The Civil War: A Narrative: Volume 3: Red River to Appomattox

by Shelby Foote

  Let him alone, either then or later, was the one thing almost no one in Washington seemed willing to do; except Lincoln, who assured Grant that he intended to do just that, at least in a military sense. “The particulars of your plan I neither know nor seek to know,” he was to tell him presently, on the eve of commitment, and even at their first interview, before the general left for Tennessee, he had told him (according to Grant’s recollection of the exchange, years later) “that he had never professed to be a military man or to know how campaigns should be conducted … but that procrastination on the part of commanders and the pressure from the people at the North and Congress, which was always with him, forced him to issue his series of ‘Military Orders’ — one, two, three, etc. He did not know but they were all wrong, and did know that some of them were. All he wanted or had ever wanted was someone who would take the responsibility and act, and call on him for all the assistance needed.”

  Welcome though this was to hear, Grant was no doubt aware that the President had said similar things to previous commanders (John C. Frémont, for example, whom he told: “I have given you carte blanche. You must use your own judgment, and do the best you can.” Or McClellan, who quoted his assurances after Antietam: “General, you have saved the country. You must remain in command and carry us through to the end. I pledge myself to stand between you and harm”) only to jerk the rug from under their feet a short time later, when their backs were turned; Lincoln had never been one to keep a promise any longer than he believed the good of the country was involved. However, in this case he supplemented his private with public remarks to the same effect. “Grant is the first general I have had,” he was reported to be saying. “I am glad to find a man who can go ahead without me.” To a friend who doubted that Grant should be given so free a rein, he replied: “Do you hire a man to do your work and then do it yourself?” To another, who remarked that he was looking well these days, he responded with an analogy. “Oh, yes, I feel better,” he laughed, “for now I’m like the man who was blown up on a steamboat and said, on coming down, ‘It makes no difference to me; I’m only a passenger.’ ”

  Partly Lincoln’s ebullience was the result of having learned, if not the particulars, then at any rate certain features of Grant’s plan. Of its details, an intimate said later that they “were communicated only to Grant’s most important or most trusted subordinates” — Meade, Butler, and Sigel, of course, along with Sherman and Banks. “To no others, except to members of his personal staff, did Grant impart a knowledge of his plans; and, even among these, there were some with whom he was reticent.” The President and the Secretary of War were both excluded, though he was willing to discuss with them the principle to be applied in bringing “the greatest number of troops practicable” to bear against the forces in rebellion; for example, that the units charged with the occupation of captured territory and the prevention of rebel incursions into the North “could perform this service just as well by advancing as by remaining still, and by advancing they would compel the enemy to keep detachments to hold them back, or else lay his own territory open to invasion.” Lincoln saw the point at once, having urged it often in the past, although with small success. “Those not skinning can hold a leg,” he said. Grant, as the son of a tanner, knew that this had reference to hog-killing time in the West, where all hands were given a share in the work even though there were not enough skinning-knives to go round. He liked the expression so well, in fact, that he passed it along to Sherman the following week in a letter explaining Sigel’s share in the Virginia campaign: “If Sigel can’t skin himself he can hold a leg while someone else skins.”

  By that time he was in the field, where he enjoyed greater privacy in working on his plan for the distribution of knives to be used in flaying the South alive. Having returned to Washington on March 23, he established headquarters three days later at Culpeper, six miles beyond Brandy Station on the Orange & Alexandria Railroad, about midway between the Rappahannock and the Rapidan. This was the week of the vernal equinox; tomorrow was Easter Sunday. Yet a fifteen-inch snow had fallen that Tuesday and the land was still locked in the grip of winter, as if to mock the hope expressed to Sherman that the armies could launch their separate but concentric attacks by April 25. To the west, in plain view, the Blue Ridge Mountains bore on their peaks and slopes deep drifts of snow, which Grant had been told by old-timers hereabouts would have to have melted away before he could be sure that bad weather had gone for good and the roads would support his moving trains and guns. Down here on the flat at least its whiteness served to hide the scars inflicted by commanders North and South, who, as one observer remarked, “had led their armies up and down these fields and made the landscape desolate.” Roundabout Culpeper, he added, “not a house nor a fence, not a tree was to be seen for miles, where once all had been cultivated farmland or richly wooded country. Here and there, a stack of chimneys or a broken cistern marked the site of a former homestead, but every other landmark had been destroyed. The very hills were stripped of their forest panoply, and a man could hardly recognize the haunts familiar to him in his childhood.”

  Although at present much of this was mercifully blanketed from sight, the worst of the scars no snow could hide, for they existed in men’s minds and signified afflictions of the spirit, afflictions Grant would have to overcome before he could instill into the Army of the Potomac the self-confidence and aggressiveness which he considered prerequisite to the successful prosecution of its offensive against an adversary famed throughout the world as the embodiment of the qualities said to be lacking on the near side of the river that ran between the armies. Discouraging to his hopes for the inculcation of the spirit of the offensive, the very landmarks scattered about this fought-over section of Virginia served as doleful reminders of what such plans had come to in the past. Westward beyond the snow-clad Blue Ridge lay the Shenandoah Valley, where Banks and Frémont had been sorely drubbed and utterly confused, and northeastward, leading down this way, ran the course of the Buckland Races, in which the cavalry had been chased and taunted. Cedar Mountain loomed dead ahead; there Sigel, thrown forward by bristly Pope, had come a cropper, as Pope himself had done only three weeks later, emulating the woeful example of Irvin McDowell on the plains of Manassas, where the rebels feasted on his stores, forty miles back up the railroad. Downriver about half that distance, Burnside had suffered the throbbing pain and numbing indignity of the Fredericksburg blood-bath and the Mud March; while close at hand, just over the Rapidan, brooded the Wilderness, where Hooker had come to grief in a May riot of smoke-choked greenery and Meade had nearly done the same, inching forward through the ice-cramped woods a scant four months ago, except that he pulled back in time to avoid destruction. All these were painful memories to the veterans who had survived them and passed them on to recruits as a tradition of defeat — a tradition which Grant was seeking now, if not to erase (for it could never be erased; it was too much a part of history, kept alive in the pride of the butternut scarecrows over the river) then at any rate to overcome by locking it firmly in the past and replacing it with one of victory.

  In working thus at his plans for bringing that tradition into existence, here and elsewhere, he was assisted greatly by a command arrangement allowed for in the War Department order appointing him general-in-chief in place of Halleck, who was relieved “at his own request” and made chief of staff, an office created to provide a channel of communication between Grant and his nineteen department heads, particularly in administrative matters. The work would be heavy for Old Brains, the glory slight; Hooker, who had feuded with him throughout his eastern tenure, sneered that his situation was like that of a man who married with the understanding that he would not sleep with his wife. But Halleck thereby freed Grant from the need for attending to a great many routine distractions. Instead of being snowed under by paperwork, the lieutenant general could give his full attention to strategic planning, and this he did. From time to time he would return to Washington for a
n overnight stay — primarily, it would seem, to visit Mrs Grant, who had joined him in Cincinnati for the ride back east — but mainly he kept to his desk in the field, poring over maps and blueing the air of his Culpeper headquarters with cigar smoke, much as he had done a year ago in the former ladies’ cabin of the Magnolia, where he planned the campaign that took Vicksburg.

  2

  Of all these several component segments, each designed to contribute to Grant’s over-all pattern for victory on a national scale, the first to go awry was the preliminary one — preliminary, that is, in the sense that it would have to be wound up before the more valid thrust at Mobile could begin — involving Banks and Steele in the far-off Transmississippi, hundreds of miles from the two vital centers around which would swirl the fighting that would determine the outcome of the war. It was the first because it had already begun to falter before Grant was in a position to exercise control. Moreover, once he was in such a position, as general-in-chief, his attempts along that line only served to increase the frustration which both subordinates, proceeding as it were against their hearts, had been feeling all along. Not that it mattered all that much, whatever he did or did not do, for the seeds of defeat had been planted in the conception. By then the only cure would have been to abandon the crop entirely; which would not do, since Lincoln himself, with a fretful sidelong glance at France’s latter-day Napoleon, had had a hand in the sowing.

  Promptly after the midsummer fall of Port Hudson opened the Mississippi to Union trade throughout its length, Halleck had taken the conquest of Texas as his prime concern in the western theater. It seemed to him the logical next step. Besides, he had always liked to keep things tidy in his rear, and every success achieved under his direction had been followed by a pause for just that purpose. After Donelson, after Corinth, after Vicksburg, he had dismembered the victorious blue force, dispersing its parts on various lateral or rearward assignments, with much attendant loss of momentum. Consequently, although it was here that the North had scored all but a handful of its triumphs in the field, the war in the West had consisted largely of starts and stops, with the result that a considerable portion of the Federal effort had been expended in overcoming prime inertia at the start of each campaign. And so it was to be in the present case, if Old Brains had his way. With the President’s unquestioning approval — which, as usual, tended to make him rather imperious in manner and altogether intolerant of objections — Halleck had been urging the conquest of Texas on Banks, who had been opposed in the main to such a venture, so far at least as it involved his own participation. A former Massachusetts governor and Speaker of the national House of Representatives, he was, like most political appointees, concerned with building a military reputation on which to base his postwar bid for further political advancement. He had in fact his eye on the White House, and he preferred a more spectacular assignment, one nearer the center of the stage and attended with less risk, or in any case no more risk than seemed commensurate with the prize, which in his opinion this did not; Texas was undeniably vast, but it was also comparatively empty. He favored Mobile as a fitting objective by these standards, and had been saying so ever since the surrender of Port Hudson first gave him the feel of laurels on his brow. Halleck had stuck to Texas, however, and Halleck as general-in-chief had had his way.

  Texas it was, although there still was considerable disagreement as to the best approach to the goal, aside from a general conviction that it could not be due west across the Sabine and the barrens, where, as one of Banks’s staff remarked, there was “no water in the summer and fall, and plenty of water but no road in the winter and spring.” Halleck favored an ascent of Red River, to Shreveport and beyond, which would allow for gunboat support and rapid transportation of supplies; but this had some of the same disadvantages as the direct crosscountry route, the Red being low on water all through fall and winter. While waiting for the spring rise, without which the river was unnavigable above Alexandria, barely one third of the distance up to Shreveport, Banks tried his hand at a third approach, the mounting of amphibious assaults against various points along the Lone Star coast. The first of these, at Sabine Pass in September, was bloodily repulsed; the navy lost two gunboats and their crews before admitting it could put no troops ashore at that point. So Banks revised his plan by reversing it, end for end. He managed an unsuspected landing near the mouth of the Rio Grande, occupied Brownsville unopposed, and began to work his way back east by way of Aransas Pass and Matagorda Bay. There he stopped. So far he had encountered no resistance, but just ahead lay Galveston, with Sabine Pass beyond, both of them scenes of past defeats which he would not risk repeating. All he had got for his pains was a couple of dusty border towns and several bedraggled miles of beach, amounting to little more in fact than a few pinpricks along one leathery flank of the Texas elephant. By now it was nearly spring, however, and time for him to get back onto what Halleck, in rather testy dispatches, had kept assuring him was the true path of conquest: up the Red, which soon was due for the annual rise that would convert it into an artery of invasion.

  By now, too, as a result of closer inspection of the prize, Banks had somewhat revised his opinion as to the worth of the proposed campaign. Mobile was still what he ached for, but Mobile would have to wait. Meantime, a successful ascent of the Red, as a means of achieving the subjugation of East Texas, would not only add a feather to his military cap; it would also, by affording him and his army valuable training in the conduct of combined operations, serve as excellent preparation for better and more difficult things to come. Besides, study disclosed immediate advantages he had overlooked before. In addition to providing a bulwark against the machinations of the French in Mexico, the occupation of Shreveport would yield political as well as strategic fruits. First there was Lincoln’s so-called Ten Percent plan, whereby a state would be permitted to return to the national fold as soon as ten percent of its voters affirmed their loyalty to the Union and its laws. With Shreveport firmly in Federal hands, Confederate threats would no longer deter the citizens of West Louisiana and South Arkansas from taking the oath required; Louisiana and Arkansas, grateful to the Administration which had granted them readmission, would cast their votes in the November election, thereby winning for the general who had made such action possible the gratitude of the man who, four years later, would exert a powerful influence in the choice of his successor. There, indeed, was a prize worth grasping. Moreover, the aforementioned strategic fruits of such a campaign had been greatly enlarged in the course of the fall and winter, occasioned by Steele’s advance on Little Rock in September, which extended the Federal occupation down to the Arkansas River, bisecting the state along a line from Fort Smith to Napoleon, and posed a threat to Confederate installations farther south. Ordnance works at Camden and Arkadelphia had been shifted to Tyler and Marshall, Texas, where they now were back in production, as were others newly established at Houston and San Antonio. Cut off from the industrial East by the fall of Vicksburg, still-insurgent Transmississippians had striven in earnest to develop their own resources. Factories at Tyler, Houston, and Austin, together with one at Washington, Arkansas, were delivering 10,000 pairs of shoes a month to rebel quartermasters, and inmates of the Texas penitentiary at Huntsville were turning out more than a million yards of cotton and woolen cloth every month, to be made into gray or butternut uniforms for distribution to die-hard fighters in all three states of the region. Shreveport itself had become an industrial complex quite beyond anyone’s dream a year ago, with foundries, shops, and laboratories for the production of guns and ammunition, without which not even the doughtiest grayback would constitute the semblance of a threat. If Banks could lay hands on Shreveport, then move on into the Lone Star vastness just beyond, the harvest would be heavy, both in matériel and glory. By late January, having considered all this, and more, he was so far in agreement with Halleck that he wired him: “The occupation of Shreveport will be to the country west of the Mississippi what that of Chattanooga is
to the east. And as soon as this can be accomplished,” he added, his enthusiasm waxing as he wrote, “the country west of Shreveport will be in condition for a movement into Texas.”

  Another persuasive factor there was, which in time would be reckoned the most influential of them all, though less perhaps on Banks himself than on various others, in and out of the army and navy, about to be involved in the campaign. This was cotton. Banks was intrigued by the notion that the proposed invasion not only could be carried out on a self-supporting basis, financially speaking, but could result in profits that would cover other, less lucrative efforts, such as the ones about to be launched through the ravaged counties of northern Virginia and across the red-clay hills and gullies of North Georgia. What was more, he backed his calculations with experience. On his march up Bayou Teche to Alexandria, in April of the year before, he had seized an estimated $5,000,000 in contraband goods, including lumber, sugar and salt, cattle and livestock, and cotton to the amount of 5000 bales. This last represented nearly half the value of the spoils — and would represent even more today, with the price in Boston soaring rapidly toward two dollars a pound in greenbacks. Yet those 5000 bales collected along the Teche were scarcely more than a dab compared to the number awaiting seizure in plantation sheds along the Red and in the Texas hinterland; Banks predicted that the campaign would produce between 200,000 and 300,000 bales. Even the lower of these two figures, at a conservative estimate of $500 a bale, would bulge the Treasury with no less than a hundred million dollars, which by itself would be enough to run the whole war for two months. Nor was that all. In addition to this direct financial gain, he would also put back into operation the spindles lying idle in the mills of his native state, where he had got his start as a bobbin boy and where the voters would someday turn out in hordes to express their thanks for all he had done for them and the nation in their time of trial. It was no wonder his enthusiasm rose with every closer look at the political, strategic, and financial possibilities of a campaign he formerly had thought not worth his time.