by Bruce Catton
So popular enthusiasm was at a low ebb, and the war had grown so big and so heavy that simple enthusiasm was not going to be enough anyway. This discovery, made in Richmond at the beginning of the spring, was now being made in Washington, and Mr. Lincoln’s government came to the same conclusion Mr. Davis’s government had reached: if men would not go into the Army of their own free will they must be made to go. This meant death for one of the proudest traditions in the land. Americans had always believed that the volunteer spirit, the heartbreaking patriotism of youth responding to oratory and music and flags, would carry them through any dangers, and once this belief was struck down it would never revive; but there was no help for it. Gingerly, and with much less boldness and resolution than had been displayed in Richmond when the same problem arose, Washington reached out to embrace conscription.
The embrace was not quite complete, because there were legal ins and outs, not to mention political quaverings. As the law stood the President could not compel citizens to go into the United States Army. He could, however, draft the state militia for nine months, and by Constitutional theory the militia included all of the adult males in each state. This authority, cut and stretched to fit the emergency, was now put to use. On August 4 the President called on the states to enroll 300,000 militia, adding the proviso that if by August 15 any state failed to meet is quota under the previous call for volunteers, men would be drafted from the militia to make up the deficiency.
This was a fairly roundabout approach. The volunteer regiments would be raised and organized by the states in the old familiar way, and if the Federal government drafted anybody it would do it at secondhand, using state machinery. A most intricate accounting system was devised, under which one three-year volunteer equalled four nine-months militiamen, and if a state met its full quota of volunteers none of its people would have to be drafted. This was rather an approach to conscription than conscription itself but it was an extremely powerful stimulus to volunteering, because no elected officials in state, city, town, or country cared to be part of a machine which dragged good voters by neck and heels into the Army. So official persons all over the land gave vigorous support to the recruiting program and saw to it that alluring bounties were offered regardless of expense. Cumbersome as it was, it worked—for a time, anyway—and, by December, Secretary Stanton was able to announce that he had 420,000 new soldiers, of whom 399,000 had volunteered. Implicit in all of this, of course, was the idea that if the war went on the government would use compulsion to the limit to keep its Army up to strength.2
This meant just what the more drastic Confederate conscription act meant, as devout states’ rights theorists had noted with shock. It was a clear assertion of the power of the central government to reach clear inside a state and lay its hands on the individual citizen, and a government which could do this was no longer a government of limited powers. The change was inevitable, because this was no longer a limited war. Somewhere between Shiloh and Malvern Hill—or possibly at some point along a diagonal running between Mr. Davis’s resort to the draft and Mr. Lincoln’s decision to emancipate—it had become unlimited, and it had to be fought accordingly.
It was bewildering, and good men were disturbed. The very godfather of secession, William L. Yancey himself, was reported to have said in the Confederate Senate that he would prefer conquest by the Yankees to the despotism of President Davis: which may have been the sort of thing the President was thinking of when he wrote to his friend General Bragg that “revolutions develop the high qualities of the good and the great, but they cannot change the nature of the vicious and the selfish.” General William T. Sherman looked about him in western Tennessee and confessed that he was “appalled by the magnitude of the danger that envelops us as a people,” because rebellion in the South was accompanied in the North by a dismaying rise of democracy and anarchy3 (it was always a bit hard for Sherman to tell the two apart). And in cotton plantations along the Mississippi there was so much raiding and counterraiding, so much burning of cotton and so much turmoil among the chattels, that good planters hardly knew which side they were on.
