Terrible Swift Sword

by Bruce Catton

  Perhaps this was high tide, or something like it. It was September 17, and the advancing Confederates had canceled the threat to eastern Tennessee, had taken more than 8000 prisoners, and had compelled 50,000 Yankee invaders to head northward in unseemly haste for the Ohio River. They had caused happy crowds to go cheering through the streets of Lexington, and had forced other crowds to dig trenches at Cincinnati, while squirrel hunters held a muster. Bragg suddenly ceased to be the dour dyspeptic; for once in his career he actually seemed lighthearted, and he fairly bubbled with praise for the soldiers in his command.

  “My army is in high spirits, and ready to go anywhere the ‘old general’ says,” he wrote, in a letter to Mrs. Bragg. “Not a murmur escapes a man.… We have made the most extraordinary campaign in military history.” One of his officers noted that two soldiers who had been sentenced to be shot for insulting Kentucky women (nature of the insult not specified) had been reprieved by the commanding general, and wrote: “We begin to think Bragg isn’t nearly the inhuman, blood-thirsty monster that he has been represented to be.” Colonel Wilder, having toured the camp, said that although Bragg’s soldiers were terribly ragged and dirty, “I never saw an army in a more perfect state of discipline,” and in a dispatch to the War Department Bragg asserted: “My admiration of and love for my army cannot be expressed.” He spoke of its “patient toil and admirable discipline” and remarked that “the men are much jaded and somewhat destitute, but cheerful and confident without a murmur.” He added hopefully: “We move soon on a combined expedition with General Smith.”11

  High tide; but possibly not quite as high as it looked. The men were, after all, very tired, for they had made a prodigious march across difficult country, and although Bragg held his enlisted men in high regard he had little use for most of his generals. (He had told Adjutant General Cooper earlier in the summer that some of these “are only incumbrances and would be better out of the way,” and said that their weakness robbed his army of a quarter of its efficiency.)12 Smith was still one hundred miles away, and although Buell had been badly outmaneuvered he was too strong to be beaten unless Bragg’s and Smith’s armies could be united. Near Munfordville Bragg hesitated, waited for Buell to attack him, found that he would not, and at last moved northeast to Bardstown, where he hoped that Smith would join him. (This move gave Buell a clear road to Louisville, whereas before the road had been blocked.) At Bardstown, however, Bragg found no Smith: just a letter from Smith urging him to destroy Buell as quickly as he could because the people of Kentucky would not support the Confederacy until Buell had been defeated.13

  Bragg’s pessimism began to return. He believed that the success of his whole campaign depended finally on an uprising of loyal Kentuckians; if they were not going to rise the campaign would be a failure no matter how brilliantly it had been conducted. When a cheering Bardstown crowd surrounded his hotel and called him out to the veranda for a speech, Bragg was frank. He had come north to enable Kentucky “to express her southern preference without fear of northern bayonets,” but it was all up to the people themselves. If they would support him he would support them, but if they should “decline the offer of liberty” he would take his army away and leave the state to its own devices. He notified the War Department that “we are sadly disappointed at the want of action by our friends in Kentucky.” Recruits thus far did not even equal the number of casualties that had been incurred, although casualties had been light; he had brought 15,000 stand of arms along but so far had found hardly anyone to use them, and “unless a change occurs soon we must abandon the garden spot of Kentucky to its own cupidity.”14

  The bright sky was slowly darkening; the unhappy fact being that although Bragg and Smith had outwitted and outmarched their opponents they had passed an invisible meridian and had moved into an area where time was on the side of the Federals. Simply to march into Kentucky was not enough, no matter how brilliantly it was done. The Yankees who held Kentucky had to be beaten—not in outpost affairs, but in a major battle—and the longer this battle was deferred the less chance did the Confederates have to win it, because the Yankee armies were getting stronger every day while the Confederate armies were not. Bragg and Smith were not exactly avoiding battle, but they were not driving on relentlessly to provoke a battle at all hazards; by this time the hazards were beginning to look too great. Smith was torn between a desire to occupy Frankfort, the capital of the state, and a fear that the Federals would strike him in the rear, and his moves were tentative and ineffective. Bragg was beginning to show the strange bleakness of spirit which sometimes came upon him in time of crisis, making him brood over a danger instead of striking it dead with one decisive blow. Growing uncertain, he was beginning to fumble.

