his own position actually was most insecure; he was a long way from his base, and if the Confederates could strike northwest from eastern Tennessee in strength they might cut him off and give him serious trouble.

  When the summer began the Confederates had a little more than 15,000 men in eastern Tennessee. Most of these were at Knoxville, under the command of a solid Old Army soldier, Major General Edmund Kirby Smith, who had led a brigade at Bull Run, had been wounded in action, and enjoyed the full confidence of the authorities at Richmond. A small Union force had recently occupied Cumberland Gap, the difficult northern gateway to eastern Tennessee, but it was not yet an offensive threat and Kirby Smith was strong enough to contain it. He was not strong enough, however, to do anything about Buell, and in June he notified Richmond that Chattanooga would be lost unless strong reinforcements could be sent in. At the same time he wrote to Bragg, explaining that he was powerless to save Chattanooga. Bragg immediately sent three thousand men to Chattanooga as a stop gap, and then studied the situation to see if he could not do more.10

  He found that he could do much more, and he did it with speed, efficiency and daring. He would leave Van Dorn with 16,000 men to hold Vicksburg, and he would leave General Price with 16,000 more at Tupelo to watch northern Mississippi; between them, these officers ought to be able to handle any offensive Grant was likely to make this summer, especially in view of the abrupt lessening in Federal naval pressure on the Mississippi. With the rest of his army, approximately 31,000 men, Bragg boldly set out for Chattanooga, planning not merely to protect that city but to join with Smith in an invasion of Kentucky that would compel Buell to retreat and might even drive him to destruction. Then the “long and strong flood” Bragg had hoped for would be a reality.

  One thing Bragg understood clearly. This was a railroad war, the first one in history, and a general who knew how to use the rails could move armies faster and farther than armies had ever been moved before. To get from Tupelo to Chattanooga he had to take the long way around—776 miles, over six railroads, going south from Tupelo to Mobile, northeast to Montgomery and Atlanta and then northwest to Chattanooga—but the railroads could move the army much more quickly than it could go if it took the direct route and walked, and Bragg’s headquarters understood logistics. The army began to move on July 23, and late in July Bragg and his 31,000 were coming into Chattanooga and Bragg and Smith were planning a campaign into Buell’s rear. The whole complexion of the war in the west had changed.11

  The Confederacy had regained the offensive; the lid was off, and infinite possibilities were in the air. Neither Chattanoog
a nor even Vicksburg, which the Federals could have had for the taking six weeks earlier, was in danger now; instead Buell was in danger, the whole Federal grip on the Mississippi Valley was threatened, a Confederate invasion of the North was taking form, and the war which had seemed so near to its end was beginning all over again.

  4: Triumph in Disaster

  Howell Cobb of Georgia, who was one of the founding fathers of the Confederate States of America, was putting in the summer as a brigadier general in the Army of Northern Virginia. As a military man he had but a modest position in the chain of command, but as one of the nation’s most eminent political leaders he could talk to anybody on equal terms, and early in August he saw hard times coming and sent a brief warning to Secretary of War Randolph.

  “This war must close in a few months, perhaps weeks,” he wrote, “or else will be fought with increased energy and malignity on the part of our enemies. I look for the latter result.”1

  His forecast was sound, and the most obvious sign that he knew what he was talking about lay in the things which were being said and done just then by a new Federal Army commander in Virginia, Major General John Pope.

  General Pope, who had made a first-rate record in the west, had been brought east by the Northern government late in June to make an army out of the luckless contingents which had suffered so much at the hands of Stonewall Jackson: the commands of Frémont, Banks, and McDowell. Frémont, who ranked Pope, considered the new arrangement an insult and resigned, his departure lamented by no one save the most ardent abolitionists. He was replaced by Franz Sigel, who had fought poorly at Wilson’s Creek and well at Pea Ridge; a soldier who, if not exactly a hero to the abolitionists, was at least a hero to the German-American soldiers who had strong antislavery leanings. Sigel, Banks, and McDowell became corps commanders in the army which Pope put together: a force which numbered, at the outset, about 42,000 men and which Pope concentrated along the upper Rappahannock with aggressive intent. At the very least he could take the pressure off of McClellan’s beaten army; with luck, he and McClellan together might stage a pincers operation that would capture Richmond and destroy Lee’s army. The odds were against it, because Lee was squarely between them and was most unlikely to permit any such thing, but on paper at least the project was feasible.

  Pope was energetic. He also was full of windy bluster, and although he actually was no more brutal than many other Federal generals he had a great talent for seeming to be so, and his appearance in the Virginia theater did symbolize a hardening of Federal policy, which presently became quite as malignant as Howell Cobb anticipated. In the end good Southerners hated John Pope almost as much as they hated Ben Butler.

  Broadly speaking, Pope had been brought east to fight with the gloves off: to be aggressive, to live off the country as far as possible, and to teach the inhabitants of occupied Virginia that secession was a rocky road to travel. He began by issuing a singularly maladroit address to his troops, announcing that in the west Union soldiers usually saw only the backs of their enemies and declaring that he wanted to hear no more about defensive positions, lines of retreat and the like—an army that advanced and won battles did not need to worry about such things. This done, he spelled out his policy toward noncombatants in a series of orders which clearly indicated that the whole atmosphere of the war had changed.

  Citizens of occupied territory would be held responsible for all damage done by guerrillas; the guerrillas themselves, if caught, would be executed and so would everyone who had aided them. If shots were fired at Union soldiers from any house, that house would be destroyed and the people who lived in it would be arrested. Disloyal citizens would be driven outside the army’s lines, and if they returned they would be treated as spies. Inhabitants of occupied territory who did not leave home must take the oath of allegiance to the United States, and any who took this oath and then violated it would be shot. Furthermore, the United States Army would confiscate any forage or other foodstuffs that it needed when it was operating in secessionist territory.2

  The bark was really worse than the bite. The harshest parts of the orders were not enforced, innocent noncombatants were not shot despite these rasped threats, and by the end of the war the policy thus laid down would be considered more or less normal for an army campaigning in hostile country. But these orders did not come at the end of the war; they came when the old illusion that some limit could be placed on mortal combat still lingered, when the phrase about “the war between brothers” might yet seem to connote romance and good sportsmanship rather than anger, bitterness and a deep desire to hurt. They outraged and shocked the Southern nation, which at once concluded that John Pope was a monster, but their real significance went far beyond Pope. They meant that the Federal government had at last abandoned the belief that it could make war dispassionately and without leaving scars and resentment. As Mr. Davis promptly pointed out to the Confederate Congress, these orders were perfectly in tune with the spirit of the Confiscation Act which the Federal Congress had recently adopted: they meant ruthlessness and a fight to the finish, and the Confederacy could respond only by “employing against our foe every energy and every resource at our disposal.”3

  If the shootings and imprisonments promised by General Pope failed to materialize, the orders did bring much suffering to Virginians who lived in the path of Pope’s army. The Federal soldiers never were tightly disciplined, any long march meant extensive straggling, the stragglers always included the worst rowdies in the army, and the men now interpreted the new directive to mean that pillage and looting were more or less legal. Farms were stripped of livestock and grain, smokehouses were robbed, homes were entered, and one Federal officer ruefully admitted that “the lawless acts of many of our soldiers are worthy of worse than death.” Most of the men rationalized their behavior: it was absurd to protect secessionist property when the men who were trying to put down secession were hungry. This feeling as a matter of fact existed in McClellan’s army as well as in Pope’s, and some of the Army of the Potomac units this summer ravaged the Virginia peninsula with a heavy hand.4

  As an inevitable by-product, the soldiers became an antislavery force. An army which, by orders and on impulse, deprived secessionists of their property in order to win the war was not likely to make an exception in the case of human property. Soldiers who had not a trace of sympathy for the Negro would nevertheless set him free if his owner was an enemy who needed to be hurt. No matter what laws or proclamations might come out of Washington, the Union armies were certain to corrode the institution of slavery to the point of its collapse if they operated in slave territory long enough. The slaves themselves got the point before anyone else did, and the appearance of Federal troops sent waves of restlessness across every plantation. A few weeks after McDowell’s regiments occupied Fredericksburg, Betty Herndon Maury noticed that the town was clogged with runaway slaves, who were “leaving their owners by the hundred and demanding wages.” She added: “Many little difficulties have occurred since the Yankees have been here, between white people and Negroes. In every case the soldiers have interfered in favor of the Negroes.”5 Be it noted that this happened under McDowell, who was one Federal general who tried so hard to protect Southern property that his soldiers actually suspected him of being disloyal to the Union.

  A ferment was working, and the only way to stop it was to stop the war, presumably by winning it. In Virginia the Federals had the manpower to win; McClellan and Pope had fully twice as many men as Lee had, and reinforcements were in sight. But McClellan was on the James and Pope was on the Rappahannock, and the victorious Army of Northern Virginia lay between them. Pope obviously would never be sent down to the peninsula, because the administration was as reluctant as ever to uncover Washington. He would unquestionably advance overland, striking at Richmond from the north, and his army was smaller than Lee’s; if McClellan remained inert, Lee could slip out of Richmond, defeat Pope, and then get back and confront the Army of the Potomac in its lines at H
arrison’s Landing. So McClellan and Pope would have to work together and their moves would have to be precisely co-ordinated, and, early in July, Pope wrote to McClellan to find out what could be done.

  McClellan’s reply was cordial but not very helpful. He approved of Pope’s decision to concentrate his forces, and he promised that if Pope advanced and was attacked by Lee, “I will move upon Richmond, do my best to take it, and endeavor to cut off his retreat.” But he warned that “it is not yet determined what policy the enemy intends to pursue, whether to attack Washington or to bestow his entire attention upon this army”; for his own part, McClellan could only say that “I shall carefully watch for any fault committed by the enemy and take advantage of it.” To this frank acknowledgment that Lee had the initiative, McClellan added the hope that Pope could at least advance his cavalry enough to divert Lee’s attention from the Army of the Potomac.6

  It would have been hard enough at best to get one harmonious offensive from these two separated armies; as things actually were it was simply impossible. McClellan and Pope disliked and distrusted each other intensely. McClellan expected Pope to fail and Pope expected McClellan to let him fail, and in the end each man was right. When Pope first reached Washington he told President Lincoln that McClellan ought to be removed, and not long afterward he assured Secretary Chase that McClellan’s “incompetency and indisposition to active movements” were so great that if Pope ever needed the help of McClellan’s army he was not likely to get it. McClellan’s opinion of Pope was unquestionably expressed (at least in part) by his close confidant, Fitz John Porter, who told a friend that in his address to his troops Pope “has now written himself down, what the military world has long known, an Ass,” and said that the Army of the Potomac had no confidence in the man.7 Only an alert and forceful general-in-chief could have made Pope and McClellan work together, and the general-in-chief at this point was Halleck.