Planters were supposed to burn their cotton to keep the Yankees from getting it. Since his baled cotton represented his whole year’s income the average planter hated to do this. He hated it even more if he lived where Yankee traders might come along and offer cash money for his crop. (It was unfortunately very hard to bargain with these traders, because if the price they offered was rejected a squad of Yankee soldiers was likely to show up and confiscate everything in sight, paying nothing at all.) The local Southern authorities therefore organized armed patrols and sent them up and down the river to burn all the cotton they could find. Here and there the planters offered resistance, and at a place called Carolina Landing, seventy miles above Vicksburg, a patrol was routed and forced to retreat; regular troops had to be sent up from Vicksburg, and the patrol at last burned the cotton behind a cordon of bayonets. A Chicago newspaper correspondent rejoiced that “this business of destroying the private property of citizens has done more to strengthen the national cause than all the victories our armies have achieved,” and one resident wrote despairingly to the governor of Mississippi that many planters had simply abandoned their homes and moved away. Overseers were running off, the slaves were out of control, and unless something was done soon the Yankees would get 20,000 bales of cotton out of one county.4
Unlimited war meant that sort of thing, along with much else, and men tried in vain to restore the old limits. The New York banker, August Belmont, who was a conservative but stoutly Unionist Democrat, got a letter in August from a friend in New Orleans who begged him to work for a speedy compromise peace.
If the war went on much longer, said this friend, the South would be ruined. It was almost ruined now, but it was not going to stop fighting; the more it suffered the angrier and more determined it became, and it would sacrifice its last life to prevent Northern conquest. Could not sober conservatives in the North lead in a great movement to end the war on a simple basis of forgive, forget, and behave? Let both sides confess error, renew the old friendship and restore the prewar world in all its lost splendor. As the weaker side, the South could make no overtures, but the stronger North could do so, and if the government at Washington refused to go along a political party could perhaps bring it about—the Democratic party, which had always tried to “maintain the constitution as it was framed and interpreted for more than two-thirds of a century.” If a chance for compromise existed it was utter madness to go on with the war.5
There was nobility in the idea that there ought to be a peace without victory; yet in August of 1862 America’s tragedy was that it was caught between the madness of going on with the war and the human impossibility of stopping it. Secession had been a direct result of the outcome of the election of 1860. To restore the status quo would be to assume that either the North or the South had had a great change of heart—that the North would not again go Republican, or that the South would quietly acquiesce if it did. Neither Mr. Lincoln nor Mr. Davis was going to assume anything of the kind. Each man was fighting for a dreadful simplicity. Neither one could describe a solution acceptable to him without describing something wholly unacceptable to the other; neither man could accept anything less than complete victory without admitting complete defeat. Both sides had heard the trumpet that would never call retreat. The peace-makers could not be heard until the terrible swift sword had been sheathed; but the scabbard had been thrown away, and now the Confederacy was carrying the war into the enemy’s country.
It was making, in fact, its one great co-ordinated counteroffensive of the war. The odds against this counteroffensive were forbidding but the thing just might work, and if it did the Confederacy could win everything it had ever wanted.
It would begin in the west. Braxton Bragg had stolen a long march on the Federals by getting into Chattanooga while Buell was still methodically perfecting his arrangements in central Tennessee. If Bragg and Kirby
Smith together could get behind Buell, force him to battle and destroy him, both Tennessee and Kentucky could be regained, the Federals along the Mississippi would have to retreat, and the war would look very different. It would look like a final Confederate triumph if, while the westerners were doing this, Lee could go north of the Potomac and win a smashing victory on Yankee soil.
There were of course a great many “if’s” in this, but it could happen; Mr. Davis told Bragg and Smith what was expected of them just as Lee was preparing to move away from McClellan and go after Pope; and in August the armies began to march.6
Bragg and Smith were optimistic. They respected each other, they were well aware that their enemies were temporarily off balance, and they believed that once they got into Kentucky they would be fighting a war of liberation, with enthusiastic popular support canceling the perennial Federal advantage in numbers. Unfortunately, Mr. Davis had given them a good idea rather than the blueprint of an actual campaign. Nobody had real over-all authority over what was about to be done except the President, who was much too far away to do more than block out the general objectives. Bragg could give no binding orders to Smith, and Smith could give none to Bragg. They were committed to cordial co-operation, but there was no boss. Bragg and Smith commanded separate armies, facing different foes under different conditions, and if at a crucial moment one man wanted to go one way while the other man wanted to go another way co-operation was likely to disappear.
Bragg and Smith met at Chattanooga early in August and apparently agreed on a plan. They had two Federal armies to consider. Buell’s, which then numbered a little more than 30,000 and could quickly be made bigger, was spread out along the railroad that came southeast from Nashville to Stevenson, Alabama; if left alone, it would some day march on Chattanooga. A force of 9000 under Brigadier General George W. Morgan occupied Cumberland Gap, and presumably meant to come down eventually on Knoxville. The first step for the Confederates, obviously, was to dispose of those Federal armies.
Bragg understood that the campaign would begin with the recapture of Cumberland Gap, which would take care of the Federal General Morgan; after this, Bragg and Smith would join forces and fall on Buell. Beating Buell, they would clear central Tennessee of Federals, and then move into Kentucky—which, according to that spirited Kentucky cavalryman, John Hunt Morgan, would immediately throw out its Unionist governor and legislature and support the Confederacy enthusiastically with numerous recruits and abundant supplies.
Smith either understood the plan differently or changed his mind immediately after the conference. He marched out of Knoxville in mid-August, before Bragg was ready to move, left a division to mask Cumberland Gap, and went boldly north into Kentucky, getting farther away from Bragg at every step.
Thus co-operation had failed at the outset, and Bragg had to revise his own plan. Since Smith was entering Kentucky with hardly more than a third as many soldiers as Buell commanded, he had to be supported; and so, on August 21, Bragg got his army under way, crossing the Tennessee River at Chattanooga and striking northward into the tough mountain country in order to put his army between Buell’s and Smith’s. He made the move smartly, and Buell—whose grasp on the military initiative had been somewhat loose all summer—was forced to give up his cautious advance on Chattanooga and adjust his movements to those of his enemy. By September 5, Bragg had crossed the mountains and the Cumberland River and had gone all the way to the Kentucky line, entering that state at the town of Tompkinsville, while Buell was still concentrating his own forces at Murfreesboro, seventy-five miles to the south. Buell was being reinforced. He was gathering in his own scattered units, and in addition two of Grant’s divisions were coming from western Tennessee to join him. Grant was warned to keep a third available; and it seemed to Buell that his best course was to leave an adequate force to hold Nashville and take everyone else into Kentucky in pursuit of Bragg. Since Bragg would go all the way to the Ohio River unless Buell overtook him, the pursuit was necessary; but to Andrew Johnson, the militantly Unionist Tennessee Senator who had been made military governor of the state, it looked like a ruinous retreat, and Johnson filed bitter complaints with Washington. Washington was not happy. When Buell sent a reasoned explanation of his proposed movements, Halleck gave him a cold reply: “March where you please, provided you find the enemy and fight him.”7
Bragg and Smith were still a long way apart, and to get their armies and their ideas for using them into close harmony might be difficult; but their campaign undeniably was off to an excellent start, and it spread feverish alarm in the North. By August 30 Smith was approaching the town of Richmond in central Kentucky, roughly halfway between Cumberland Gap and Cincinnati, and at this place he virtually obliterated a scratch force of 6500 Federals which tried to stop him. The soldiers were mostly untrained Indiana recruits, hastily scraped together and sent to the front under one of Buell’s trusted lieutenants, Major General William Nelson; Smith’s veterans disposed of them with moderate effort, capturing 4000 unwounded prisoners. One immediate result of the victory was that the Federal General Morgan evacuated Cumberland Gap and made a prodigious two hundred mile retreat all the way to the Ohio River.
Smith marched on and occupied Lexington, where he got a heartwarming welcome: Confederate flags all over the place, women and girls crying a welcome from every window and garden, baskets of food and buckets of cold water at street corners for the refreshment of tired Confederates, everyone exulting (as an Arkansas soldier put it) that “Kentucky was at last about to be free.” The town almost exploded with joy when John Hunt Morgan and his cavalry came through on the gallop; all the church bells rang, and people who had no flags waved their handkerchiefs, and laughed or wept or cheered as the spirit moved them. Smith sent a jubilant message off to Bragg. He was going to move on to Cincinnati, he said, all that was needed was to have the left of his army in touch with the right of Bragg’s, and “if I am supported and can be supplied with arms, 25,000 Kentucky troops in a few days will be added to my command.”8
Moving against Cincinnati, Smith was spreading himself just a bit thin. He commanded about 21,000 men, but 8000 of them were at Cumberland Gap and 3000 more were chasing Federal General George Morgan, and Smith had hardly more than 10,000 soldiers immediately at hand; not enough by half for an invasion of Ohio. But the long strong flood Bragg had talked about was moving, the Federals were obviously getting panicky, and in a panic anything can happen; so Smith’s leading division went north through Cynthiana toward Covington, and all the Ohio country responded in a fever of patriotism, fright and overflowing energy. David Tod, Governor of Ohio, urged loyal men in each county to take up arms and prepare for the worst, declaring that “the soil of Ohio must not be invaded by the enemies of our glorious government.” Major General Lew Wallace, who may have been just the man for the assignment, assumed command of the defenses of Cincinnati, suspended ferryboat service on the river, devised the slogan “Citizens for labor, soldiers for battle,” and announced that all business would be suspended so that able-bodied men could go out and dig trenches, under police supervision. From the outlying precincts homespun citizens showed up with muzzle loaders, powder horns, and leather bullet pouches; 15,000 of them and more, by all accounts, men who were either backwoodsmen or could pass for such with citified reporters; and they prepared to man the trenches dug by less picturesque folk, in case armed secession drew nigh. They were said to be squirrel hunters and this was their great day, and they became legendary; shooting no Rebels, because no Rebels ever came within range. The final note about them is an anxious query sent to Wallace by a Regular Army officer a fortnight later: “Cannot I get rid of the Squirrel Hunters? They are under no control.” In the end, Cincinnati was saved. Kirby Smith had just been making a feint.9
The danger looked real enough at the time. Bragg also was driving north, and Buell’s men marched hard in a vain effort to overtake him. Bragg came up thirty miles east of Bowling Green, which had marked the center of Albert
Sidney Johnston’s line just a year earlier, and at Munfordville, where the railroad to Louisville crossed the Green River, he struck a Federal strong point held by 4000 men under Colonel John T. Wilder, who until recently had been an unassuming Indiana business man and who now was about to add a strange little footnote to the story of the Civil War.
Bragg’s advance guard attacked the fortifications twice and was repulsed with moderate loss. Then Bragg brought up the rest of his army and sent in a demand for surrender, pointing out that the Federals were surrounded and that their case was hopeless. Through the Confederate lines that night came a flag of truce and a Yankee officer—Colonel Wilder in person, seeking a conference with Major General Buckner, who led a division in Hardee’s corps. In Buckner’s tent Wilder became disarmingly frank. He was not, he said, a military man at all, but he did want to do the right thing. He had heard that Buckner was not only a professional soldier but an honest gentleman as well; and would Buckner now please tell him if, under the rules of the game, it was Colonel Wilder’s duty to surrender or to fight it out?
Somewhat flabbergasted—he said later that he “would not have deceived that man under those circumstances for anything”—Buckner said Wilder would have to make his own decision. (He knew what a weight that was. Seven months earlier he had had to surrender Fort Donelson, his superiors having fled from responsibility, and when he sent a flag through the Yankee lines his old friend Grant had been merciless.) Buckner pointed out that Wilder’s men were hemmed in by six times their own numbers and that Bragg had enough artillery in line to destroy the fort in short order; at the same time, if the sacrifice of every man would aid the Federal cause elsewhere it was Wilder’s duty to fight.… In the end, Buckner took him to see Bragg, who was curt with him but let him count the cannon in the Confederate works. Wilder counted enough to convince him that the jig was up, and at last he surrendered: a well-meaning but bewildered citizen-soldier who had gone to his enemy for professional advice and, all things considered, had been fairly dealt with.10