  The Yankees themselves were far from happy. Buell, who had been actively campaigning all summer without once encountering Confederate infantry, was as deliberate as ever. He got up to Louisville while Bragg was occupying Bardstown, and he busied himself organizing the untrained reinforcements which Middle Western governors were frantically sending to him, but Washington was growing irritable. Before September ended, the War Department ordered him to turn over his command to George Thomas, suspending the order only when Thomas protested that it was unfair to change generals on the eve of a decisive battle. (Unfair to the man replaced; unfair, also, to the man who had to replace him.) Buell stayed in command, but his neck was in a noose and he would inevitably pass from the scene unless he won a victory.

  But the real pressure was on the Confederates. Taking the offensive, they had obligated themselves to live beyond their means. All that they had won would be lost unless they got a victory in the open field. Unlimited war demanded an unlimited victory.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Thenceforward and Forever

  1: Recipe for Confusion

  In the West, John Pope had declared, Federal soldiers mostly saw the backs of their enemies, and the same thing ought to happen in Virginia. Whatever this statement lacked in accuracy—Buell’s army right now was going north at top speed, the backs of its enemies out of sight in advance—it at least breathed the offensive spirit. Acting on this spirit, and recovering quickly from the embarrassing check at Cedar Mountain, General Pope in mid-August assembled his troops and set out to carry the war to the foe. He got as far as the Rapidan River, made ready to cross and campaign in true western style, and then began to learn that in Virginia things were different.

  To begin with, he was facing Robert E. Lee, whose like he had not yet seen. In addition he was at the mercy both of his own shortcomings, which General Lee would cruelly expose and exploit, and of the high command of the Army of the Potomac, which expected him to fail and which in the end would be deliberate enough to make failure certain. Finally, General Pope was coming to the stage just when the nature of the war was changing.

  Both sides had supposed originally that they fought to restore the past, the difference between them being largely a question of what the past really meant and how it could best be regained. Now something more fundamental was coming to the surface, compelling men to examine their ideas about the future. So the fighting would be different, hereafter, infinitely harder to control and understand than it had been before. The going was likely to be rough for a Federal Army commander unless he was either totally phlegmatic or exceptionally perceptive; and John Pope unfortunately was neither. He was just average, operating in a time and place where a strictly average soldier was likely to run into trouble. What happened to him was probably inevitable, and anyway he brought most of it on himself, but he could have been luckier.

  By August 15, Pope had about 55,000 men under his immediate direction, including 8000 men of General Burnside’s corps under Major General Jesse Reno. He was on the Rapidan—that fated river which almost seemed to be a boundary between Federal and Confederate Virginia—and Halleck had warned him to stay there until the Army of the Potomac joined him; and so Pope waited, guarding the river crossings and expecting that from 70,0
00 to 100,000 of McClellan’s veterans would presently be lined up beside him. When that happened, Pope believed, General Halleck would come down from Washington to take field command, with Pope and McClellan as his chief lieutenants. Meanwhile Pope would hold the pivot.

  He had picked a poor spot for it, because his position was potentially most dangerous. The Rappahannock River was behind him, and the railroad which was his life line ran back to that river on a long diagonal, from his right front to his left rear. If the Confederates should steal a march, side-step a few miles to the east and then move due north across the Rapidan, they could reach the Rappahannock crossing before Pope could—cutting off his supplies, closing his escape hatch, trapping him between the rivers and then disposing of him at their leisure. The inexpert Federal cavalry was hopelessly overmatched by Jeb Stuart’s men, which meant that Lee almost certainly could steal a march or two if he tried, and Lee was exactly the sort who would try. He would try it soon, because time was running out. McClellan was still at Harrison’s Landing but his troops would begin to reach Pope in ten days or less. Whatever Lee did must be done quickly.

  His first attempt just missed. On August 18, Lee ordered a shift to the right followed by a quick drive across the river, and if things had gone as planned Pope’s army very probably would have been crushed. But some of Stuart’s cavalry missed an assignment and Robert Toombs’s infantry left unguarded a river crossing that was supposed to be sealed, and so a Federal patrol got south of the Rapidan and learned what was up by capturing an officer bearing Lee’s orders. So Pope was warned; and although he had spoken freely about letting lines of retreat take care of themselves and acting always on the offensive he retreated now in great haste, and late on August 19 he had his entire force safely back behind the Rappahannock. He guarded the crossings with care, and for several days Lee could do nothing but spar with him and look for an opening.1

  There was no opening, for Pope was on the alert; and with each passing day Lee’s chance for victory grew smaller. On August 20 McClellan’s V Army Corps, under Fitz John Porter, began landing at Aquia Creek, ten miles northeast of Fredericksburg, and started to move west toward the upper Rappahannock. On August 22 the III Corps, led by Samuel P. Heintzelman, reached Alexandria and began to march down overland. The rest of Burnside’s men were coming up, and so was a detachment brought over from western Virginia, and, by August 25, Pope had 70,000 men within call, with more on the way. Lee was already outnumbered, and in another week his case would be hopeless.2

  He would not give the Yankees that week. He had said that John Pope ought to be “suppressed”—quite as if the man were no soldier but a mere disturber of the peace on whom the law ought to descend—he proposed to do it personally, and if he could not break through Pope’s line he would go around it. On August 25 he sent Stonewall Jackson with 24,000 men off on a long swing to the northwest. Jackson was to march entirely away from Pope’s front, circling off behind the Bull Run mountains and then coming east through Thoroughfare Gap to strike Pope in the rear. Lee and Longstreet would tarry on the Rappahannock, to persuade Pope that the whole Confederate Army was still there, and in due time they would follow Jackson, join hands with him somewhere far to the north of their present position, and there compel Pope to fight a battle. Once Pope was beaten there would be time to see about the Army of the Potomac.

  This of course was precisely the sort of move Stonewall Jackson liked. Something about the campaign in the Chickahominy swamps had baffled him, but he was over it now, thinking and acting like the Jackson of the Valley campaign; he was a panther once more, swift and stealthy and deadly, and he got his veterans on the road at dawn and set off on a typical Jackson march, driving his men relentlessly, discussing his plans with no one. Lee saw him off, and then—as calmly as if there was nothing on earth to worry about—he wrote to Mrs. Lee, giving her a modest summing-up of the plan that had been in his mind ever since he left Richmond.

  “I think we shall at least change the theater of war from James river to north of the Rappk,” he wrote. “That is part of the advantage I contemplated. If it is effective at least for a season it will be a great gain.”3

  To move the war from the vicinity of Richmond to the vicinity of Washington would, as he said, be very good; even if he failed to destroy Pope’s army he would nevertheless have gained much. But Lee was really looking for a chance to win it all—to get the Yankees entirely out of Virginia and to win on Northern soil the victory that would end the war. The Confederate tide was rising, in the east and in the west, and the unearthly vision of independence achieved was something better than a mirage. Lee was not looking solely for a tactical advantage; he was leading the counteroffensive that sought nothing less than final triumph, and this move that risked so much had everything to gain.

  The risk, to be sure, was immense. Already outnumbered, Lee was dividing his army in the immediate presence of his enemy, which is the sort of thing that all the books warn against, and for at least two days the halves of his army would be out of touch. If Pope discovered what was going on and acted with reasonable intelligence and energy he could bring Lee’s entire campaign to ruin, holding those separated halves apart and dealing with each in turn under conditions which would give him all of the advantages. If he could even stall for another week or so, the two Federal armies would be fully united and no conceivable strategic brilliance would help the Confederacy. Once again, Lee was letting everything ride on the play of one card.

  But the risks had been carefully figured. Lee had no higher opinion of Pope’s military capacity than McClellan had. He knew that Pope’s army was still a collection of unassimilated units, some of which were poorly led and were used to defeat. If Lee was trying to unite two separate armies on the field of battle, the Federals after all were trying to do the same thing, and Lee undoubtedly was able to see that smooth co-operation between Pope and McClellan was unlikely. Finally, the whole tone of the war just now was in his favor. The Yankees were at odds with themselves; a sudden shock might jar them apart. Secretary of the Navy Mallory expressed it, in a letter he wrote at the end of the month:

  “We are stronger today than we have ever been, while our enemy is weaker. As our people have become firmly bound together for this war, those of the North have become discontented, and discord is now predominant in their counsels. Lincoln’s cabinet dread a defeat, and hence their armies are everywhere retreating.… If we should defeat Pope decidedly, the backbone of the war will be over; for the opposition to the abolition party would shear it of its strength.”4

  Northern discord and discontent were very real, producing tangible military consequences. Among these (and this was much to General Lee’s advantage) there was a distorting, paralyzing pressure on the central nervous system of the Army of the Potomac.

  That army would fight heroically when the time for fighting came, but its military mind had been warped. There was that overwrought, emotional atmosphere at headquarters in which the government itself was seen as an enemy, individual members of the government were abominable villains, leaders of other Federal armies were stupid rivals; and a long-nursed sense of injury and isolation created a sensitivity so acute that the army could not be handled at all except by someone with the most delicate touch. Just when the outcome of the war might depend on the agility with which this army left its own chosen field to operate in a field selected by someone else (villainous superior or detested rival) the army was sluggish and petulant. It disliked the way Washington treated it; even more, it disliked the kind of war Washington obviously meant to fight, and it wanted to define what victory was going to mean even before it flexed its muscles to insure that the victory would be gained.

  While he was preparing to send his sick away from Harrison’s Landing, at a time when the order to withdraw his army had been foreshadowed but not yet received, McClellan explained to Halleck, by letter, that the Federal government must fight for a victory which the South would accept.

  “The people o
f the South,” he wrote, “should understand that we are not making war upon the institution of slavery, but that if they submit to the Constitution and the laws of the Union they will be protected in their constitutional rights of every nature.… I therefore deprecate and view with infinite dread any policy which tends to render impossible the reconstruction of the Union and to make this contest simply a useless effusion of blood.” Halleck replied that he agreed entirely, and that Pope’s venomous orders regarding Southern civilians in occupied territory were most injudicious: still (he said) it was necessary to bring the Army of the Potomac to Pope’s side, and would McClellan please hurry the movement along?5

  All things considered, the movement went slowly. Orders to leave the peninsula had been received on August 3, and the first contingents reached the upper Potomac nineteen days later. Those nineteen days added up to more time than the Federal government could afford to lose. They were time enough to enable Lee to shift the cockpit of the war from the valley of the James back to northern Virginia, and to compel the government at Washington to stop thinking about what the capture of Richmond would mean and to think instead about what would happen if Pope’s army were lost. Perhaps, indeed, these were the days in which the last chance to keep the war within bounds faded and died. General Halleck grew impatient and told McClellan to move faster, and McClellan’s feelings were hurt; and it was necessary to send down a sort of military ambassador to smooth his feathers.

  The ambassador was General Burnside, who managed to convince McClellan that although the general-in-chief was more or less in a hurry he was not actually hostile, and McClellan at length wrote Halleck: “I am glad to say that Burnside has satisfied me that you are still my friend.” Halleck replied almost apologetically, admitting that in the heat of the moment, what with the crisis of the war at hand and all, he may have been a trifle brusque: “It is very probable that my messages to you were more urgent and pressing than guarded in their language. I certainly meant nothing harsh, but I did feel that you did not act as promptly as I thought the circumstances required.” Then, as delicately as possible, Halleck again called for speed: