The History of the Confederate War, Its Causes and Its Conduct, Volume 2 (of 2)
by George Cary Eggleston · English · Gutenberg #46175 · 583,418 chars · public domain (US)
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Title: The History of the Confederate War, Its Causes and Its Conduct, Volume 2 (of 2)
Author: George Cary Eggleston
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THE HISTORY OF THE CONFEDERATE WAR
ITS CAUSES AND ITS CONDUCT
A Narrative and Critical History
by
GEORGE CARY EGGLESTON
VOLUME I
New York
Sturgis & Walton Company
1910
All rights reserved
Copyright, 1910
By Sturgis & Walton Company
Set up and electrotyped. Published March, 1910
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
PART II.--THE CONDUCT OF THE WAR _Continued_
XXXI. The Struggle for Emancipation 3
XXXII. Burnside's Fredericksburg Campaign 19
XXXIII. Halleck's Treatment of Grant 31
XXXIV. Grant at Corinth 38
XXXV. Bragg's Campaign against Louisville 53
XXXVI. Fall and Winter Campaigns at the West and South 72
XXXVII. The Chancellorsville Campaign 83
XXXVIII. The Gettysburg Campaign 122
XXXIX. The Campaign of Vicksburg 151
XL. The State of Things After Gettysburg 171
XLI. The Struggle for Charleston 181
XLII. The Campaigns of Chickamauga and Chattanooga 196
XLIII. Grant's Strategy--The Red River Campaign--Fort
Pillow, Etc. 207
XLIV. Grant's Plan of Campaign 221
XLV. The Battles in the Wilderness 228
XLVI. Spottsylvania and the Bloody Angle 237
XLVII. Cold Harbor and on to Petersburg 249
XLVIII. The Confederate Cruisers 261
XLIX. Sherman's Campaign against Atlanta 265
L. The Bay Fight at Mobile 278
LI. The Mine Explosion at Petersburg 284
LII. Early's Invasion of Pennsylvania 294
LIII. Operations at Petersburg and Sheridan's Valley
Campaign 299
LIV. The Presidential Campaign of 1864 308
LV. Sherman at Atlanta 315
LVI. Sherman's "March to the Sea" 330
LVII. Hood's Campaign 337
LVIII. Preparations for the Decisive Blow 340
LIX. The End 347
Index 357
VOLUME II
THE CONDUCT OF THE WAR (_continued_)
CHAPTER XXXI
THE STRUGGLE FOR EMANCIPATION
In the meantime great events were occurring which were in some respects
more important in their bearing on the war than battles would have
been. In these events the war recognized itself and adapted itself to
its conditions.
From the beginning the abolitionists had clamorously and ceaselessly
demanded of Mr. Lincoln that he should recognize the actual cause of
the war by proclaiming freedom for the slaves at the South. There was
no doubt in anybody's mind that the war was simply the culmination of
that "irrepressible conflict" between the systems and sentiments of
free and slave labor which had constituted the burden of the country's
history for nearly half a century. If there had been no slavery there
would have been no war.
It is true that a very large proportion of the Southern people
regretted slavery, deprecated its existence, and earnestly desired to
be rid of it. It is also true that the great mass of the Southerners
were non-slaveholders, and that their fighting was done not for the
perpetuation of that institution, in which they had no interest, but in
assertion of those reserved rights of the individual states upon the
maintenance of which they sincerely believed that the liberty of the
people depended. These people desired to take their states out of the
Union, not for the sake of slavery, but for the sake of that right of
local self-government which they regarded as the fundamental condition
of liberty among men.
On the other hand a large proportion of the Northern people cared
little or nothing about slavery--many of them even approving the
institution as the only practicable arrangement under which blacks and
whites could live peaceably together, and as a condition eminently
proper for the incapable black man. But these believed in the
maintenance of the Union as a condition of liberty and progress, and
were ready to sacrifice their lives and their possessions in behalf of
that end.
Nevertheless it was clear from the beginning that in the last analysis,
the war involved as its issue the maintenance of slavery, or the
destruction of that system root and branch.
Personally Mr. Lincoln hated slavery and very earnestly desired its
extermination. But, as he reminded those who beset him with unsolicited
advice, he was restrained by his oath of office while they were free to
advocate any principle or policy that might seem good in their eyes.
Moreover, he had upon him the tremendous task of preserving the Union
and in aid of that supreme purpose he was ready to sacrifice all other
considerations of what kind soever. In answer to an impassioned appeal
from Horace Greeley in August, 1862, Mr. Lincoln set forth his attitude
in these words:
"My paramount object is to save the Union, and not either to save or
destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave,
I would do it. If I could save it by freeing all the slaves, I would do
it. And if I could do it by freeing some and leaving others alone, I
would also do that."
At the beginning Mr. Lincoln had clearly seen the necessity of winning
all the support he could to his war measures. He had seen that while
practically the whole population of the North would stand by him in a
war for the preservation of the Union, there must be a very great and
dangerous defection, should he make the war one for the extirpation
of slavery in those states in which the institution existed under
protection of the Federal Constitution. By thus resolutely refusing
to make the war a crusade against slavery, and declaring--as he did
in his official utterances--that it was no part of his purpose to
interfere with the domestic institutions of any state, Mr. Lincoln had
drawn to his support a vast body of influential citizens who would
otherwise have opposed, and whose influence was great enough perhaps,
if it had been offended, to have robbed him of the means of restoring
the disrupted Union. Had he adopted the policy of the extremists at
the North, had he begun by declaring war upon slavery rather than upon
disunion, there is little doubt that Maryland, Kentucky and the whole
strength of Missouri would have been thrown into the Confederate side
of the scale with disastrous effect. Even New York, the financially and
otherwise dominant Northern state, would have given him at best only
a divided and ineffective allegiance, while in all the other states
of the North, heavy minorities, and in some cases perhaps commanding
majorities, would have opposed his measures and deprived him of that
support in Congress and the country upon which depended his success in
his effort to restore and perpetuate the Union.
By his policy of waging war at the outset only for the salvation of
the nation's integrity he won to his measures the support of hundreds
of thousands whose antagonism, or whose dissatisfied inactivity,
would have threatened the National arms with defeat and disaster. So
far-reaching indeed was the effect of his wiser policy that it gave to
the country in its hour of sorest need the services of the great War
Minister, Edwin M. Stanton, with all that his inclusion in the cabinet
implied.
Mr. Stanton and Mr. Lincoln were not friends. They were very nearly
enemies. Stanton was a Democrat of very pronounced views; Mr. Lincoln
represented a party which Stanton had strongly and even bitterly
assailed, holding it to be sectional in origin, impulse and purpose,
and therefore scarcely less than a treasonable conspiracy against the
Nation. But when Mr. Lincoln resolutely formulated his policy, as one
that had for its sole object the restoration of the American Union of
States and the preservation of the Nation from disruption, Mr. Stanton
gladly consented to bear his share in the conduct of affairs with that
end in view.
It was a daring thing for Mr. Lincoln to do, thus to place at the
head of the War Department when actual war was on, a Democrat whose
Democracy was everywhere known to be pronounced and aggressive. Mr.
Lincoln foresaw that such an appointment would inevitably invite
hostile criticism and probably active opposition. But Mr. Lincoln
was a man of exalted moral courage. He needed the peculiar abilities
of Edwin M. Stanton at the head of the War Department at a time when
the war seemed almost everywhere to be going against the Union cause,
and he needed Stanton's influence in the country. He therefore risked
criticism and made the appointment as one that would tend better than
any other to marshal the Federal strength into an effective force and
perhaps extort victory at the last from a situation which had thus far
brought mainly disappointment.
Perhaps the sagacity of the President had still another object in
view in the appointment of Stanton. Mr. Lincoln was a shrewd and
far-seeing politician. By appointing Stanton, his personal enemy and a
distinguished Democrat, to the second most important place among his
Constitutional advisers, he did more than in any other way he could
have done, to reconcile Northern Democrats to his administration and to
make of them earnest supporters instead of active antagonists of his
measures for the preservation of the Union.
Mr. Lincoln had several opportunities to emphasize his attitude and
purpose. The best of these was furnished by Horace Greeley's article,
in reply to which he wrote the passages already quoted in this chapter.
But the matter was made more emphatic in other ways. When McClellan,
early in the war, advanced into Western Virginia, that general issued
a proclamation to all slaveholders there assuring them that it was
no part of the Government's purpose or policy to interfere with the
institution of slavery; that on the contrary the Federal forces would
promptly restore to their masters any fugitive slaves who might escape
to the Union lines, and that the Federal armies would themselves
suppress every attempt at slave insurrection which might be made in the
interest of the Union cause. "Notwithstanding all that has been said
by the traitors," he wrote, "to induce you to believe our advent among
you will be signalized by an interference with your slaves, understand
one thing clearly; not only will we abstain from all such interference,
but we will, on the contrary, with an iron hand crush any attempt at
insurrection on their part."
There is not the smallest doubt that McClellan issued this proclamation
with Mr. Lincoln's full approval and even probably by his direction. In
any case it reflected the President's attitude and purpose at that time.
At an earlier date, in May, 1861, General B. F. Butler, then commanding
at Fortress Monroe, was appealed to for the return of three fugitive
slaves who had escaped into his lines. He refused upon a law point of
great subtlety. He contended that as negro slaves--chattels of their
owners--were capable of being made useful to the Confederates, not
only as producers of food for the support of the Southern armies,
but also as laborers upon the fortifications and the like, they were
properly "contraband of war" precisely as arms and ammunition and
foodstuffs are. From that time forward an escaping slave was called
a "contraband," and in view of the astonishing lies told by such
"contrabands," and the errors of judgment into which those imaginary
bits of information often led the Northern press and people, there was
at last a general ridiculing of all statements based upon the testimony
of "intelligent contrabands."
Mr. Lincoln did not interfere with General Butler's policy of holding
escaped slaves as merchandise "contraband of war." But in other cases
he did interfere with the strong hand. In August, 1861, General
Fremont, commanding in Missouri, issued a proclamation declaring free
the slaves of every Confederate engaged in war against the Union. Mr.
Lincoln repudiated the proclamation and himself abrogated its terms.
Seven months later, in March, 1862, Mr. Lincoln gravely asked Congress
to adopt a policy of compensated emancipation. The war had already cost
about a billion dollars, and it threatened to cost twice or thrice that
sum in addition, with an uncertain result as the outcome.
Accordingly, Mr. Lincoln planned to end the struggle by a business-like
negotiation. He asked Congress (March 6, 1862), to authorize the
Government to lend pecuniary aid to every state which should adopt
measures looking to the gradual abolition of slavery. He saw and felt
that it would be cheaper for the Government to buy every slave in the
land at twice his market value, than to prosecute the war upon the
enormously costly scale which it had assumed. Incidentally, also, the
making of such an arrangement, if it had been possible to make it,
would have saved the lives of hundreds of thousands of men--the flower
of the country's youth on both sides of the line.
It was a business-like and humane thought, and Congress assented to
it. But it was based upon the mistaken notion that the Confederates
were fighting primarily for their property rights in slaves. It ignored
the supremely important fact that the war was costing the Southern
people incalculably more than double the value of all the slaves
owned in those states. It failed to recognize the equally important
fact that, rightly or wrongly, the Southern people sincerely believed
themselves to be contending for liberty, for the constitutional rights
of the states, for the principle of local self-government; that they
were contending against that basilar principle of imperialistic
oppression--the government of communities by a power outside of
themselves. To Mr. Lincoln's own dictum that "no man is good enough
to govern any other man without that other man's consent" they had
added the corollary that no community and no nation is good enough to
govern any other community without that other's consent. They were
fighting, as they confidently believed, for the fundamental principle
of self-government among men, and to that cause they were ready to
make sacrifice of slavery as cheerfully and as heroically as they were
already making sacrifice of all else that they held dear.
Mr. Lincoln misunderstood them and misinterpreted their attitude and
their condition of mind. If they had been offered ten thousand dollars
apiece for all their slaves--worth on the average only a few hundreds
at most--they would have rejected the offer angrily as a tendered
bribe to induce them to give up and betray that cause of human liberty,
states' rights, and the right of local self-government, in behalf of
which they had taken up arms.
To such men, inspired by such beliefs and engaged in such a cause,
no price could offer the smallest temptation. Mr. Lincoln had
misunderstood the Southern people, as they had misunderstood him. Their
warfare had no element of commercialism or of greed in it, precisely
as his was directed not, as they supposed, to the destruction of State
autonomy, but to the sole object of restoring and perpetuating the
American Union. As fanaticism in antagonism to slavery could not swerve
him, so considerations of merely pecuniary advantage did not and could
not influence them. His proposal, which was in effect, to buy all the
negroes in the South, made no more impression upon the Southern mind
than would a proposal to purchase their wives and children, or their
right to sign their own names.
It was under this misapprehension of Southern sentiment that Mr.
Lincoln for a space rejected every suggestion of negro emancipation
and sought to hold his generals in the field to a policy of complete
non-interference with slavery in the Southern States.
We have seen in what fashion he dealt with General Fremont's
proclamation of emancipation in Missouri. On the twelfth of April,
1862, General David Hunter, in command of the forces on the South
Carolina coast, issued a general order to the effect that all slaves
within his immediate jurisdiction should be confiscated as contraband
of war, and instantly set free. On the ninth of May he issued another
general order in which he declared all negroes resident in South
Carolina, Georgia and Florida to be free men.
Ten days later Mr. Lincoln annulled these orders absolutely by
executive command, declaring that the question of the emancipation
of slaves was one which he reserved to himself, and forbidding all
generals in the field to deal with it in any way, direct or indirect.
Congress had legislated on the subject in a very cautious and
hesitating fashion. In August, 1861, it had passed an act authorizing
military commanders to seize and hold all negro slaves found actually
employed in the military service of the Confederacy with the knowledge
and consent of their owners. But the act stipulated that slaves so
confiscated, should not be set free but should be held subject to the
future disposal of the Federal courts.
The proceedings of military officers in the field with respect to this
matter varied according to the views and temper of each. Mr. Lincoln's
revocation of Fremont's orders led to that General's resignation.
General Hunter's act in enlisting a regiment of fugitive slaves who
had fled into his lines, gave great alarm in Congress and in the
country, lest the war should be diverted from its Union-saving purpose
and converted into a crusade for the forcible abolition of slavery,
involving all the horrors of a servile insurrection on the part of
slaves who, in many parts of the South, were scarcely better than half
savages.
General Williams, commanding the Department of the Gulf, sought to
solve the difficulty by the simple process of turning all fugitive
slaves out of his camps, thus avoiding the necessity of deciding
whether or not he would permit masters to come within his lines for the
purpose of recapturing their slaves. Two colonels refused to obey this
order, and were promptly removed from their commands in consequence.
Thus the "irrepressible conflict" of sentiment on the subject of
property in slaves divided the Federal army and sorely vexed the
country as it had done for nearly half a century before.
To Mr. Lincoln it brought perplexities of the gravest sort. It
embarrassed him very greatly in his effort to hold the war steadily
to the purpose he had marked out for it. It defeated all his hopes of
persuading the South to believe that the Government was trying to save
or restore the Union, and that the administration was sincere in its
declaration of a fixed purpose not to interfere with the institution
of slavery in states where it constitutionally existed or to impair
in any way the autonomy of those states. Such pledges could make no
appeal to the minds of Southern men in face of the actual interferences
attempted, often successfully, by commanders in the field.
Worse still, this irreconcilable division of opinion and diversity
of action, threatened to deprive the administration of that strong
support at the North which Mr. Lincoln deemed necessary to a successful
prosecution of the war. It threatened to alienate that great body
of men at the North who were implacably opposed to abolitionism and
who held firmly to the belief that the autonomy of the States was
necessary to the maintenance of liberty, but who were ready enough to
make sacrifice of blood and treasure in aid of a war waged solely for
the preservation of the Union.
In this embarrassing situation Mr. Lincoln made a second attempt to
cripple Southern resistance by securing emancipation by purchase in the
border states, thus cutting off all hope on the part of the South that
those states would ever secede, and at the same time in some degree
satisfying the clamor of the abolitionists. He called the border-state
Congressmen about him and earnestly, even passionately urged them to
vote in Congress for an act pledging the Government to pay to every
state that should decree emancipation the full value of all the slaves
held in such state at the time the census of 1860 was taken. He
especially besought these representatives of border slave states to
persuade their constituents to a willing acceptance of these terms.
Nothing of any practical value came of this effort. It resulted only in
stimulating on the part of the Abolitionists that aggressive insistence
upon universal emancipation by military force which was so sorely
embarrassing to the President.
It was soon afterwards (August 19, 1862), that Horace Greeley published
his open letter entitled "The Prayer of Twenty Millions" to which
Mr. Lincoln replied, setting forth his policy and purpose, in words
already quoted in this chapter: "My paramount object is to save the
Union, and not either to save or destroy slavery. If I could save the
Union without freeing any slave, I would do it. If I could save it by
freeing all the slaves, I would do it. And if I could do it by freeing
some and leaving others alone, I would also do that."
But all this while Mr. Lincoln contemplated the emancipation of the
slaves by executive proclamation as a war measure to be resorted to
whenever it should seem to him likely to be effective. In the preceding
month of July he had drawn up a proclamation of emancipation, and had
read it to his cabinet. But he had laid it aside, believing that the
time was not yet ripe. The Confederates seemed at that time at high
tide of military success. Their armies, victorious and aggressive, were
overthrowing one Federal force after another, and putting Washington
itself upon an uncertain defense. It was the conviction both of Mr.
Lincoln and of Mr. Seward, that to issue an emancipation proclamation
under such circumstances would not only seem ridiculous in the eyes
of the world but would be everywhere interpreted as a despairing
manifestation of conscious weakness, the futile outcry of failure. He
must wait for victories before taking this step.
But when after Antietam, Lee withdrew from Maryland and abandoned his
campaign against the national capital, Mr. Lincoln decided to assume
the rôle of a victor, dictating terms which he held himself strong
enough to enforce.
Accordingly on September 22, 1862, he issued a proclamation declaring
that on the first of January, 1863, all slaves held in those states or
parts of states which should at that time be still in rebellion should
be then and forever afterwards free.
This was at once a threat and a promise.
It is a matter of curious speculation to consider what would have been
the situation if the Southern States had submitted themselves before
the beginning of 1863. In that event the proclamation of freedom to
slaves within their borders would have been of no effect, inasmuch
as it applied only to states remaining at war. A second executive
proclamation of emancipation would have had no war necessity to justify
or even to excuse it. For the Constitution conferred upon the President
no power to emancipate slaves. It was only on the plea of war necessity
that this power could be remotely and speculatively inferred, and that
war necessity would have passed completely away had the war itself come
to an end before the date set for the enforcement of the threat.
Perhaps it was in view of this very remote contingency that Mr. Lincoln
at that time urged upon Congress the adoption of a constitutional
amendment forbidding slavery anywhere within the borders of the Union.
Congress did not act upon the recommendation at that time, and on the
first of January, 1863, Mr. Lincoln issued his final proclamation
of emancipation, naming the states and parts of states in which
rebellion was held then to exist, and declaring free all the slaves
within those states and parts of states. It did not apply to those
slave states which had not joined the Confederacy, and, except that
Maryland voluntarily freed her slaves near the end of the war, the
institution remained lawful in such states as had not seceded, and
actually continued to exist there until December 18, 1865, when the
ratification of the thirteenth amendment to the Constitution was
officially proclaimed by Mr. Lincoln's successor.
So far as securing actual liberty to slaves within the Confederate
lines was concerned, the emancipation proclamations had no effect
whatever. They were probably not expected to have any. But they had
an important bearing upon the conduct of the war and the state of
the public mind. They made an end of all doubt about what Federal
commanders in the field should do with slaves escaping to their
lines. They satisfied the strong and growing abolitionist sentiment
at the North, and they had some effect in alienating war Democrats
and a considerable number of Republicans from the Federal cause,
thus checking enlistments in some quarters, and impairing the
administration's support.
This effect was far less marked than it would have been had Mr. Lincoln
issued an emancipation proclamation earlier in the war when he was
first urged to do so. Nevertheless the political effect was notable.
In the autumn elections there was a heavy falling off in Republican
majorities, while in some important states Democrats relentlessly
opposed to the administration and all its policies were elected to
replace Republicans in office. This was notably the case in New York,
where Horatio Seymour succeeded the Republican governor, E. D. Morgan,
and a sentiment in hostility to the administration and to the war
itself grew up, which was afterwards reflected in bloody riots when the
time came for a draft of men for the army.
In Europe and particularly in England, the emancipation proclamation
went far to change a former friendship for the Confederacy, which had
at times threatened danger, into a strong moral support for the Federal
cause.
But whatever moral and political results, for or against the Lincoln
administration, this act may have produced, it had no perceptible
effect upon the actual conduct of the war. That was still to be fought
out at the cost of millions of treasure and multitudes of lives. Many
of its greatest battles were still to come and its most important
campaigns were yet to be fought out.
CHAPTER XXXII
BURNSIDE'S FREDERICKSBURG CAMPAIGN
It has already been related that at the end of the battle of
Sharpsburg, or Antietam, neither army cared to renew the contest.
The two confronted each other within deadly firing distance for the
space of twenty-four hours, doing nothing whatever. Apparently each
had so far had enough of such fighting that neither cared to take the
initiative for its renewal, yet each was ready enough to meet the other
should that other care to assail it.
At the end of this waiting time Lee slowly retired towards the Potomac,
McClellan not caring to pursue, and finally crossing the river the
Confederates went into camp near Winchester.
So far from planning either to press Lee or to move by some other route
upon Richmond, McClellan seems to have thought that he had done quite
all that could be expected of him, in turning back the Confederate
invasion of the region north of the Potomac. It appears from his
dispatches to Mr. Lincoln that he purposed with his enormously superior
army to take the defensive, post himself on the Potomac and stand
ready to meet any second attempt that Lee might make to invade the
North or to strike at Washington. Even for such a service he did not
deem his army large enough, though it greatly outnumbered Lee's, or
sufficiently well equipped, though its equipment was notably superior
to any that its adversary ever had, either before or after that time.
Instead of planning a campaign McClellan devoted himself to the making
of multitudinous requisitions and ceaseless complaints.
Precious weeks of perfect campaigning weather were thus wasted,
McClellan lying idly upon the north bank of the Potomac while Lee
rested and reinforced his army near Winchester.
But if McClellan did nothing Lee was not so supine. He did not indeed
begin a new campaign or bring on a battle, but he again awakened
apprehension of invasion at the North by sending Stuart--the same
cavalier who had ridden around McClellan's army near Richmond--to
make a raid into Maryland and Pennsylvania which seemed for the time
at least to be the precursor of a new movement of invasion by the
Confederates.
On the tenth of October, with 1,800 picked cavalry men and some
light field-pieces, Stuart crossed the river at Williamsport, above
McClellan's position, made a rapid march to Chambersburg, Pennsylvania,
and thence swept eastward and southward, riding unmolested entirely
around McClellan and returning to Virginia on the thirteenth by passing
the river again below Harper's Ferry.
He brought off a rich store of ammunition, supplies and many valuable
horses, but the capture of these was neither the primary object nor the
chief result of the daring raid. It was intended for moral effect, and
it wrought such effect in a marked degree. It awakened apprehension at
the North, and it showed Lee to be still capable of an aggressiveness
of which McClellan was obviously very greatly in fear. At the North as
well as at the South it gave to the situation, after the late campaign,
the appearance of one in which the Confederates seemed in better
condition for further operations than their adversaries were.
Mr. Lincoln renewed his urgency for McClellan's advance, and finally
succeeded in inducing him to cross the river and to seem at least to
take the offensive. But after crossing into Virginia, McClellan did
nothing effective. The history of Mr. Lincoln's effort to set the
splendid Army of the Potomac in motion again, and the correspondence
incident to that effort, are interesting, but they do not come within
the purview of this present work.
Wearying at last of the inactivity Lincoln ordered General Burnside
to take command of the Army of the Potomac, as McClellan's successor,
and the new commander decided to move down the left bank of the
Rappahannock and attempt a march upon Richmond by a short route.
Establishing his base of supplies at Acquia creek on the Potomac, only
a few miles from Fredericksburg, with a railroad connection between,
Burnside sat down on the north side of the Rappahannock, opposite
Fredericksburg, the last of his columns reaching that point on the
twentieth of November. Lee, moving upon a parallel line, reached
Fredericksburg about the same time, and formed his lines to resist his
enemy's contemplated advance.
Lee's army at that time numbered about 68,000 men, but before the
battle it was swelled by reinforcements to nearly 80,000, and again
reduced by detachments, to 68,000 or less. Burnside's force numbered
about 120,000, with 147 guns, about twice Lee's strength in artillery.
Fredericksburg lies upon fairly level ground, immediately upon the
southern bank of the Rappahannock, which at that point is not fordable
at any season. In rear of the town and within cannon range, there
is a line of bold hills beginning upon the river above the city and
stretching in a curve around the town to the eastward where they
gradually diminish in height and finally disappear.
Lee seized upon these hills and hurriedly fortified them, placing his
artillery in effective positions and shielding his men with strong
earthworks. Here he concentrated the greater part of his army under
Longstreet on the left or west, and Jackson on the right or east, while
D. H. Hill, with the remainder of the Confederate army was posted at
Port Royal, twenty miles further down the river, eastward, to meet and
repel any attempt that might be made to cross there and turn the flank
of Lee's position.
This detachment of Hill with a strong force to a point so far away
as to forbid his direct coöperation with the rest of the army during
the battle, seriously diminished Lee's effective strength, but
the advantage of position which he possessed and the advantage of
fighting behind breastworks which his enemy must assail from the open,
compensated him somewhat.
Burnside's first difficult task was to get his army across the river.
This he could do only by the use of frail pontoon bridges of which
he purposed to lay five--three in front of the city and two below.
The pontoon trains were slow in arriving, and when they came it was
for a time impossible to put the pontoons into position, owing to the
destructive fire of the sleepless sharpshooters Lee had posted along
the banks to interfere with the work. In consequence of this and other
difficulties it was not until the tenth of December that a crossing
was made which Burnside had confidently expected to make more than a
fortnight earlier.
In the meanwhile Lee had busied himself night and day in strengthening
his position in every possible way, and he was soon fully prepared for
the contest.
Burnside's first assault was made about ten o'clock on the morning of
December 13. It was made in two columns, striking simultaneously, the
one against Lee's right and the other against his left. The assault
upon his right was at first attended with a partial success, but
Jackson hurried troops to the breach and quickly hurled the assailants
back in confusion, pursuing them nearly to the river's bank where a
heavy artillery fire checked his progress. The Federal assault on that
part of the Confederate line was not renewed during the day.
From official reports and otherwise, it appears that Burnside at first
intended to direct his main attack upon this right wing of Lee's army.
The hills there were lower and far less defensible than were those on
the Confederate left, and offered, certainly, a much more tempting
opportunity to the Federal commander. It was without doubt the weakest
point in Lee's line--the point which the Federals might have assailed
with greatest hope of success or at least of inflicting the heaviest
loss upon their foes. But, for some reason which has never been clearly
explained, Burnside changed his plan of battle almost at the last
moment, and directed his heaviest columns against Marye's Heights,
the well-nigh impregnable stronghold of Lee's left wing. Here Lee had
his batteries and a host of infantry strongly posted in formidable
earthworks on top of the hills, in a position of great advantage.
For a body of troops to charge up Marye's Heights, bristling as they
did with hostile and well served cannon, and defended by tens of
thousands of veteran riflemen, was a task that might well have appalled
even such sturdy fighters as composed the Army of the Potomac. But
the matter was made more difficult by another peculiarity of the
ground. Looked at from below, the hill seemed to present a smooth
surface, ascending gently toward the works that defended it. But this
appearance was deceptive. On the side of the hill well in advance of
Lee's main line, and running athwart the Federal line of advance, there
was a sunken road, faced with a stone wall, which formed as perfect
a breastwork as any that an engineer could have constructed there.
Into this sunken road Lee threw about two thousand riflemen, who lay
there perfectly concealed from view and as well protected against
adverse fire as men using rifles can be. Their orders were to withhold
their fire until the enemy charging up the slope under a destructive
cannonade from above, and thinking of the works at the top as the first
obstacle to be encountered, should reach a point a score or so of yards
in front of the sunken road, whence they could be swept away like
dust before a housemaid's broom. It was as deadly a trap as could be
imagined, and its concealment was perfect. Yet when the Federal general
decided to make his main attack upon Lee's left, there was no course
open to him but to take this doubly defended hill by assault or suffer
fearful disaster, as he did, in a futile attempt to do so. For the
nature of the ground on Lee's farther left rendered it impossible to
turn his flank or try conclusions with him otherwise than by a direct
charge upon Marye's Heights.
The first attack was made by French's division. It was already
suffering terribly under the fire from the hilltop, when it came upon
the sunken road and was instantly swept away by a hailstorm of bullets.
Retiring, French left about one half of his men on the field, dead or
wounded.
Hancock charged next with five thousand men and was driven back with a
loss of two thousand or more.
The exact nature of the case was not even yet understood. The position
in the sunken road was still masked to the Federal commanders. But
French's and Hancock's attempts had conclusively shown that no courage,
no determination, no heroism however high, could enable mortal men to
carry that hill by assault. Nevertheless Burnside persisted where a
wiser leader would either have withdrawn or have changed his plan of
battle. He sent another, and another, and still another division into
that fire of hell, only to see them instantly hurled back, shattered
fragments of most gallant commands, beaten, broken and well-nigh
destroyed by reason of a blundering obstinacy on the part of their
commanding general.
Finally Hooker was ordered to make another attempt--the sixth of those
futile and bloody charges. He pointed out to Burnside the uselessness
of the effort and begged him to abandon without further needless
sacrifice of gallant men's lives, an operation which had already been
proved to be hopeless.
In a blind rage Burnside seemed unable to comprehend what his
subordinates saw clearly enough. He insisted upon sending Hooker's
command also into that slaughter pen. They rushed forward,--four
thousand as brave fellows as ever fought in battle--and a few minutes
later seventeen hundred of them lay stretched upon the field, their
bodies riddled with Confederate bullets, while their comrades, unable
to achieve the impossible, fell back as the remnants of the other
divisions had done before.
The Confederate war furnished two conspicuous manifestations of supreme
heroism on the part of large bodies of men--one upon one side, the
other upon the other. Pickett's charge at Gettysburg was one of these.
This series of six charges up Marye's Heights was the other.
When the sixth assault ended as its predecessors had done, the time had
manifestly come to end the battle. A wiser commander would have ended
it much earlier, indeed. Having lost 12,353 men in an ill-directed
contest Burnside withdrew to the river bank, baffled and beaten beyond
recovery.
The Army of the Potomac had won all the glory for itself that heroic
conduct can give in the absence of victory, but it had need now of
rest, recruitment and a new commander.
Burnside was clearly not equal to the task of commanding such an army
in a contest with such an adversary as Robert E. Lee. He had himself
passed precisely that judgment upon his own capacities when on three
former occasions the command of the Army of the Potomac was offered
to him. But now that he had accepted that command and had led to
disastrous defeat what somebody at the time characterized as "the
finest army on the planet," disappointment and chagrin seem for the
moment to have unseated his reason. He refused to recognize the extent
of the disaster he had suffered or the conspicuousness and completeness
of his defeat. His army was torn and broken as no other great army
on either side had been before. It was weary with futile battling,
discouraged by a failure that had involved terrible losses, and the
fact that it was not demoralized was due only to the splendid courage
and devotion of the soldiers themselves. Worse than all it had lost
confidence in the capacity of its leader.
Nevertheless Burnside, reckless of any consequences that might follow,
was determined that night to renew the battle on the following morning,
himself leading his own former corps, the Ninth, in still another
desperate attempt to carry Marye's Heights. Earnest protests and
persuasions succeeded at last in inducing him to abandon this purpose,
and after remaining inactive for a day on the bank of the river, he
withdrew his army, under cover of night, to the other side of the river
and the fearfully disastrous Fredericksburg campaign was at an end.
Military critics have wondered much that Lee, whose loss in the battle
had been only 5,309 men, and whose troops were almost wild with the
enthusiasm of victory, permitted his badly beaten adversary to remain
unmolested on the southern bank of the stream for twenty-four hours
and then quietly to retire. Burnside's position and the condition of
his army strongly invited attack. He had a wide and deep river behind
him, with only a frail pontoon bridge spanning it. Had he been defeated
there by assault on the part of the victors there would have been no
way of escape open to him. Destruction or surrender must have followed.
On the other hand, his force still heavily outnumbered Lee's and it
was in no way demoralized. Defeated and discouraged as it was its
spirit was unbroken, and had Lee left his works and assailed it in the
open, the issue of the conflict might have been very uncertain. It is
alleged that Lee's lieutenants urged a tempestuous assault, and that
Lee's chief reason for rejecting the advice was born of his hope that
Burnside would himself on the next day renew the attempt to dislodge
the Confederates from their well-nigh impregnable position.
However that may be, Lee did not in fact assume the offensive; Burnside
retired during darkness to the farther side of the river and the two
armies settled themselves in winter quarters, Lee presently sending
large bodies of men to the southwest to reinforce the armies there,
where active warfare was in progress, and still more active warfare
threatened.
The military operations of the season that thus closed had been in
every way remarkable. Four distinct campaigns had been fought, all of
them severe, and all marked by brilliant strategy and heroic conduct on
the part of the troops on either side. McClellan's siege of Richmond,
which had filled the South with gloomy apprehension, had been broken in
a series of bloody and impressive battles, and the Army of the Potomac
had been forced to withdraw for the defense of Washington.
Pope's campaign with his Army of Virginia had been conspicuously
brought to naught by brilliant strategy and desperate fighting.
Lee's invasion of Maryland had for a time reversed the former order of
things, putting the Federals on the defensive. It had ended at last in
a battle so indecisive that both sides claimed it as a victory. Finally
Burnside's well planned but badly executed Fredericksburg campaign
had resulted in very conspicuous defeat and failure after one of the
bloodiest battles of the war.
The net result of the four campaigns was one of very great advantage to
the Confederates. The gloomy apprehension with which they had looked
forward to that summer's military operations was changed to exultant
joy and confidence as they contemplated the situation when the work
of the year was over. They had discovered a commander for whom their
adversary had as yet found no match in his mastery of the art of war.
They were reinspirited by the results achieved and were full of
confidence for the future.
On the other side, the North rejoiced in the splendid fighting quality
of the Army of the Potomac, as demonstrated in the Seven Days' battles,
at Manassas, at Antietam, and most of all, at Fredericksburg. The
danger which at one time seemed so imminently to threaten their capital
and the cities farther north, had been averted, and they had confidence
that the coming spring would bring results in Virginia as pleasing to
them as those that had been achieved by Grant in the west during the
year that was coming to an end.
The struggle of the giants had but just begun.
CHAPTER XXXIII
HALLECK'S TREATMENT OF GRANT
When Halleck assumed command at Pittsburg Landing after the battle of
Shiloh he seemed intent, not only upon depriving Grant of the privilege
of vigorously following up the victory he had won but also upon
"snubbing," ignoring and humiliating that successful general in every
way possible. If Grant's tremendous and at last successful struggle
to force Beauregard back to his defenses at Corinth had been a crime
instead of a heroic achievement, his commanding general could scarcely
have punished it in more annoying and humiliating ways than he did.
It was a sore affliction to Grant to have command taken from him at the
moment when he saw before him a perfect opportunity to pluck the ripe
fruits of his obstinate fighting by pressing forward in overwhelming
force for the completion of the conquest for which that fighting had
provided an easy and certain way. It was still more severely painful to
him to sit still and see all the easy possibilities of the situation he
had created, deliberately thrown away by martinet incapacity.
To a man like General Grant, simple minded and sincere, a man whose
sole ambition was to force the war to a successful conclusion within
the briefest possible time, and whose vigor in action seemed to make
that result certain with the masterful means now in hand at Pittsburg
Landing, this foolish frittering away of the opportunity he had created
by his splendid fighting, must have been the most painful of all the
punishments which Halleck at that time inflicted upon him for his
impertinence in wresting a great victory from a calamitous defeat,
before his superior officer could reach the field and reap the credit
for himself.
But Halleck had other humiliations in store for his impertinently
successful lieutenant the late Galena clerk, and the now admired and
applauded officer of volunteers. Grant even yet had no rank in the
regular army, and he had ventured to advise the temporary dissolution
of the regular army in order that the skill and training of its
officers might be utilized--with capacity alone as the test--in making
the volunteers, who after all constituted the country's chief reliance
for its salvation, as effective in the field as if they had been
regulars.
We have seen how, after Grant's conquest of Forts Henry and Donelson,
and the complete rupture of the first Confederate line of defense,
Halleck forbade him to gather the fruits of his victory, suspended him
from command and seemingly threatened him with arrest. After Shiloh it
would not have been prudent for Halleck again to suggest the arrest
of a general whose name was on every lip as that of the one Federal
commander who was capable of winning victories while all others were
meeting conspicuous defeats. But Halleck had other arrows in his
quiver. He left Grant as nominally his second in command, and, in form
at least, assigned him specifically to the command of the right wing of
the army. But he proceeded from the beginning to ignore his second in
command. He summoned him to none of those councils and consultations to
which he invited Grant's own subordinates. Even in the matter of orders
to that wing of the army which he had technically placed in Grant's
charge, he ignored all the courtesies and flagrantly violated all the
usages of war, by sending his commands directly to division generals,
instead of sending them through General Grant's headquarters--thus
rivaling the discourtesy of Judah P. Benjamin in his dealings with
Stonewall Jackson. This left Grant in humiliating ignorance even of
the orders issued to divisions which were supposed to be under his
command, and for whose movements and conduct he was held responsible.
His situation was unendurable, even to a man of his robust habits of
mind, and by way of relief he finally asked permission to establish his
headquarters as District Commander, at Memphis, a city which had by
that time come into Federal control.
These details are recited here, not by way of apology or defense of
General Grant. His fame needs no defense, and very certainly his
conduct in war needs no apology. Moreover all these circumstances, and
others that reflect still more unfavorably upon Halleck's extraordinary
treatment of the only Federal general who at that period of the war
seemed able to achieve victories, are calmly and fully set forth in
General Grant's own memoirs. But such details are necessary here,
in explanation of that fair and full, and impartial history of the
Confederate war, which is intended in these volumes.
There were repeated occasions in the course of the struggle when vigor
of generalship on the one side or upon the other, would very certainly
have brought the war to an early conclusion, sparing both sides the
tremendous sacrifices which a lack of capable generalship in the end
entailed upon both.
This post-Shiloh imbecility was one of those conspicuous, and
conspicuously neglected occasions. There is not room for doubt that if
Halleck had remained in his St. Louis headquarters, and had permitted
Grant with the now combined armies of himself, Buell and Pope, to
prosecute an instant and vigorous campaign, the whole Mississippi
Valley would have been speedily brought under Federal control, with all
the consequences that such a conquest must have involved.
After the battle of Shiloh Grant had by his own estimate 120,000 men
at and near Pittsburg Landing, or within easy call. For in addition
to Buell's army Pope had reinforced him with 30,000 men. Beauregard
had about 30,000 effectives at Corinth--or after Van Dorn reinforced
him, perhaps 47,000. Grant's own expert opinion expressed in print, is
that within two days he could and would--if let alone--have captured
Corinth, driving the Confederate forces there into disorderly retreat
if not compelling their surrender, and capturing all their stores.
He would then have been in position to move in overwhelming force
upon Vicksburg and Port Hudson, points not yet strongly fortified or
heavily garrisoned. Capturing them, as he easily could have done, he
would have made the Federals masters of the Mississippi above Baton
Rouge, while Farragut was making himself master of all the lower
reaches of the river. In the meanwhile Grant would have prevented that
concentration and recruitment of Beauregard's army for which Halleck
gave generous leisure to his enemy by delaying his own advance from
Pittsburg Landing for three weeks of preparation and then consuming an
entire month in pushing a force of three men to his adversary's one
over an unobstructed and undefended space of less than twenty miles
only to find when he got to his destination that his enemy, greatly
strengthened, had in leisurely fashion retired to another position,
taking with him every pound of provisions and every round of ammunition
he possessed.
Here were seven of the most precious weeks of the war lost, and the
loss is very inadequately measured by that statement. It is not too
much to say that Halleck's extraordinary deliberation and delay
alone made possible and certain all the terrible fighting and all
the losses of human life incident to the Vicksburg campaign, just as
the paralyzing incapacity of his orders after the capture of Fort
Donelson, made needlessly possible and destructively certain the
tremendous battling of the Confederates at a later period at Nashville,
Chattanooga, Franklin, Lookout Mountain, Chickamauga and in the Atlanta
campaign.
If military etiquette upon either of these occasions had permitted
General Grant, with the support his words would undoubtedly have had
from Sherman, Buell and Thomas, to set forth clearly the conditions,
needs, and opportunities in the Western Department, the authorities
at Washington would pretty certainly have set Halleck's embarrassing
authority aside, thus giving demonstrated capacity the license it
desired to achieve results of incalculable benefit to the National
arms. But Halleck alone of all the generals in that quarter enjoyed
the privilege of direct communication with the War Department, and
Halleck so adroitly represented--perhaps he did not consciously or
intentionally misrepresent--the facts of the situation, that presently,
on the eleventh of July, he was appointed to succeed McClellan as
Commander in Chief of all the Union armies.
This was perhaps the most astonishing, not to say the most unwise,
appointment made on either side during the entire course of the war,
unless we except Mr. Jefferson Davis's appointment of Pemberton after
he had lost Vicksburg, to the position of military adviser of himself,
with apparent authority to control and command even Robert E. Lee.
In the meanwhile Halleck had done all that was possible to him to
humiliate General Grant and to deny him everything in the shape of
opportunity. General Grant, in his "Memoirs," (page 219), pathetically
says:
Although next to him [Halleck] in rank, and nominally in command of
my old district and army, I was ignored as much as if I had been
at the most distant point of territory within my jurisdiction; and
although I was in command of all the troops engaged at Shiloh, I
was not permitted to see one of the reports of General Buell or his
subordinates in that battle until they were published by the War
Department long after the event.
Again on page 225, General Grant tells of an occasion when he suggested
a military movement to General Halleck--a thing that the second in
command might very well have been expected to do. After explaining
to his readers what his suggestion was, General Grant adds: "I was
silenced so quickly that I felt that possibly I had suggested an
unmilitary movement."
Yet when Halleck was ordered to Washington to assume chief command he
saw clearly that it would not be prudent in the existing state of the
public mind to make any other than Grant the commander at Corinth. He
therefore sent word to Grant in Memphis to report at Corinth. But he
said nothing whatever to him about his own appointment to the command
of all the armies, or about his intended departure for Washington,
or even about his intention that Grant should assume command at
Corinth. He merely directed him to report there, leaving it entirely
to uninformed conjecture whether he was merely to report in person
for some instruction or was to remove his headquarters from Memphis
to that point. In this uncertainty Grant telegraphed asking whether
or not he was to take his staff with him. To this Halleck curtly and
discourteously replied: "This place will be your headquarters. You can
judge for yourself."
CHAPTER XXXIV
GRANT AT CORINTH
When Grant took command at Corinth he found matters in an exceedingly
confused and embarrassing condition. In the first place his authority
was so ill defined that he could do nothing of importance without risk
of subjecting himself to censure and perhaps even to a trial by court
martial for having exceeded his authority, while if he left anything
undone by reason of his uncertainty as to the scope of his command, he
must do so at equal risk of censure or court martial for neglect.
Halleck had been in command of the entire department and of all the
forces within its borders. In leaving General Grant as his successor he
did not invest him with a similarly comprehensive authority. Neither
did he make it clear that such authority was denied to him. So far as
his orders indicated Grant was still only a district commander, having
authority only over troops within the district of West Tennessee, whose
eastern boundary was the Cumberland river, beyond which Halleck had
sent a large part of the forces that had been under his command at
Corinth. And yet Grant was practically a department commander. His own
exposition of the situation is so clear, succinct and complete, that
no paraphrase can better it or equal it. On page 233 _et seq._ of his
"Memoirs," General Grant wrote:
I left Memphis for my new field without delay and reached Corinth
on the fifteenth of the month. General Halleck remained until the
seventeenth of July; but he was very uncommunicative, and gave me
no information as to what I had been called to Corinth for. When
General Halleck left to assume the duties of general-in-chief I
remained in command of the District of West Tennessee. Practically
I became a department commander because no one was assigned
to that position over me, and I made my reports direct to the
General-in-chief; but I was not assigned to the position of
department commander until the twenty-fifth of October. General
Halleck, while commanding the Department of the Mississippi, had
had control as far east as a line drawn from Chattanooga north.
My district only embraced West Tennessee and Kentucky west of
the Cumberland river. Buell, with the Army of the Ohio, had as
previously stated, been ordered east towards Chattanooga, with
instructions to repair the Memphis and Charleston railroad as
he advanced. Troops had been sent North by Halleck along the
line of the Mobile and Ohio railroad to put it in repair as far
as Columbus. Other troops were stationed on the [Mississippi
Central] railroad from Jackson, Tennessee, to Grand Junction,
and still others on the road west to Memphis. The remainder of
the magnificent army of 120,000 men which entered Corinth on the
thirtieth of May, had now become so scattered that I was put
entirely on the defensive in a territory whose population was
hostile to the Union.
One of the first things I had to do was to construct fortifications
at Corinth better suited to the garrison that could be spared to
man them. The structures that had been built during the months of
May and June were left as monuments to the skill of the engineer,
and others were constructed in a few days, plainer in design, but
suited to the command available to defend them.
In brief Halleck had completely thrown away one of the most brilliant
opportunities of the war. He had found an army of 120,000 men, flushed
with victory and full of spirit, concentrated at a point in the
center of the Confederacy, from which it was not only possible but
easy to advance in overwhelming force in any direction, while the
inflow of recruits at that time was great enough to make good and
even to double the losses that battle might involve. On the other
hand the Confederates had lost so heavily at Shiloh that they did not
venture to make a stand in their intrenchments at Corinth, even though
Halleck's extraordinary dilatoriness gave them seven weeks of precious
time in which to recruit their army, strengthen their defenses and
receive reinforcements of 17,000 seasoned and veteran troops that were
presently sent to them.
General Grant has pronounced the positive and unhesitating opinion
that an energetic advance immediately after the Shiloh battle, with
the enormously superior forces then concentrated at that point would
have resulted beyond a peradventure in the conquest of Corinth within
two days, with the capture of all the stores and ammunition there as
a necessary incident and the capture of Beauregard's army as at least
a promising possibility. By consuming three weeks in preparation for
an advance which ought to have been made at once and by wasting a
whole month more in an advance by parallels, where an advance at the
quickstep with fixed bayonets, was all that was needed, Halleck had
completely thrown away this opportunity.
But even then, even after wasting seven weeks in reaching Corinth, it
was not too late to achieve results of the most momentous consequence.
On page 227 of his "Memoirs," General Grant gives this expert opinion
of the situation and the opportunity:
The Confederates were now driven out of West Tennessee, and on the
sixth of June, after a well contested naval battle, the National
forces took possession of Memphis, and held the Mississippi river
from its source to that point. The railroad from Columbus to
Corinth was at once put in good condition and held by us. We had
garrisons at Donelson, Clarksville and Nashville on the Cumberland
river, and held the Tennessee river from its mouth to Eastport.
New Orleans and Baton Rouge had fallen into the possession of
the National forces, so that now the Confederates at the West
were narrowed down for all communication with Richmond to the
single line of road running east from Vicksburg. To dispossess
them of this, therefore, became a matter of the first importance.
The possession of the Mississippi by us, from Memphis to Baton
Rouge, was also a most important object. It would be equal to the
amputation of a limb in its weakening effect upon the enemy. After
the capture of Corinth a movable force of 80,000 men, besides
enough to hold all the territory acquired, _could have been set
in motion for the accomplishment of any great campaign for the
suppression of the rebellion_.[1] In addition to this, fresh troops
were being raised to swell the effective force.
[1] The italics are not General Grant's, but are placed by the
author of the present work, upon words that seem to him to
be pregnant of criticism and explanation.
AUTHOR
But the work of depletion commenced. Buell, with the Army of the
Ohio, was sent east, following the line of the Memphis and Charleston
railroad. This he was ordered to repair as he advanced--only to have
it destroyed by small guerilla bands or other troops as soon as he was
out of the way. If he had been sent directly to Chattanooga, as rapidly
as he could march, sending two or three divisions along the line of
the railroad from Nashville forward, he could have arrived with but
little fighting, and would have saved much of the loss of life which
was afterwards incurred in gaining Chattanooga. Bragg would then not
have had time to raise an army to contest the possession of Middle and
East Tennessee and Kentucky; the battles of Stone river and Chickamauga
would not necessarily have been fought; Burnside would not have been
besieged in Knoxville without the power of helping himself or escaping;
the battle of Chattanooga would not have been fought. These are the
negative advantages, if the term negative is applicable, which would
probably have resulted from prompt movements after Corinth fell into
the possession of the National forces. The positive results might have
been, a bloodless advance to Atlanta, to Vicksburg, or to any other
desired point south of Corinth in the interior of Mississippi.
Will the reader bear in mind, that these military criticisms are not
made by the author of the present work, although they fully commend
themselves to his judgment, but are the calm and deliberate utterances
of Ulysses S. Grant, by all consent the ablest general that ever
commanded a Federal army, and a general minutely familiar with every
detail of the situation which presented itself after Shiloh? They bear
the authority both of intimate knowledge and of demonstrated military
skill. Reduced to their lowest terms they amount to this: If Halleck
had been an officer fit to command an army, he would have rushed upon
Corinth with his three to one force on the very day on which he assumed
command. The result could not have been in the least degree doubtful.
But even after he had wasted seven precious weeks--three of them in
preparation for an advance for which he was already fully prepared,
and four more in an advance over a wholly undefended space of nineteen
miles which he ought to have covered in one day or a day and a half
at most,--there was still open to a capable general an opportunity
which Halleck utterly failed to see or to seize. He had under his
command 120,000 veteran troops, of the very best fighting quality and
subordinately commanded by such masters of the military art as Grant,
Sherman, Thomas, Buell, Lew Wallace, Nelson, Prentiss and their fit
fellows. Making the most liberal allowance for detachments to guard
railroads and to hold every acre of country conquered, General Grant
says he could have mustered an effective army of 80,000 men or more for
aggressive operations in any direction that might have seemed best to
him, against which the Confederates could not have opposed more than
30,000 or 40,000 at the utmost. The whole central South lay before him
where to choose. His opportunity was one the like of which came to no
other commander North or South, during the whole course of the war.
He threw it utterly away. He scattered his superbly overwhelming army
to the four winds, under orders that rendered their courage and their
enterprise futile, and left Grant in a hopelessly defensive position,
with no army capable of any measure of aggression, and with an
authority so ill defined that he could not order a concentration even
in the smallest way.
And yet, this man, Halleck, who had never fought a battle in his life,
and who had never commanded an army except to scatter and waste it, was
chosen to command all the armies of the United States.
Surely the country could not have been worse served if the
administration had been intent upon losing the war instead of
carrying it to success. And very certainly the long domination of this
peculiarly incapable man served to embarrass "enterprises of great pith
and moment," and to prolong the destructive, fratricidal struggle for
long after the time during which, under wiser counsels, it would have
endured.
Curiously enough no explanation of this costly blunder has ever been
suggested. We know of course that Halleck's first appointment to
command in the West was made upon General Scott's recommendation, at a
period of the war when nobody knew or could know what officers of the
old army were capable of achieving results and what ones were unfit
for command. General Scott's mistake in selecting Halleck for a highly
responsible command was pardonable under the circumstances. But after
his extraordinary dealings with the victories at Fort Henry and Fort
Donelson, and still more conspicuously after his phenomenal failure
to seize upon the opportunity that came to him ready made by the
results achieved at Shiloh, it is absolutely impossible for the most
imaginative critic to conceive of a reason which might have justified
the administration at Washington in selecting this man with his doubly
demonstrated incapacity to direct all the armies of the Union in their
operations.
Not only was Grant left upon the defensive with a force too small to
permit aggression of any kind on his part, but even this scant force
was rapidly and very dangerously depleted by orders from Halleck's
Washington headquarters. The Confederates and guerrillas were daily
threatening his communications and frequently attacking his defensive
detachments in force. He was confronted on the south by an effective
force of 35,000 men under Van Dorn and Price, threatening Memphis,
Corinth, Bolivar and other points. Grant's concern for the safety of
Memphis, isolated as that post was by the Confederate occupation of
Grand Junction--between Memphis and Corinth--was lightened only by
the fact, as he himself suggestively put the matter, that "it was in
Sherman's hands."
Under this stress of circumstances, and with extraordinary disregard
of what disastrous consequences there might be involved, Halleck
on the fourteenth of August ordered Grant still further to weaken
himself by sending two more divisions to Buell on his tedious march
eastward. Again on the second of September, Grant received orders to
send still further reinforcements to Buell, and two days later Gordon
Granger's division was detached and sent, by orders from Washington, to
Louisville. On the twenty-second Colonel Rodney Mason, whom Grant had
forgiven for arrant cowardice at Shiloh, made a dastardly surrender of
Clarksville with half a regiment or more.
Thus the one commander who had thus far shown himself capable of
conceiving campaigns and conducting them to success, was left with
a totally inadequate and constantly diminishing force, to waste his
time in guarding a vast territory while Bragg was marching from
Rome, Georgia, with a strong Confederate army toward Chattanooga,
meaning to seize that position before Buell could get there. In his
"Memoirs" General Grant gives expression to his regret that he was
not permitted to move, instead of sitting still, at a time when even
with the depleted force under his command, he still felt confidant of
his ability to crush and destroy Bragg's force, thus forestalling and
rendering unnecessary the very severe and bloody campaigns which were
destined to follow for lack of such a timely blow.
The Confederates, early in the spring, had enacted and enforced a
conscription law which had resulted in putting every man in the South
capable of bearing arms, into the army. At the North--largely because
of the defeat of McClellan and Pope in Virginia, and of Halleck's
astonishing failure to follow up the Shiloh campaign with aggressive
operations--the volunteering had so far ceased that Mr. Lincoln's call
for an additional 300,000 men met with a meager and unsatisfactory
response. In several states--New York among them--the quotas were not
furnished by volunteering and it was necessary to order a draft to fill
up the ranks depleted by battle and disease. The North at this time had
more than twice as many men in the field as the South could muster. But
with every southward advance of Federal armies more and more men must
be withdrawn from the active work of aggression and set to guard places
captured, to maintain lines of communication and to hold regions that
had been overrun. Moreover the Southerners were mainly fighting on the
defensive, which in some degree compensated for their lack of equal
numbers. Still again the enlistment of every man at the South was to
endure to the end of the war, while very large numbers of men at the
North were enlisted for shorter terms, some of them for only three
months or a hundred days, scarcely time enough in which to discipline
and train them into effectiveness.
Without offense, also,--and certainly no offense is intended--it is
fair to say that the volunteers and conscripts who at this period of
the war came into the Confederate service, were in many cases morally
superior to the men brought by draft processes into the armies of the
Union. They were all Americans for one thing, while great multitudes
of those enlisted or drafted into the service at the North were recent
immigrants from Europe who neither knew nor cared for the issues
involved in the contest but who entered the service as they might
have accepted any other employment, for the sake of the money returns
promised. These money returns included, besides pay, rations and a
clothing allowance, a bounty of extraordinary liberality, amounting
in many cases to a larger sum of money than its recipients had ever
dreamed of owning, as the price of substitution. For while at the
South every man included within the terms of the conscription law must
shoulder his musket and go to the front, whatever his wealth or social
position might be, the case was very different at the North. There men
who had the means of buying a substitute very often did so. Many who
lacked the means or were unwilling to pay the high price exacted by
those who stood ready to sell themselves as substitutes, emigrated to
Canada or went to Europe to escape the military service.
These facts undoubtedly created a disparity between the two contending
armies, which had not existed during the earlier part of the war. The
immigrants and the purchased substitutes who joined the Federal armies
after the campaigns of 1862 were over, were not morally the equals of
the native or long naturalized Americans who had fought so heroically
around Richmond, at the second battle of Manassas, at Sharpsburg, and
at Shiloh. For this as well as for the other reasons indicated, the
North had need of larger numbers than the South, in order to carry the
war to success.
The Confederates now held a smaller section of the Mississippi than
before, but they held that more strongly. A general of capacity, after
Shiloh, might easily have wrested its possession from them, as General
Grant has pointed out. Under a general incapacity, nothing was done to
that end and the Confederates, thus favored by Federal neglect, had
so far fortified their strongholds that the dislodgment which would
have been easy in the spring could now be accomplished only by one of
the severest, bloodiest and most perilous campaigns of the war. Thus
all that had been gained above or below, towards the reconquest of the
Mississippi, had gone for next to naught. For the possession of its
mouth on the one hand, and the control of its upper reaches on the
other, meant nothing so long as the Confederates held Vicksburg and
Port Hudson, thus obstructing a river whose sole value was as a highway.
In Virginia the Southern arms had been successful in an extraordinary
degree. McClellan's splendid army of 120,000 men had been broken and
beaten back from the very gates of Richmond, and sent hurriedly
northward to defend the National capital itself against threatened
capture. Pope, at the head of an army quite equal to any that the
Confederates could muster, had been outmaneuvered, outfought and
overthrown at Manassas, and hurled back upon the defenses of Washington
as a needed refuge. Lee had invaded Maryland, his cavalry amusing
themselves by unopposed marches into Pennsylvania. Finally Burnside's
attempt at Fredericksburg with an army overwhelming in its numbers, had
resulted in fearfully bloody failure.
As the autumn drew on Grant was left at Corinth, by no fault of his own
but because of Halleck's orders, with a force barely sufficient, if
sufficient at all, to hold the railroads and outlying posts which he
was set to guard. In his front there lay a threatening army stronger
than any that he could hope to bring together at any one point. To the
eastward Buell, under paralyzing orders, was slowly marching toward
Chattanooga, while Bragg with a strong Confederate army was hastening
northward to seize that commanding strategic position and to push
thence northward with high hopes and fair prospects of making the Ohio
river before the year was out, the dividing line between the Northern
and Southern forces, replacing the line which by Grant's successes had
been drawn the whole width of two states further south.
On these points the testimony of General Grant is too direct, too
conclusive and too valuable to be omitted here, or to be given
otherwise than in his own carefully chosen words. On page 237 _et seq._
of the "Memoirs" he writes:
General Buell had left Corinth about the tenth of June to march
upon Chattanooga. Bragg, who had succeeded Beauregard in command,
sent one division from Tupelo on the twenty-seventh of June for
the same place. This gave Buell about seventeen days' start. If he
had not been required to repair the railroad as he advanced, the
march could have been made in eighteen days at the outside, and
Chattanooga must have been reached by the national forces before
the rebels could have possibly got there.
On page 240 we have this careful estimate of the situation at the
beginning of September:
On the seventh of September I learned of the advance of Van Dorn
and Price, apparently upon Corinth. One division was brought from
Memphis to Bolivar to meet any emergency that might arise from this
move of the enemy. I was much concerned because my first duty after
holding the territory acquired within my command, was to prevent
further reinforcing of Bragg in Middle Tennessee. Already the army
of Northern Virginia had defeated the army under General Pope,
and was invading Maryland. In the center General Buell was on his
way to Louisville and Bragg marching parallel to him with a large
Confederate force for the Ohio river. I had been constantly called
upon to reinforce Buell until at this time my entire force numbered
less than 50,000 men of all arms. This included everything from
Cairo south within my jurisdiction. If I too should be driven back
the Ohio river would become the line dividing the belligerents west
of the Alleghanies while at the east the line was already farther
north than when hostilities commenced at the opening of the war. It
is true Nashville was never given up after its first capture, but
it would have been isolated and the garrison there would have been
obliged to beat a hasty retreat if the troops in West Tennessee
had been compelled to fall back. To say, at the end of the second
year of the war the line dividing the contestants at the east was
pushed north of Maryland, a state that had not seceded, and at
the west beyond Kentucky, and this State which had been always
loyal, would have been discouraging indeed. As it was many loyal
people despaired in the Fall of 1862 of ever saving the Union. The
Administration at Washington was much concerned for the safety of
the cause it held so dear.
This was a most trying time for a man of General Grant's overmastering
instinct of activity. The task set him of guarding a vast territory
and three railroad lines against a ceaselessly active and enterprising
enemy, gave him occupation enough it is true. But the situation forbade
him to concentrate anywhere, or to do anything indeed except repel
assaults first upon one insignificant point and then upon another.
A mere catalogue of the actions fought at this time in that quarter
would occupy pages of print. Only one of them had enough significance
to require mention in this history. On the thirteenth of September the
Confederate general, Sterling Price, with a considerable force occupied
Iuka, a town on the Memphis and Charleston railroad, about twenty
miles east of Corinth. The fact was a significant commentary upon the
unwisdom of the orders which delayed Buell's march on Chattanooga, in
the end defeating its purpose, in order to repair a railroad, any point
upon which the Confederates could seize at will in spite of Grant's
utmost diligence in an impracticable and indeed impossible defense.
Grant feared that the object of Price's movement might be something
of vastly more importance than the destruction of a railroad station,
as indeed it was. Price's purpose in seizing Iuka was to get control
of the railroad east of that point long enough to enable him to send
heavy reinforcements to Bragg, who was at that time pushing Buell back
upon Louisville, with the prospect, if reinforced in timely fashion,
of capturing that city, compelling Grant's retirement to Cairo, and
establishing the Ohio river as the northern boundary and the military
line of the Confederacy. Accordingly Grant dangerously weakened
several exposed points in order to concentrate under Rosecrans a
sufficient force to drive Price out of Iuka before the main body of the
Confederate army south of Corinth could join him there.
The operation resulted in some strenuous fighting. Price was driven
back and his scheme was defeated. The details of the battle need not be
recounted here. They belong to the domain of minute history, covering
special campaigns. For the purposes of a general history of the war, it
is sufficient to point out the only strategic purpose involved in the
movement, and its defeat by a timely and judicious activity.
CHAPTER XXXV
BRAGG'S CAMPAIGN AGAINST LOUISVILLE
Strategically considered there was no point in the middle South
so important to either side at that time as Chattanooga. Either
side having possession of that place could hold it against a force
outnumbering its garrison many times. More important still, its
possession by the Confederates opened to them three or four different
routes of advance into Kentucky, which no enemy with anything like an
equal force could effectually guard or defend. To hold one of these
routes was to open another. Confederate possession of Chattanooga at
that period of the war meant therefore the possible and even probable
conquest of all eastern Kentucky, the isolation and fall of Nashville,
the reconquest of the Tennessee and Cumberland rivers, and the enforced
retirement of Grant's advanced army to the line of the Ohio river.
All these consequences, as General Grant has said, were the probable
results of a Confederate occupation of Chattanooga in force, and had
Bragg succeeded in the campaign he directed from that point all these
consequences would have been morally certain to befall the Union arms,
as General Grant saw at the time and afterwards set forth in his
"Memoirs."
On the other hand the seizure of Chattanooga by a Federal force of
consequence, would have closed and barred the gate to all further
advances of the Confederates into Tennessee and Kentucky. It would have
made the southern boundary of Tennessee permanently the most northerly
military line of division between North and South, making of Kentucky a
state completely saved to the Union and of Tennessee a state completely
recovered to it.
General Halleck had sagacity enough to see, at least in some degree,
the strategic necessity of seizing upon Chattanooga. Accordingly he
ordered Buell to march upon and occupy that place. But he seems to have
forgotten that there were energetic men in command of Southern armies,
men quite as capable as he was of recognizing an opportunity. Instead
of sending Buell post haste to occupy the place, as General Grant
has pointed out that he should have done, leaving the repair of the
Memphis and Charleston railroad to details of troops to be made after
the main point was gained, he threw away the advantage of a seventeen
days' start and a shorter line than that of his enemy, and kept Buell
for many weary weeks repairing bridges and culverts while Bragg was
hurrying with all possible speed to throw a commanding force into
Chattanooga.
The result was that Bragg captured the commanding strategic position
and Buell was left "in the air," as military men say, not knowing where
to concentrate or in what direction his enemy was to be expected. The
story of his haltings, his hesitations, his confusion of mind, his
orders and counter orders, as given in General Van Horne's "History of
the Army of the Cumberland," and in the accompanying documents, is
pitiful in its revelation of the perplexities of an earnest, sincere
and very capable officer who had been made the victim of "orders" from
an incapable but relentlessly exacting "superior."
It would be an idle and wearisome waste of space to recount here all
of Buell's marchings and counter-marchings, all the orders given and
countermanded, and given again only to be again rescinded, which
marked the progress of that campaign. For the purposes of history
it is enough to say that Bragg, with his Confederates, in the end
succeeded in maneuvering Buell out of Tennessee and across Kentucky
to the neighborhood of Louisville, while sending a dangerously strong
detachment into eastern Kentucky to threaten Covington and Cincinnati.
The purpose of this detachment was to compel Buell to divide his force
and send a part of it up the river to defend Cincinnati, thus weakening
the defense of Louisville, which city Bragg intended to assail and
confidently hoped to capture.
That purpose failed. The moment that Cincinnati was threatened, men in
multitudes, who had not before thought of enlisting, swarmed to the
point of danger and freely offered themselves for its defense. It was
not necessary for Buell to spare a single regiment for Cincinnati's
protection, beyond those already holding eastern Kentucky, and
even these, when Bragg's campaign developed its purpose against
Louisville, were able to spare considerable detachments to aid Buell in
Louisville's defense. But all this is an anticipation of events. Let us
tell the story as it occurred.
During the spring and summer of 1862, and after Buell's main army
had marched westward to reinforce Grant at Pittsburg Landing, there
had been almost ceaseless campaigning and fighting along the upper
Tennessee river, in Alabama, and around Cumberland Gap. Generals O.
M. Mitchell, G. W. Morgan and Negley were the active agents in this
campaigning on the Federal side; Kirby Smith was the Confederate
chieftain with John Morgan and N. B. Forrest for his enterprising
cavalry raiders. The fighting was often severe and the maneuvers
brilliant on both sides, but in the absence of strong armies it was
after all scarcely more than skirmishing, involving no battle of
importance and no movement of strategic consequence enough to require
mention in a general history of the war. The struggle was the outcome
of a purpose on either side to maintain the strategic status quo, or
if possible to improve it here and there where opportunity offered.
Substantially the result was to leave matters about as they had been,
except that the continual activity and the frequent encounters of arms
served to discipline and steady the raw recruits who were coming in on
both sides. The operations of that spring and summer served to make
soldiers of the new men North and South.
It was not until after Halleck sent Buell to seize upon the strategic
position at Chattanooga, and Bragg, seventeen days later, withdrew
his main body from Grant's front and set out by the roundabout way of
Mobile to anticipate Buell, that the war in that part of the country
again assumed strategic and historical importance.
Buell's march eastward was necessarily very slow and halting, and
during its continuance he was compelled to scatter his forces in a very
dangerous fashion. There had been two blunders made at the outset--both
of them made by General Halleck against General Buell's protest. One of
them was in making Corinth the base of supplies for Buell's army and
depending for communication upon a long east and west line of badly
broken railroad which was exposed at almost every point to frequent and
destructive incursions of the enemy. Buell had asked to make Nashville
his base instead. That point was connected with Louisville by rail and
still more securely by river, and the river route was at all points
adequately guarded against interruption by an effective gunboat fleet.
From Nashville south and east there were railroads which Buell could
have guarded effectually with one fifth the force necessary to the very
ineffectual protection of the east and west line of the Memphis and
Charleston road.
But Halleck was imperative in his orders and Buell had to submit, with
the ultimate result of having to scatter his forces widely in order to
guard both lines and repair both, on pain of bringing actual starvation
upon his army.
The second mistake was in ordering Buell to repair the very badly
damaged Memphis and Charleston railroad as he advanced. This, as we
have already seen, resulted in so delaying his advance that Bragg
reached Chattanooga first and was from that hour master of the
situation.
In the meanwhile Forrest and Morgan were ceaselessly active in Buell's
rear--towards Louisville--harassing his detachments, threatening and
at times destroying his communications, burning bridges, tearing up
railroads, gathering recruits from the youth of Kentucky and Tennessee,
throwing the people into panic and grave uncertainty of mind, and
now and then defeating and capturing important forces. Thus at
Tompkinsville, Kentucky, Morgan routed the Federal garrison under Major
Jordan, and proceeding, destroyed the railroad at Lebanon Junction,
and at Lebanon compelled the surrender of the force there with a large
amount of supplies which Buell badly needed. Thence he raided all over
central Kentucky, destroying railroads of the utmost importance to
Buell and finally escaping with rich booty into the Confederate lines
again.
Forrest pushed out from Chattanooga and undertook even larger
operations. He assailed Murfreesborough on the thirteenth of July,
carried the place by storm, captured the whole garrison, including
its commander, General Crittenden, and, turning about, overcame and
captured Colonel Lester on the Stone river, with his entire force of
nine full companies.
These actions were not battles of any special consequence, of course.
They are mentioned here merely as illustrations of the perplexities
that beset General Buell in his march upon Chattanooga, and ultimately
made a complete failure of the attempt. Such actions as those described
were of daily occurrence, and they compelled General Buell not only to
weaken his column by detachments sent to strengthen exposed positions,
but still further to cripple himself by sending columns of some
importance to try conclusions with the very enterprising enemy.
Bragg, at the head of a strong Confederate army, established himself in
Chattanooga on the twenty-ninth of July, some weeks before Buell could
finish the reconstruction of the Memphis and Charleston railroad and
advance to the point the occupation of which was the sole object of his
campaign.
Bragg at once called to his aid all the troops that could be spared to
him from points of less importance, and very soon he was at the head of
a strong force which threatened a serious and dangerous invasion.
But while he was thus concentrating his forces for a vigorous
aggressive movement, Bragg adroitly concealed his purposes. He so
disposed his divisions as to leave Buell in utter uncertainty as to his
intentions. It might be that he intended a reconquest of Nashville. It
might be that his purpose was to march into eastern Kentucky. It might
be that he intended to move northward, take Buell in flank and rear,
destroy his communications, cut him off from assistance or retreat, and
perhaps compel his surrender. His dispositions equally threatened each
of these possible enterprises, without in the least degree impairing
his ability instantly to concentrate his entire force for the execution
of any one of them.
And what his force was Buell did not know and could not conjecture with
any degree of confidence. East Tennessee was full of Union men eager to
give helpful information to the Federal commander, but Bragg, with an
adroitness that had not before been brought to bear upon campaigning
in the west, managed to conceal the strength of his army even from
the citizens of Chattanooga, at the same time moving troops about in
such fashion as to suggest half a dozen different and irreconcilable
purposes. It thus happened that the more and the more positive
information Buell received with regard to his enemy's operations
and intentions, the more hopelessly was he bewildered. He dared not
concentrate upon any line, lest his adversary should move at once by
some other and put him in peril. No one can read General Buell's orders
and dispatches written at that time without being strongly impressed
with the hopeless confusion and uncertainty of his mind due to a
situation that was perplexing in the extreme.
It was obvious that he must draw his widely scattered forces together
at some point; but where? He could not concentrate them at any point
upon the line or in the region he was supposed to be occupying without
weakening all other points at grave risk of having his enemy turn his
position and bring him to destruction. There was only one course that
he could pursue with even tolerable prudence. That was to abandon his
aggressive campaign, fall back, concentrate for defense and give battle
at some point of his own selection much farther north.
Bragg's army consisted of five divisions of infantry with artillery
and cavalry. Buell had five divisions in front and three others within
almost instant call, while he could depend upon being still further
reinforced from Louisville, whither a still further part of Grant's
army had been sent. But the nature of the country in which Bragg lay,
and the uncertainty of his intentions forbade an attack upon him there.
Buell decided at last that his adversary's objective was Nashville,
and on the thirtieth of August he gave orders for a retreat toward
that place by way of Murfreesboro. At Murfreesboro he made no pause,
as by that time Bragg's movement had developed his purpose to go into
Kentucky and make a hurried advance upon Louisville, striking that
city before Buell could come to its defense. Buell therefore abandoned
his march towards Nashville and pushed his column northward by hurried
marches, in the hope that he might beat Bragg in the race for the
Ohio river, or failing in that, might be in time to fall upon his
adversary's rear before he could establish himself in Louisville's
defenses. He left a small garrison to hold Nashville but pushed forward
in all haste with his main army, in retreat upon Louisville.
His retreat was embarrassed at every step. Bragg had forces ahead
of him who destroyed bridges, tore up tracks, captured important
supply depots, and in one case, at Mumfordsville, compelled the
surrender--September 17--of a fortified town with its garrison, upon
which Buell had somewhat depended for a reinforcement.
At first Buell had left Thomas at Nashville, to defend that city, but
his own need of strength became so pressing that he called upon that
able officer to join him with the greater part of the troops that had
been left at Nashville.
What Bragg's campaign really meant, and what he hoped to accomplish
by it may best be shown by his own orders and dispatches. On August
eleventh, soon after he had established himself at Chattanooga, he sent
instructions to General Van Dorn who was confronting Grant at Corinth
in which he said: "It is very desirable to press the enemy closely in
West Tennessee. We learn their forces there are being rapidly reduced,
and when our movements become known, it is certain they must throw
forces into middle Tennessee and Kentucky, or lose those regions. If
you hold them in check, we are sure of success here; but should they
reinforce here so as to defy us, then you may redeem west Tennessee and
probably aid us by crushing the enemy's rear."
On August 27, just as his army was got into vigorous motion, General
Bragg wrote to Van Dorn again as follows: "We move from here
immediately--later by some days than expected; but in time, we hope,
for a successful campaign. Buell has certainly fallen back from the
Memphis and Charleston railroad, and will probably not make a stand
this side of Nashville, if there. He is now fortifying that place.
General E. K. Smith, reinforced by two brigades from this army, has
turned Cumberland Gap and is now marching on Lexington, Kentucky.
General Morgan (Yankee) is thus cut off from all supplies. General
Humphrey Marshall is to enter eastern Kentucky from western Virginia.
We shall thus have Buell pretty well disposed of. Sherman and
Rosecrans, we leave to you and Price, satisfied you can dispose of
them, and we confidently hope to meet you upon the Ohio."
Two days later, on August 29, Bragg telegraphed Price, saying:
"Buell's force is in full retreat upon Nashville, destroying their
stores. Watch Rosecrans and prevent a junction. Or, if he escapes, you
follow him closely."
It will be seen from these dispatches that Bragg had no real thought of
advancing upon Nashville, as Buell at first believed that he intended
to do. His campaign was boldly planned for a larger conquest farther
north, which, if he had been successful, would have left Nashville an
easy prey to a strong detachment, if indeed it had failed to succumb to
isolation and fall by its own weight.
In these brief communications we have a complete revelation of Bragg's
plans and purposes--a complete setting forth of his hopes. Stripped
of military technicalities his purpose was to push his army towards
Louisville in advance of Buell's retreat; to strike and destroy the
Federal general's line of railroad communication between Nashville
and Louisville, at points north of Buell's march, thus impeding and
delaying the Federal retreat and in Forrest's phrase "getting there
first with the most men"--_there_ meaning Louisville on the Ohio river.
In aid of this plan he had cut off the Federal general, Morgan,
at Cumberland Gap, rendering his force useless for any aggressive
purpose and incapable of joining Buell anywhere. He had ordered strong
forces into eastern Kentucky, to hold there all the Federals in that
quarter, to threaten Cincinnati and perhaps to compel the detachment
of a considerable force from the garrison at Louisville for the
defense of the Ohio city. He depended upon Price and Van Dorn so to
occupy Grant's badly depleted army in western Tennessee and northern
Mississippi as to prevent it from moving to Buell's assistance, or
should it so move, he expected his very energetic lieutenants to
cripple it by a prompt pursuit and by vigorous blows struck upon its
rear, in the meanwhile overrunning and reconquering the region lost in
western Tennessee and Kentucky.
This was without doubt one of the most brilliantly planned operations
of the entire war on either side. It looked to no less an achievement
than the undoing of all that had been done by Grant and Buell and
Thomas, the reconquest of all the region lost and the establishment
of the Confederate lines upon the Ohio river for both offensive and
defensive operations during the next year and the years to follow.
The one defect of the plan was that the Confederates had not force
enough to carry it to success, except by some happy accident, and happy
accidents were far less likely to happen in the autumn of 1862 than
they had been a year earlier when troops were raw, generals totally
inexperienced and the problems of war wholly unsolved even in their
primary processes.
Bragg's force was considerably less than that which Buell had under
his immediate command. Lee was at that time carrying on his tremendous
campaigns in Virginia and Maryland so that no troops could be spared
from that quarter to reinforce Bragg's undertaking. Price and Van Dorn
had quite all they could do to hold their own against Grant at Corinth
and Sherman at Memphis. It is true that Grant had been "stripped to the
skin," as he expressed it, by calls upon him to reinforce Buell and to
spare division after division for the army that was contending against
Lee and doubtfully defending the Federal capital. But on the other hand
Price and Van Dorn had been stripped equally bare to furnish Bragg with
the troops with whom he was invading Kentucky.
And while Bragg was thus marching into his enemy's country with a
force only about three fifths as numerous as that of his adversary
and with no prospect of important reinforcement from any quarter,
Buell was retreating upon a city strongly held, whose garrison would
furnish an instant and a very strong reinforcement, while the mere
threat of Bragg's advance was inducing the hurrying of multitudes of
fresh troops from all the northwestern states, to the menaced cities of
Cincinnati and Louisville. For it was clearly seen in Ohio, Indiana and
Illinois, and even in Michigan, Wisconsin and Minnesota, that should
Bragg succeed in establishing himself on the Ohio river the states
north of that stream must become the ravaged and trampled theater of
the next year's campaign, with a Confederate invading force swelled
by enlistments from Kentucky and Tennessee to enormous proportions
and reinforced by the fifty or sixty thousand Southern veterans
whom the conquest of the Ohio by Bragg would instantly release from
defensive work farther south. In brief, if Bragg could have captured
and held Louisville by defeating Buell, it was morally certain that
the Confederates would have been able, during the following spring,
to invade the Northwest with an effective force of tremendous
proportions. For Kentucky and Tennessee would in that case have become
wholly Confederate, and the whole South would have joined in an effort
to make decisive use of such an opportunity to end the war in triumph.
Tens of thousands of seasoned troops employed during the summer of
1862 in garrisoning towns and protecting railroad lines would in that
case have been set free to aid in an aggressive movement north of the
Ohio. With the Confederates established at Louisville and holding the
Ohio river as their line, there would have been no choice but for
Grant to withdraw from Mississippi, West Tennessee and Kentucky, thus
setting free not only the 30,000 or 50,000 men confronting his present
position, but also the garrisons and armies about Vicksburg and along
the several railroads in Mississippi and in northern Georgia and
Alabama. It is certainly not an exaggeration to estimate that had Bragg
succeeded, as he hoped, in seizing Louisville and meeting Van Dorn and
Price "on the Ohio" as he said, the Confederates could and would have
mustered at least 150,000 men for the invasion of the Northwest at the
opening of the spring of 1863--an army greater than the South ever put
into the field at any point during the entire continuance of the war.
And all this was a not impossible--indeed a not
improbable--contingency. It is true that Bragg's force was in numbers
inferior to Buell's in about the proportion of three to five. But it
was massed at the outset and remained completely coöperating from
beginning to end of the campaign. It had besides, the advantage of
knowing what it intended and whither it was going, while Buell must
vaguely guess its intentions and hold himself ready during a retreat,
to meet his enemy wherever that enemy might see fit to strike.
In war these things offset superiority of numbers in a degree which it
is difficult for the civilian reader to understand. He who can give
battle or refuse it where he pleases, has a very great advantage over
his adversary who must accept whatever is offered or else retreat at
disadvantage.
Moreover Bragg had managed to get the start of Buell in their race
for Louisville, and this advantage had been greatly increased by his
success in breaking Buell's lines of march by burning bridges, tearing
up railroads and capturing supply depots. For a time it seemed more
than probable that Bragg would reach Louisville and occupy it before
Buell could by any possibility get there. In that event Buell would
have been cut off from all supplies, and only ordinary vigilance on the
part of the Confederates would have been necessary to starve him into
surrender--for if thus cut off, his stores could not have supported his
army for more than three or four days at the utmost.
Still again, Bragg had another ground of hope. It often happens in
war, that a smaller force, skilfully handled, masters a larger force.
To go no further back than the Seven Days' battles around Richmond,
and the campaign following, Lee had succeeded by the skilful handling
of a comparatively small force in overcoming one army which greatly
outnumbered his own, while paralyzing the purpose of other forces as
great as his own, that had been sent to reinforce his enemy. With this
and many other familiar illustrations of the possibility of achieving
conspicuous military success against superior numbers present to his
mind, it was not vainglorious on the part of Bragg, who believed in
his own skill, to hope that if he could reach Louisville in advance of
Buell, his army, inspirited by repeated successes on the march, and
holding the vantage ground of possession, might successfully meet and
defeat Buell's way-weary force, cut off, as in that case it would have
been, from its objective, from all hope of assistance and even from
very badly needed supplies.
Indeed, had Bragg achieved his purpose of pushing his columns into
Louisville in advance of Buell's coming, it would have been almost a
miracle for him to have failed in his resistance to the outmarched
Federal commander's attempts to recapture the lost stronghold.
It was one of those fearful crises of the war,--like Sharpsburg
and Gettysburg--in which the whole outcome of the struggle hung
trembling in the balance, and the future alike of the Union and of the
Confederacy was risked, as it were, upon the hazard of a die.
For while Bragg was thus dragging Buell back from northern Alabama and
Georgia to the Ohio river and more than seriously threatening to make
of that river the fortified frontier of the Confederacy, Lee was in
Maryland, after having overthrown McClellan before Richmond and Pope
at Manassas, and the National capital itself seemed in sore danger of
capture. The year which had opened with the Union victories at Forts
Henry and Donelson, presently followed by Grant's success at Shiloh,
while McClellan's overwhelming divisions were near enough to Richmond
to see the spires of that city's churches, seemed about to draw to a
close so disastrous to the Federal cause as to leave it in worse case
than at the beginning of the war or indeed at any time since the first
defeat at Bull Run.
The National credit was impaired as it never had been before. The
Confederates were moved to make of the eighteenth of September a day
of Thanksgiving for a deliverance which they regarded as in effect
accomplished.
Enlistments at the North had so far fallen off that drafts must be made
in order to maintain that great superiority of numbers without which
the North, fighting aggressively, could not hope to make head against
Southern defense, as all the operations of the war up to that time had
shown, and as the later course of the contest additionally proved at
every point.
But Bragg's effort to seize Louisville before Buell could throw
himself into that city's defenses, failed of its purpose. By virtue
of a wonderful march Buell reached the city first, near the end of
September, the last of his forces arriving there on the twenty-ninth.
Bragg was at Bardstown, not far away and in a very threatening
position. In the meanwhile Grant held his own at Corinth in spite of
the dangerous depletion of his forces, and the whole of West Tennessee
remained in possession of the Federals.
Buell found heavy reinforcements awaiting him at Louisville, while
Bragg at Bardstown had not yet been joined, as he had expected to be,
by Kirby Smith's force from eastern Kentucky.
The conditions of the campaign were thus reversed. Buell, who had been
on the defensive and in enforced retreat, was able now to take the
offensive, while Bragg, who had been advancing with high hopes was now
in a position from which he must retreat promptly on pain of having his
army overwhelmed and destroyed.
Buell quickly reorganized his army into corps, welding the raw troops
into the seasoned force, and within a day or two he was ready to assail
the enemy who had driven him across two states.
Bragg retired to Perryville with a total force of about 35,000 men, and
Buell with 58,000 advanced upon him. On the eighth of October a severe
battle occurred which lasted from noonday to night and seemed undecided
when night fell. But when morning came Bragg had retired and was in
slow and orderly retreat southward. The Federal loss in the battle of
Perryville was reported at 4,348, including two brigadier generals
killed. The Confederate loss is unknown, but as Bragg began the battle
with only three divisions assailing eight, and as the fighting at times
was muzzle to muzzle, the slaughter among such troops as were actually
engaged on his side, must have been terrible.
Learning that Kirby Smith's command had on that evening joined Bragg,
General Buell did not press his enemy, but disposed his forces for a
defensive battle. It was not until the thirteenth that he discovered
that Bragg was indeed retreating and ordered a pursuit. This was
pressed, with some fighting now and then, as far as Crab Orchard, where
the Federals halted, leaving Bragg free to make his leisurely way to
East Tennessee with an enormous wagon train loaded with a rich booty of
supplies which he had gathered in Kentucky.
CHAPTER XXXVI
FALL AND WINTER CAMPAIGNS AT THE WEST AND SOUTH
The climatic conditions of the disputed country south and west were
excellent for campaigning during the autumn, and tolerable during most
of the winter. As neither side was satisfied with the results achieved
in that quarter during the spring and summer of 1862, both were
disposed to carry on the war with vigor during the autumn of that year
and the winter following.
On the third of October, while Buell and Bragg were confronting each
other near Louisville, Van Dorn, who had been heavily reinforced from
Missouri, undertook to carry out Bragg's orders, for the capture of
Corinth and the reconquest of western Tennessee and Kentucky. He
advanced upon Corinth in force and assailed Rosecrans, who held the
immediate command of that place, upon lines chosen by the Federal
commander, three miles in front of the main defenses.
It was a rich prize that the Confederate commander battled for, and
right manfully did he strive to gain it. Corinth at that time was
a depot of supplies of unusual consequence, and besides that, its
conquest would mean the complete breaking of Grant's long and difficult
line of defense.
During the first day of terrific fighting, Van Dorn succeeded in
driving Rosecrans back to the refuge of the town's fortifications. On
the next morning he assailed the works with extraordinary vigor and
determination. His men suffered terribly from the cannon and musketry
fire of a protected enemy at short range, but they succeeded at last in
breaking the defenses and forcing their way into the town where they
fought inch by inch through the streets. For a time it seemed certain
that they must succeed not only in carrying the town and capturing
the stores that had been collected there, but also in compelling the
surrender of the defending force, twenty thousand strong, with the
multitude of large guns mounted upon the works. But reinforcements
came to Rosecrans's aid at the critical moment and turned the tide of
battle just in time to prevent a great disaster to the Federals. The
Confederates were driven back and after a heavy loss, never accurately
reported, they retreated from the place.
Grant had ordered Rosecrans, should this occur, to pursue with all his
force and crush the Confederate column completely. Rosecrans delayed
even the beginning of pursuit from noon, when the retreat began, until
the morning of the next day and then, by a mistake in the road taken,
lost even the little chance left to him of effective pursuit.
Grant was sorely displeased with this loss of an opportunity which
had been purchased at cost of so severe a battle, and at his request
Rosecrans was removed to another field. He was sent in fact, after a
brief time, to succeed Buell, whose failure to do greater damage to
Bragg met with condemnation at Washington.
The Confederate authorities were equally displeased with their general,
Van Dorn, and soon afterwards he was superseded in command by General
John C. Pemberton.
Pemberton was a Pennsylvanian by birth, who had married at the South.
He was a special, personal favorite of President Davis. He had never
commanded an army or conducted a battle in his life, yet Mr. Davis had
rapidly promoted him all the way from colonel to lieutenant general,
over the heads and to the great discouragement of colonels, brigadiers
and major generals who had won high distinction upon hotly contested
Confederate battlefields. And now, when the Federal forces were firmly
established on the far Southern line of the Memphis and Charleston
railroad, and when the very greatest generalship was obviously and
peremptorily needed to save the Confederate cause in the South and
West, the Richmond authorities selected this favorite, who had done no
fighting, commanded no armies and manifested no military ability, to
take control of Confederate defense at the most critical point of all.
The result was quite what might have been expected. Pemberton was
badly defeated every time he gave battle and it was he who surrendered
Vicksburg and the Mississippi river on the fourth of July after a
brave but incapable defense. The history of that belongs to a later
chapter. And even after this extraordinary demonstration of his
unfitness and incapacity, and at a time when very many at the South
seriously--though unjustly--suspected him of having deliberately
betrayed their cause, Mr. Davis appointed this man to a post which
seemed at least to give him authority to control General Lee himself.
This latter appointment was so quickly and so hotly resented by an army
that well nigh worshiped Lee, that Mr. Davis wisely modified it before
it had time to provoke a protest that might have savored of mutiny.
When Rosecrans superseded Buell, on October 30, 1862, the Federal army
was in process of concentration at and near Bowling Green. Within a few
days the concentration was complete, and Rosecrans was ready for active
campaigning with a great army, inspirited by recent successes, strongly
reinforced, effectively reorganized and full of hopeful determination.
But in what direction to advance was an unsettled problem. Rosecrans
was strongly urged from Washington to move at once into East Tennessee,
threatening Chattanooga and giving encouragement to the Unionists in
that quarter. But Nashville was in serious danger. It had been held
by a comparatively meager garrison during the Perryville campaign,
against a strong Confederate force under Breckinridge, and there was
more than a chance that Breckinridge might now capture the position
unless Negley, with the two divisions under his command there, could be
promptly supported. The importance of Nashville to the Federal armies
as a secondary base of supplies was very great. Whether Rosecrans
should campaign to the east, west or south, his need of depots at
Nashville must be imperative.
While he was pondering the question of an objective, Bragg settled it
for him. The Confederate general had retired from Kentucky rather of
his own choice than under compulsion. He had suffered no disaster. At
Perryville indeed he had had the best of the fighting for a large part
of the day, and he had retired in the night rather with the purpose of
giving battle again at some more favorable point than with intent to
avoid battle with an enemy in strongly superior force. That enemy had
not seen fit to follow and press him, and so there had been no further
trial of conclusions. The Confederates had indeed failed to capture
Louisville and establish themselves on the Ohio, but they had met with
so much success not only in the various actions fought but also in
demonstrating their ability to advance or retreat at will, that they
came out of the campaign feeling themselves, in effect, victors. They
were full of spirit and eagerly ready for further campaigning.
With his army in this mood and with a secure base behind him at
Chattanooga, Bragg promptly moved upon Murfreesboro, with manifest
intent to join Breckinridge and carry Nashville with a rush, if
Rosecrans should fail to succor that strategic key to the situation.
Murfreesboro lies on the Nashville and Chattanooga railroad, a scant
forty miles southeast of Nashville. The country between is open and so
completely unobstructed by physical features of difficulty, that the
railroad shows scarcely a curve in its course between the two points.
In view of Bragg's advance there was but one course open to Rosecrans.
He must strengthen the defenses of Nashville and concentrate there for
defensive and offensive operations.
He promptly threw a strong force into Nashville and soon his entire
army was concentrated there, except such detachments--and these were
large--as were employed in rebuilding the railroad between Louisville
and Nashville, which the Confederates had destroyed, and those other
and still larger detachments which were necessary to defend that
vitally important line of communication against the ceaseless activity
of Forrest and Morgan, who were making themselves destructively
ubiquitous.
Rosecrans's activity was such that he succeeded in rendering Nashville
secure before Bragg could carry out his purpose of assailing that
stronghold. Still Bragg did not despair of his purpose. He sent
peremptory orders to the forces around Corinth, either to send him
strong reinforcements or to carry on such a campaign in their own
districts as should compel Rosecrans to weaken himself at Nashville by
sending heavy reinforcements to the west.
Meanwhile Bragg fortified himself at Murfreesboro, establishing
his lines along and across Stone river--a little, easily fordable
stream--about two miles in front of the town.
Rosecrans decided to assail him there, and to that end advanced with
47,000 men. His march began on the twenty-sixth of December, and by
the thirtieth he was in position to assail his enemy with an effective
force of 43,700 men. His plan of battle was to throw forward his left
wing in force, envelope his enemy's right and crumple up his lines
by pushing into action a ceaseless stream of fresh troops, wheeling
his divisions to the right as they should be successively brought into
action.
But Bragg was also an officer of great energy and activity, and he had
under his command a force nearly if not quite equal to that of his foe.
He was at disadvantage during Rosecrans's sudden and unexpected advance
from Nashville, from the fact that he had sent away his cavalry under
Wheeler, Forrest, and Morgan to assail Rosecrans's communications at
a time when that general was not expected to take the initiative in a
winter campaign in the field. But now that Rosecrans was in his front,
and obviously intending immediate battle, Bragg in his turn determined
to assume the aggressive and himself bring on the action. His plan was
absolutely identical with that of Rosecrans, namely to push forward his
left wing, envelope and crush his enemy's right and by successive right
wheels to destroy his foe or drive him into retreat. Thus Rosecrans
intended to begin the battle at one end of the line while Bragg meant
to begin it at the other.
Each of course massed his forces at the point where he purposed to make
his first assault, and each thus weakened his line at the point which
his enemy was planning to assail.
As a consequence the initiatory advantage must of necessity lie with
the force that should succeed in making itself the first aggressor,
bringing on the battle before the other was ready and striking the
other's weakest wing with his own strongest divisions.
That advantage fell to Bragg as a reward for his alertness in striking
as soon as possible after dawn on the last day of the year. He had so
extended his left as completely to overlap Rosecrans's right and he
fell upon it in flank with resistless impetuosity. The force defending
it was quickly crushed and the Confederates, advancing with enthusiasm,
bent back the next division encountered, and after some strenuous
fighting, forced it to retire upon a new line which Rosecrans had
hastily established at right angles to that of the morning.
The fighting continued with desperate determination and great slaughter
on both sides until nightfall. The advantage was conspicuously with
the Confederates, though there was no decisive victory won. Rosecrans
had held his position indeed, upon a part of his line, and had not
been either destroyed or forced into retreat. But the Confederates had
driven him from one half or more of the ground that he had held at the
beginning of the battle, had captured twenty-eight of his guns and
large numbers of prisoners, while their cavalry had marched entirely
around him and fallen upon his communications in a way that very
seriously threatened him with an isolation that must have involved his
destruction.
Rosecrans had been badly worsted in battle, but he was not yet
beaten. His army was not demoralized, and his own determination was
not impaired. He took account of his ammunition, sent detachments to
protect his communications, and resolved to hold his position and renew
the battle on the following day, either as the assailant of his enemy
or as the assaulted, as circumstances might determine.
But the next day was passed in inaction on both sides, and it was not
until the second of January, 1863, that the battle was renewed. Even
then it was renewed only in part and obviously with no disposition on
either side to bring on a general engagement. Nevertheless there was
very bloody fighting on the part of the detachments engaged, in which
the Confederate general, Breckinridge, becoming involved and being
subjected to a concentrated artillery fire at short range, lost nearly
two thousand men.
Two days later and after desultory fighting, General Bragg abandoned
his position at Murfreesboro and retired to Duck river, where he
fortified. He reported his losses in this battle--which is variously
known as Murfreesboro, and Stone river--at 10,000 men, and declared
that he had taken 6,000 prisoners. He had also captured thirty guns
and lost three. On the other hand, General Rosecrans reported a loss
of 8,778 in killed and wounded, and about 2,800 in prisoners lost
to the enemy--a total of somewhat less than 11,000. The two reports
are hopelessly at variance and irreconcilable, as to the number of
prisoners taken, as was usually the case with the reports of battle
losses at that period of the war. They were usually inaccurate and
never trustworthy, as every historian who has honestly tried to find
out the truth has learned to his annoyance.
But whatever the exact losses were on either side, they were far
greater than were those of many more famous battles, and about as great
as those of the battles commonly accounted as of superior proportions.
Thus the loss admitted by the Confederates at Murfreesboro out of a
force of about 35,000 or 40,000 men, was nearly twice that which Lee,
with a force of 68,000, suffered at Fredericksburg; while the admitted
Federal loss at Murfreesboro, where the army numbered 43,700 men, was
very nearly as great as that sustained by Burnside's army of 120,000
at Fredericksburg, including the fearful slaughter in the six terrible
assaults upon Marye's Heights.
Obviously the battle of Murfreesboro must be accounted one of the
bloodiest struggles of the war, as well as one of the most heroically
contested on both sides. Its indecisiveness has been very interestingly
summed up by General Van Horne in his "History of the Army of the
Cumberland" as follows:
Neither army commander had fully executed his plan of battle,
although General Bragg had approached very nearly the completion
of his. He had turned a flank of the National army, bent back the
right to the rear of the center, but had failed to turn its left
or reach its rear, and hence had not gained the extreme advantages
which he had anticipated in assuming the offensive and [which he]
had seemingly attained at the grand crisis of the battle. He had
assaulted boldly and persistently from first to last, but had
completely exhausted his army without gaining a decisive victory.
General Rosecrans had fought a battle radically different from the
one he had proposed for himself. Instead of turning the right of
the Confederate army and taking its center in reverse, according
to his plan, he had been forced into the most emphatic straits in
maintaining the defensive from flank to flank. Both commanders had
lost heavily; General Bragg by continuous assaults with massed
forces, and General Rosecrans by resistance at each point to
superior numbers, and by frequent recessions under the guns of
the enemy.... A battle whose emergencies of offense and defense
involves the use of all reserves, must necessarily be a bloody one.
It is seldom that an engagement of such dimensions has left two
commanding generals so much in doubt as to the course that either
would adopt, and hence each determined to await developments, and
each was ignorant of the purpose of the other. Of the two General
Bragg was the more hopeful.
In the end, as we have seen, both armies fell back and fortified, and
campaigning ended in the southwest for that season.
Other events of that winter may be briefly summarized.
Mr. Lincoln's emancipation proclamation became effective on the first
of January.
The Confederate Congress passed a second conscription bill in
February extending age limits both ways and putting practically every
able-bodied white man in the South into the army.
The Federal Congress, on the third of March, authorized the suspension
of the writ of habeas corpus, thus virtually establishing martial law
throughout the North.
A Confederate loan of $3,000,000 was promptly subscribed for in Europe.
On the seventh of April the fleet off Charleston assailed the defenses
of that city, but was beaten off with the loss of one ironclad, the
monitor, Keokuk, sunk.
CHAPTER XXXVII
THE CHANCELLORSVILLE CAMPAIGN
However important the operations at the West and South might be, the
vital seat of the war was always in Virginia.
There the contending armies ceaselessly threatened the two capitals,
the conquest of either of which would have been decisive. There both
sides concentrated their best armies. There was present the Confederate
Army of Northern Virginia under Lee, of which General Hooker, after
being overthrown and beaten by it, testified: "That army has, by
discipline alone, acquired a character for steadiness and efficiency,
unsurpassed, in my judgment, in ancient or modern times. We have not
been able to rival it nor has there been any near approximation to it
in the other rebel armies."
And there on the other side was present for duty that Army of the
Potomac which had so distinguished itself for heroic devotion and
unfaltering courage upon a score of desperately contested battlefields.
After Burnside's bloody defeat at Fredericksburg the authorities
at Washington proceeded to swell the Army of the Potomac to vast
proportions until as the spring of 1863 approached, its total was no
less than 180,000 men and 400 guns.[2]
[2] These are the figures given by Col. Theodore A. Dodge, U.
S. A., in his singularly able monograph on "The Campaign of
Chancellorsville," pages 2 and 19.
Meanwhile operations below Richmond had compelled Lee to detach about
one fourth of his force, thus reducing his strength to a total of
58,100 men and 170 pieces of artillery.
There was one important difference, however. In Lee the Southerners had
found their very ablest commander, a master of all the arts of war, and
an absolute master of the hearts of all the men who served under his
command.
The Army of the Potomac had been commanded in succession by McDowell,
McClellan, Pope, McClellan again, and Burnside, no one of whom had
manifested an ability to contend successfully with Lee, even with the
unstinted resources given into the hands of each. The Army of the
Potomac still lacked a capable commander and the lack was for long a
determining factor of the problem.
Colonel Dodge, an officer of the United States army, and a historian of
exquisite conscientiousness and high repute, puts the matter in these
words:
Great as was the importance of success in Virginia, the
Confederates had appreciated the fact as had not the political
soldiers at the head of the Federal Department of War. _Our
resources always enabled us to keep more men, and more and better
material, on this battle ground_ than the Confederates could do;
but this strength _was constantly offset by the ability of the
Southern generals_[3] and their independence of action as opposed
to the frequent unskilfulness of ours, who were not only never long
in command, but were then tied hand and foot to some ideal plan for
insuring the safety of Washington.
[3] Italics ours. AUTHOR.
No impartial student of the history of the war can doubt that Colonel
Dodge here touches the very marrow of the matter. In the operations in
Virginia the North had more men, often by two or three to one, more
guns and incalculably better supply departments. Their men were as
good as the Southerners. Their guns were better, and their materials
immeasurably superior both in quantity and quality. But until Grant was
summoned from the West in 1864 to take command, the Army of the Potomac
was commanded by no general who had capacity enough to make effective
use of these superior advantages in a contest of strategic wits with
Lee.
The real problem which the Washington authorities were set to solve was
to find a general equal to this task, and so long as Halleck remained
commander in chief of the Federal forces, there was no hope of success
in that search. Commander after commander had been set up only to be
promptly and disastrously bowled down again by Lee, in spite of the
enormous disparity of numbers, guns and equipment.
But neither Grant nor Sherman was among those who had been appointed to
try conclusions with Lee.
Halleck was still supreme as the military counselor of Mr. Lincoln.
Grant, in spite of his victories, was a peculiarly objectionable person
to him, and Sherman labored under the serious disability of enjoying
Grant's favor and esteem in a very high degree.
But after Burnside's failure it was necessary to find a new commander
for the Army of the Potomac, and Mr. Lincoln selected General Joseph
Hooker to make the next attempt.
General Hooker was an old army officer. He was thoroughly equipped so
far as military education was concerned, and he was so ardent in the
work of the soldier that his men had lovingly nicknamed him "Fighting
Joe Hooker." But he had never commanded an army or planned a campaign.
He had made the last and most brilliant of that series of heroic
charges up Marye's Heights which Burnside had so foolishly ordered at
Fredericksburg. He had made the charge under protest, correctly deeming
it a needless sacrifice of men's lives in a hopeless undertaking. But
he had made it with extraordinary gallantry and had persisted in it
until, as he sarcastically said, "he thought he had lost as many men as
he was ordered to lose."
Of his devotion as a soldier, and of his unusual capacity in
subordinate command, he had given adequate proof in every battle
in which the Army of the Potomac had been engaged, from Manassas
to Fredericksburg. But his capacity to lead a great army against a
great enemy was wholly conjectural. Mr. Lincoln suggested this in the
extraordinary letter in which he announced to Hooker his selection for
this supreme trust. That letter was as follows:
Executive Mansion, Washington,
D. C., January 26, 1863
Major-General Hooker:
General:--I have placed you at the head of the Army of the Potomac.
Of course I have done this upon what appears to me to be sufficient
reasons, and yet I think it best for you to know that there are
some things in regard to which I am not quite satisfied with you.
I believe you to be a brave and skilful soldier, which of course I
like. I also believe you do not mix politics with your profession,
in which you are right. You have confidence in yourself; which is
a valuable if not an indispensable quality. You are ambitious,
which, within reasonable bounds, does good rather than harm; but
I think that during General Burnside's command of the army, you
have taken counsel of your ambition, and thwarted him as much as
you could, in which you did a great wrong to the country and to a
most meritorious and honorable brother officer. I have heard, in
such a way as to believe it, of your recently saying that both the
army and the government needed a dictator. Of course it was not for
this but in spite of it, that I have given you the command. Only
those Generals who gain success can set up dictators. What I now
ask of you is military success, and I will risk the dictatorship.
The government will support you to the utmost of its ability,
which is neither more nor less than it has done or will do for all
commanders. I much fear that the spirit you have aided to infuse
into the army, of criticizing their commander and withholding
confidence from him, will now turn upon you. I shall assist you as
far as I can to put it down. Neither you nor Napoleon, if he were
alive again, could get any good out of an army while such a spirit
prevails in it. And now, beware of rashness. Beware of rashness,
but with energy and sleepless vigilance go forward and give us
victories.
Yours very truly,
A. LINCOLN.
Thus commissioned, Hooker undertook the task in which so many
predecessors had failed--the task of overcoming Lee, breaking the
resisting power of his really wonderful Army of Northern Virginia,
conquering the Confederate capital and adding Virginia, with her pith
and substance, to the list of states reconquered to the Union.
For this task he had more adequate means than any of his predecessors
or even any of his successors enjoyed until Grant, in 1864,
concentrated the whole military force of the nation and coördinated all
its operations with this one object in view.
Hooker had an army of 180,000 men, to Lee's less than 60,000--about
three men to one. He had 400 pieces of artillery to Lee's 170, and
both his guns and his ammunition were superior to Lee's. He had
unsurpassed quartermaster and commissary departments, a matter in
which Lee was wofully deficient. The railroads in Hooker's rear were
in excellent condition, while those upon which his adversary must
depend were well-nigh hopeless wrecks, with nearly helpless engines
and a lamentable insufficiency of cars. Still further, the Northern
army was filled with skilled mechanicians and practical engineers
capable of quickly meeting and overcoming any mechanical difficulty
that might arise. In one case early in the war it is related that an
engine in Federal service ran off the track and was badly damaged,
thus threatening serious embarrassment to a military movement. When
the question arose as to what could be done with the crippled engine,
a private stepped from the ranks, saluted respectfully, and said: "I
built that engine. I guess I can repair her."
The South had next to none of this sort of resource. Nor had it
anywhere great shops capable of producing machinery. The South had been
an almost exclusively agricultural country, in which the mechanic arts
were scarcely at all developed.
With such advantages and others of scarcely less importance, it seemed
a not very difficult task for Hooker so to employ the 180,000 hardened
veterans of the Army of the Potomac as to overcome the resistance of
the 58,100 composing the Army of Northern Virginia. The Government at
Washington expected nothing less than this. The people of the North
demanded such results as their right. The army itself stood eagerly
ready to do the work required, for the Army of the Potomac believed
in Hooker as it had not previously believed in any of its commanders
except McClellan before that general's career was clouded by defeat.
The men had seen Hooker fight. They were in love with his rough and
ready ways. They repeated around their camp fires his witty sayings,
and mightily rejoiced in them. They had indeed none of that filial
reverence for him which the men of the Army of Northern Virginia felt
for Lee--whom they affectionately called "Mas' Bob." But they had for
Hooker an almost boyish enthusiasm which was without doubt an important
element of strength.
Hooker began right. He was a master of the art of military
organization, and he quickly brought the army under his command into a
state of positively wonderful efficiency. Then he planned a brilliant
campaign--a campaign far better conceived than any that Lee had yet
been called upon to meet.
Fully recognizing his own superiority in numbers, in guns, in
equipment, in supplies, in the materials of war and in that mobility
which such superiority necessarily gives, he planned to utilize all
these advantages for the certain and quick destruction of his adversary.
He could force the fighting when and where he pleased. He could choose
his own battlefields and his own time for action.
He had no thought of repeating Burnside's blunder and assailing Lee in
his own chosen and strongly fortified position, at Fredericksburg. It
was his intention instead to force Lee out of his fortifications and
compel him to fight against tremendous odds in the open field.
His plan was, with enormously superior numbers to turn both of Lee's
flanks at once, compel the division of his already inferior army,
overcome both wings of it in detail, and crush it completely. That
done, Confederate resistance in Virginia would be at an end. Richmond
would lie before him a helpless prey. Virginia would be a conquered
state, and the completion of the war a mere matter of detail.
All military critics who have considered the subject, agree that this
was the best planned campaign that any Northern general had as yet
originated and that its promise of success, with the great superiority
of means behind it, amounted almost to a certainty. Its failure in the
end was disastrous in the extreme and discouraging beyond anything that
had occurred since the first battle of Manassas.
These facts taken together--the brilliancy and the entire soundness
of the plan of campaign, the stupendous superadequacy of the means at
command for carrying it to success, and its conspicuous failure in the
end--render the history of the campaign of Chancellorsville one of the
most dramatic of the wonder stories of the Confederate war.
After three months of most intelligent and energetic work in
perfecting organization and bringing all parts of the service into the
highest condition of efficiency, Hooker was ready at last to begin
his campaign. Omitting all the sick, all detachments, all forces sent
to guard communications, all furloughed officers and men, he had "for
duty equipped," according to his morning reports, no less than 131,491
men, with 400 pieces of highly effective artillery. Opposed to him
was Lee with a total force, of all arms, of 58,100 men, of whom less
than 50,000 were ready for duty, and about 170 pieces of artillery,
mostly of an inferior sort. Some small reinforcements are believed to
have come to Lee, swelling his force to about 60,000 men all told, or
perhaps 55,000 effectives.
With numbers so overwhelming, Hooker was free to do pretty nearly
whatever he might choose to do without risk of weakening himself at any
point below the strength of his enemy.
His plan of campaign was simple and strategically admirable. Broadly
stated it was this:
1. To push a strong force of cavalry, under Stoneman, around Lee's
left and into his rear, to destroy his communications, and to harass
and prevent his retreat towards Richmond--for Hooker's plans looked to
nothing less than the capture of the whole Army of Northern Virginia.
2. To send a strong force of artillery and infantry under Sedgwick
down the river to cross there, turn Lee's right, force whatever
might be left of his army, by that time, out of their entrenchments,
and mercilessly assail him in flank on his expected retreat toward
Richmond, thus additionally making his surrender inevitable.
3. At the same time to march up the river with the main body of the
Federal army, estimated by Lieutenant Colonel Theodore A. Dodge, U.
S. A., at 120,000 men, push the head of his column across the stream
far up it, sweep down the southern bank, clear the several fords
in succession and at each to send fresh columns across; then, in
irresistible force to march through the Wilderness, as that tangled
country is called, and emerge from it in appallingly overwhelming
numbers at Chancellorsville.
This would completely turn Lee's left with the main army and force him
either to retreat hurriedly toward Richmond with Sedgwick on his flank,
or to give battle in the open, with utterly inadequate forces.
Never during the whole course of the war was there a campaign more
brilliantly planned than this one was to compel victory; never did one
fail more conspicuously. Never were the advantages of the assailant
so great; never were they so completely offset by the genius of the
defending commander and the resolution of an army vastly inferior in
numbers and in the appliances of war,--in every element of strength
indeed except high soldierliness.
Stoneman moved on the thirteenth of April. His orders were to pass
up the river, keeping well out of sight and masking his movement, to
wheel suddenly and cross the stream at a point west of the Orange and
Alexandria railroad, destroy Fitzhugh Lee's cavalry at Culpeper, seize
upon Gordonsville, where the Orange and Alexandria and the Virginia
Central railroads form a junction; push on toward Richmond; cut the
Richmond and Fredericksburg railroad at Hanover Junction, thus cutting
off Lee's retreat; fortify himself there in strong positions and
obstinately oppose any effort of Lee to retreat, until Hooker, moving
from Lee's left and Sedgwick, moving from his right, should join forces
with Stoneman and complete the work of destroying the Army of Northern
Virginia. This culmination of the campaign was planned to occur six
days after Stoneman's start.
Stoneman made the first failure. He moved up the river and crossed a
part of his force. But high water soon afterwards rendered the stream
unfordable, while Lee's alert cavalry lieutenant J. E. B. Stuart,
confronted the force already crossed, and compelled it to retreat by
swimming to escape certain destruction.
This ended the cavalry part of Hooker's program. For the ford did not
become passable again until the twenty-seventh and by that time the
main movement had been begun. It was too late for Stoneman to do his
part of the work.
In the meanwhile the crossings at and near Port Royal, about twenty
miles below Fredericksburg, had been secured, and bridges had been
laid. On the twenty-ninth of April, early in the morning--before
daylight in fact,--General Sedgwick forced a crossing with three corps.
In preparation for this, ninety-eight guns had been previously placed
in position under Hooker's direction and a number more held in reserve.
Sedgwick's orders were to seize a principal road, turn Lee's right
flank, and in case of serious opposition, to carry Lee's works at all
costs; then to push forward on Lee's flank and harass his retreat. It
was expected that Stoneman would by this time be fortified in the way
of Lee's retreat, and that the main body of the Federal army under
Hooker, moving from Chancellorsville, would fall upon the Confederates
and crush them.
With these dispositions made, Hooker moved up the Rappahannock and the
Rapidan, crossed forces at the upper fords, moved thence down the right
or Confederate bank of the stream, uncovering the several fords in
succession, and crossing heavy forces at each.
Once across the Rapidan he moved his army rapidly through the
Wilderness, to Chancellorsville, a solitary plantation house near the
Southern edge of that vast thicket.
In posting himself at Chancellorsville Hooker had placed his army far
to the rear of Lee's left at Fredericksburg. It was obvious that Lee
must quit his entrenchments and move southwest to meet his adversary
at Chancellorsville, otherwise his army would be completely cut off,
overwhelmed and conquered, and the road to Richmond would be opened to
his adversary with no possibility of effective resistance anywhere.
But Lee had not been asleep. Neither was he appalled by the enormous
advantages of numbers, guns and position enjoyed by his adversary.
With that calm self-possession which was the keynote of his character;
with that masterful skill in the art of war which had so often served
him in lieu of heavy battalions, and which then and since has
commanded the admiration of military men both north and south; and,
above all, with that confidence in the superb endurance of his veterans
which their conduct on many fields had taught him to feel, he set to
work to meet and defeat Hooker's admirably planned campaign.
He left 8,500 men and thirty guns to hold the works at Fredericksburg,
so long as they could be held against Sedgwick's 30,000 men and more
than 100 guns. With the remainder of his army,--in round numbers about
45,000 men,--he quickly moved to Chancellorsville to meet Hooker with
his tremendously superior force.
The great Confederate had by this time completely penetrated Hooker's
plan of campaign. He had no idea that the 8,500 men left in the works
at and below Fredericksburg could for long hold that position against
Sedgwick's superior force, but he knew the quality of the men set
to that task, and he confidently reckoned that they would make such
resistance--as in fact they did--as to prevent Sedgwick from forming
a junction with the main army at Chancellorsville, until the struggle
there should be ended.
And what a struggle it promised to be! Lee knew that at most he could
hope for nothing better than to oppose one man to Hooker's three but
even against such odds he decided to risk battle in the open rather
than attempt a hazardous and dispiriting retreat to the defenses of
Richmond.
Cautiously but rapidly, he transferred his army to Chancellorsville and
after baffling various Federal attempts to strike at his stores and
communications, he concentrated in Hooker's front quite all that he
could of his scanty force.
By this time Hooker's ceaseless activity had uncovered all the fords
above Fredericksburg, and opened short and easy lines of communication,
through Falmouth opposite Fredericksburg, between Sedgwick, operating
on the east of Fredericksburg, and Hooker's headquarters near
Chancellorsville on the southwest. Thus the two temporarily divided
wings of Hooker's army were brought again into touch with each other
and the whole vast force acted as a unit under Hooker's command, while
its disposition was such as to compel Lee to divide his much smaller
force in preparation for the expected determined assault of the
Federals upon one or the other of two faces--he could not know which.
But it was not Lee's purpose long to await attack. His all-daring
thought was to become himself the assailant as soon as he could get his
army corps disposed in positions favorable to such a purpose.
He first selected a strong defensive position in front of
Chancellorsville and hurriedly fortified it as a means of holding
Hooker in check until he should himself be ready to take the offensive.
In the meanwhile, as his orders issued at that time clearly show,
Hooker regarded his campaign as already completely successful. He had
succeeded in so enveloping Lee that that general, according to all the
rules of the war game must surrender either after a show of fighting or
without that bloody preliminary.
In these calculations Hooker had not sufficiently reckoned upon Lee's
resourcefulness or his daring, or the fighting qualities of the Army
of Northern Virginia. All these were factors underestimated in his
statement of the equation.
The position at Chancellorsville itself was a conspicuously bad one for
the Federals if they should stand on the defensive, and Hooker, seeing
this, pushed his forces forward to more advantageous ground, a movement
which involved a good deal of fighting in a comparatively small way,
for the Confederates not only resisted stoutly but manifested a
fiercely aggressive disposition wherever opportunity offered for a
fight.
For reasons that have never been disclosed Hooker after a time
withdrew his advance columns to their old unfavorable position at
Chancellorsville and awaited his opportunity. His force was so greatly
superior to that of his adversary that there seemed no risk in doing
this, although it sacrificed a distinct advantage. It was obvious that
if Lee should make a front attack he must be beaten off and crushed
while, with his already inferior force, it would be simple madness,
Hooker thought, for his opponent to divide his army and attempt any
flank movement against an army outnumbering his own by three to one.
That madness Lee deliberately adopted as his strategy, and he carried
it to a conclusion that must always be an astonishment to the reader of
history.
Hooker's extraordinary retirement from the front of an enemy whom he
had come out for the express purpose of attacking in overwhelming
force, has always been inexplicable. Why he shrank from the attack
after seeking opportunity for it with so much energy and skill it is
impossible to understand. Why he abandoned his offensive operation just
as its culmination in victory seemed certain, and, with enormously
superior forces under his command fell back and assumed the defensive
in an unfavorable position, even he seems never to have been able to
explain. The most masterful critic and historian who has written of
this campaign, says:
At this point Hooker faltered. Fighting Joe had reached the
culminating desire of his life. He had come face to face with
his foe, and he had a hundred and twenty thousand eager and
well-disciplined men at his back. He had come to fight and he
retreated without crossing swords.[4]
[4] Dodge's "The Campaign of Chancellorsville," p. 55.
This was the situation: Lee had had 59,000 men at Fredericksburg. He
had left 8,500 of them there and had made other compulsory detachments
which reduced his fighting force in front of Hooker to no more than
39,000. He confronted Hooker, who had 120,000 securely intrenched with
11,000 or 12,000 more within reach. Obviously Lee could not hope by
direct assault to carry the works and conquer a force so overwhelming.
Equally he could not hope to stand on the defensive against an army
which could easily and certainly overlap both his flanks and quickly
crush him to a pulp. He must either retreat or play a great and most
hazardous game of strategy.
In consultation with Stonewall Jackson--the two being seated upon
cracker boxes abandoned in Hooker's retirement--it was decided to take
a supreme risk in face of a supreme danger. With 39,000 men facing
120,000, it was decided to divide the smaller army and send Jackson,
with 22,000 men upon an expedition, the purpose of which was to strike
like a lightning flash at Hooker's right flank and rear, while Lee,
with the little remnant of his army, 17,000 in all, should so far
occupy Hooker in front as to prevent him from detaching troops for the
timely reinforcement of his threatened wing.
The results that followed this operation have been and still are a
subject of bitter controversy. Hooker tried afterwards to throw the
blame for the disaster which ensued upon Howard, Sickles and his other
lieutenants. They in turn disclaimed that responsibility and insisted
that the disaster was due solely to Hooker's own orders and to his
neglect of obvious duty as commanding general. The skilled military
critics who have since written of the campaign have taken one side
or the other of this purely personal controversy, according to their
lights of knowledge, or their darkenings of prejudice. These things
belong to biography. It is the function of the historian merely to tell
the story of what happened and to that task alone the present writer
addresses himself.
Lee and Jackson decided, as they sat there on the cracker boxes, that
Jackson, with 22,000 men, should undertake to turn Hooker's right flank
and assail him in rear, while Lee with 17,000 men should fully occupy
him by a threat of front attack, and that if Jackson's movement should
succeed, his part of the army should force its way to a junction with
Lee. Failing that, the two parts of the army must of course retreat
in the not very confident hope of uniting again at Gordonsville and
together falling back to the defenses of Richmond. For Stuart with the
Confederate cavalry had utterly broken up and defeated that part of
Hooker's plan which had contemplated Stoneman's sweep to Hanover Court
House and the entrenching of his force there as an obstacle in the way
of Lee's retreat.
On Saturday, May 2, 1863, at daylight, or a little before, Lee and
Jackson began the execution of their daring stratagem.
Hooker's headquarters were at Chancellorsville. His line stretched
eastward and northeastward to the river and westward to a region of
high ground unassailable from the front, where his right lay "in the
air," in military phrase, that is to say with no natural obstacle, such
as a river or a mountain, to defend it. It was Jackson's purpose to
march westward on a route parallel with Hooker's line, turn its western
end and strike it in flank and rear.
To accomplish that he must completely separate his 22,000 men from
Lee's 17,000 and take the chances of battle for a reuniting of the two
forces.
It took all day to make the march. All day Jackson kept Stuart's
cavalry between his column and the enemy, feeling the enemy's lines
to find out how they were posted and what their strength was at every
point.
His march was clearly discovered to the Federal troops, and
fully reported to their commander, Hooker. But it was completely
misinterpreted. It was believed to be the initiatory movement of
that retreat upon Richmond, which Hooker--master of logistics that he
was--thought that he had by his maneuvers compelled Lee to undertake by
way of saving his little army from destruction.
While Jackson, with scarcely any disguise or concealment, was marching
along Hooker's front with intent to turn his flank and strike him
in rear, Hooker rested easily in the conviction that his adversary,
confronted by an irresistible force, was retreating upon Richmond
either by way of Culpeper or by the Gordonsville route.
In this belief Hooker broke the continuity of his own lines by throwing
forward a part of his forces to assail Jackson's moving column in
flank and rear, but he made no effort to advance from Chancellorsville
upon Lee's manifestly depleted force in front or in any vigorous way
to push a column in between Lee and Jackson. He fought Lee on the
skirmish lines all day, but he made no determined attempt to run over
the skirmish lines and find out what was behind them. In other words
he suffered himself to be completely and disastrously deceived by
that tapping at his own lines which Lee ceaselessly kept up by way of
misleading him.
As he knew Lee's strength almost to a man, and as he was fully and
frequently informed during the day concerning the extent to which
Jackson's detachment had weakened it, it is difficult to understand
why he did not end the struggle then and there by hurling three men to
one against Lee on the one hand and against Jackson on the other, and
crushing them separately.
Here was another illustration and proof of the fact that the Federal
administration at Washington had not yet found a general fit to command
the superb Army of the Potomac. The opportunity at Chancellorsville
was the very greatest and completest that was at any time during the
war offered to a commanding general on either side to make a quick and
complete end of the struggle.
Under like circumstances a Grant or a Sherman would have hurled 40,000
or 50,000 men upon Lee and an equal number upon Jackson, meanwhile
employing a lesser but quite sufficient force in keeping the two wings
of the Confederate army divided beyond the possibility of reunion. But
it is conceivable at least that if Lee had been confronting a Grant or
a Sherman, he would never have risked so dangerous a division of his
inferior force. The character of the adversary's commanding general is
a factor in every military problem, upon which a strategist must reckon
as carefully as he does upon the number of that adversary's men or guns.
However that may be, Lee had divided his meager force in the presence
of an enemy who greatly outnumbered him, and Hooker took no effective
account of the fact. He did not strengthen his own right wing while
Jackson was marching around it to assail it in the rear. He took no
effective measures either to assail Jackson on his threatening march
or to fall upon Lee in front in crushingly overwhelming force. He was
content to beat off Lee's pretended attacks in front and to neglect
Jackson's movement as very certainly a retreat with which he had not
energy enough to interfere.
As a result Jackson succeeded in turning the Federal right flank, and
at six o'clock in the evening the great Confederate flanker fell like a
thunderbolt upon the rear of Hooker's divisions on the right.
Without skirmishers to give warning of his coming Jackson pushed his
columns through the woods and the tangled underbrush. So eager were the
Confederates in their work that their divisions, thrown into separate
lines for the forward movement, pushed after each other until the
several lines became a single mass of humanity pressing forward, each
man striving to get in front of his fellow and be first to fall upon
the foe.
Jackson knew his men too well to doubt them for a moment, and he
therefore rushed them forward to the assault without any of those
precautions which the books of tactics prescribe. He threw out no
skirmishers to feel the way. He sent no company in advance to ascertain
the enemy's disposition. He simply hurled his force upon that of the
foe, striking as the tempest does, without warning.
The first intimation Hooker's men had of their enemy's advance came to
them in a rush of deer, grouse and other game that had been disturbed
and was fleeing through the tangled woodlands before the on-coming mass
of armed and belligerent humanity. And before wonder over this rush of
animals, serpents and birds had satisfied itself, Jackson's men, nine
deep, fell upon the unsuspecting Federals at supper, and swept like a
hurricane through their camps and over their lines.
Then occurred the second great panic of the war, in which men fell
into such fear as to lose all semblance of soldierly self-control,
and in which military cohesion was completely dissipated. Here and
there a brigade or a regiment or a company of Federals bravely stood
its ground, but the great mass of that German army corps commanded by
men of unpronounceable names which had been extensively advertised as
intending to show Americans how to fight, fell into hopeless confusion,
broke ranks and ran to whatever cover the fugitives could find. Jackson
ran over their lines, possessed himself of their defenses, captured
their arms and their suppers and completely telescoped the left wing of
Hooker's army.
Night alone saved the rest of it. For panic is more contagious than
smallpox and, in view of what happened afterwards, it is safe to say
that but for the coming of night the panic which so suddenly reduced
the right wing of Hooker's force to a mass of fugitives, would quickly
have spread throughout the army.
But night called a halt and Jackson's men rested upon their arms, ready
to renew their victorious progress with the dawn of day. According to
a competent and adverse witness[5] these men of Jackson's command were
"the best infantry in existence, as tough, hardy and full of _élan_, as
they are ill-fed, ill-clothed, and ill-looking."
[5] Lieutenant Colonel Theodore A. Dodge, U. S. A., in his
"Campaign of Chancellorsville," p. 92.
But a great calamity was in store for the Confederates that evening.
Stonewall Jackson was mortally wounded by his own men acting under
orders of his own giving, while he was making his preparations for
the completion of his wonderful work on the following morning. Except
in the possible death of Lee, no greater loss could have befallen the
Southern arms. The destruction of a division or even of an army corps
would have been a trifling disaster in comparison. For upon Jackson
as upon no other man, Lee depended for the masterful execution of his
plans, and equally for wise counsel and daring initiative. The soldiers
of the army, too, had come to look upon the great lieutenant as the one
man invincible, and to regard whatever work he might assign them to do
as a task that must be accomplished at all costs and all hazards. In
the doing of his bidding, the officers and men alike were accustomed
to think of their orders as the decrees of an all-wise Providence and
of themselves as mere instruments set to accomplish the purposes of a
higher authority. No man among them questioned the wisdom of Jackson's
plans or doubted the possibility of doing whatsoever he had ordered
them to do. In such mood as that which their reverent love for Jackson
inspired in them, those incomparable fighters were capable of well-nigh
any achievement.
When it was whispered through the army that Stonewall Jackson was
wounded unto death there was mourning and distress at every bivouac
fire, and depressing sorrow in every soldierly heart. But there was no
thought of failure or faltering in the work to be done on the morrow.
That work had been marked out for them by Stonewall Jackson himself,
and every man of them was resolved to do it or fall fighting in a
determined endeavor to accomplish to the uttermost limit of possibility
the will of the fallen chieftain.
The command fell upon J. E. B. Stuart and after sustaining a midnight
assault upon the Confederate flank by Sickles, which was repulsed with
comparative ease, Stuart was prepared, early on Sunday morning, to
press forward with the entire detachment and force a junction with Lee
in front of Chancellorsville, after destroying or driving into retreat
all of Hooker's forces that lay west of that point.
There was terrific fighting at every step. There were formidable
breastworks to be assailed and carried, and they were protected by
difficult abattis in front. There were superbly served batteries at
every defensive point with determined infantry in support. But the men
who had been Jackson's yesterday, and were to-day under the dare-devil
leadership of Stuart, remembered that Jackson had planned this movement
and they were death-resolute to carry it to completion. They pressed
forward always. A "fire of hell" meant no more to them than a summer
breeze. In face of canister and a murderous fire of musketry, they
plunged onward with no thought of hesitation or shrinking.
Jackson lay under a tree somewhere, wounded unto death, but it was
Jackson still whom these heroic fellows were serving; it was in
obedience to his orders and in execution of his plans that they were
advancing, and their inspiration of resoluteness had for one of its
elements a mad resentment of Jackson's wounds, as an injury for which
the enemy must be made to pay the blood atonement of those old
Scriptures in whose words Jackson so devoutly and reverently believed.
Probably never before or since in battle did men fight with a madder
impulse than did this "best infantry in existence" on that Sunday
morning, in execution of their stricken leader's purpose. They were
very maniacs, filled with fury, assailing the enemy at every point with
truly demoniacal determination, reinforced by all the strength and
skill that long discipline and battle-habit could give to men with arms
in their hands.
In spite of numbers, in the face of obstacles that would have appalled
the best battalions in any European army, these grief-stricken
worshipers of the great leader, swept forward as the hurricane does,
regardless of all obstacles and absolutely resistless in their onward
progress.
Their impulse was indicated by the battle cry, "Charge and remember
Jackson!" which was continually passed up and down the lines by word of
mouth throughout the day, by men with set teeth and lips compressed to
paleness.
Early in the morning it was Stuart's thought to refresh some of his
troops who had been long without food. He ordered an issue of rations
and a pause for breakfast, meantime directing a small advance in order
to rectify the line at a defective point. The men rushed forward with
such impetuosity, abandoning rations and taking the bloody work of war
in lieu of breakfast, that Stuart decided to let them have their way
and bring on at once the action for which it had been his thought to
prepare them by a feeding. The incident is valuably illustrative of the
temper in which that Sunday's fight was undertaken, a fight decisive
for the time, and ending as it did in the defeat and overthrow of the
largest, strongest, and most perfectly equipped army that had ever been
assembled on this continent, by a force one third or one fourth its
number, ill-fed, ill-clothed and exceedingly ill-looking, as Colonel
Dodge has testified in print.
Here it is necessary to make an important distinction, which is often
overlooked. When troops are beaten by an adversary having inferior
numbers, the fault is not always or even usually with the men. It lies
almost always with commanding officers who, through error or incapacity
or otherwise, fail to bring the men into such positions as may render
their superiority of numbers effective. At Chancellorsville Hooker had
quite all of three men to Lee's one--and including Sedgwick's force his
odds were even greater than that. On the part of the so-called German
corps there seems to have been a distinct inferiority of soldierly
quality, while Jackson's men, according to the expert judgment of
Colonel Dodge, supported by that of General Hooker, were "the best
infantry in existence." But between the men generally of the two armies
there was no such superiority on the one side and inferiority on the
other as to offset the enormous disparity of numbers and thus to
account for the result.
The difficulty was that in the great war game Lee was immeasurably
more than Hooker's master. At every point he so handled his forces
as to bewilder and embarrass his enemy. In spite of his inferiority
in numbers he managed at many points, by deft maneuvering, to assail
Hooker's divisions, with more men than they could for the moment bring
to bear in resistance.
In reviewing great battles and campaigns it is important to bear these
things in mind, and, for the credit of a brave soldiery, to remember
that all dispositions of troops are made by men higher up. The skill
and alertness of those men higher up, or their lack of skill and
alertness, determines whether or not due advantage is to be taken of
numbers, the nature of the ground and other adventitious circumstances
upon which the outcome of battles in a large measure depends.
At Chancellorsville, for example, there was one position so favorable
that the artillery of either army, posted there upon the crest of a
commanding hill, could work havoc in the ranks of its adversary. The
Federals held that position when night fell on Saturday. They unwisely
abandoned it during the night and early in the morning Stuart, always
quick to see and alert to seize advantage, occupied it with thirty guns
too strongly supported to be dislodged. In like manner the superior
generalship of the Confederates at other points enabled them often to
bring two men to bear against one in spite of their general inferiority
of numbers.
When Hooker found his right wing crushed and reduced to a
panic-stricken mass of fugitives, he still had the battle in his own
hands and victory easily within his grasp.
After Jackson's blow was delivered on Saturday evening Hooker could
not have doubted that Lee's little army of less than forty thousand
men had been divided in his front. It was his obvious and easy task to
keep it divided and to crush its two parts separately. He had already
thrust Sickles in between Lee and Jackson, and in order to maintain
the separation he had only overwhelmingly to reinforce Sickles, an
enterprising officer. This he might easily have done by drawing
troops from his completely unemployed left wing which stretched away
superfluously to the fords of the river with no enemy at all in front.
The war problem was simple and easy at that time, and had Hooker been a
man of masterful mind, he must have wrought it out to checkmate within
twenty-four hours.
But it is to be remembered that Lee knew all old army officers, and
knew the capacity and temper of every commander sent to oppose him. It
is probable that had Hooker been a man of masterful mind, Lee would
never have attempted the strategy which created this opportunity.
Let us leave speculation for facts. Hooker had unaccountably abandoned
his brilliant offensive movement at the crowning moment when its
success, complete and decisive, seemed certain. Having come out to
force Lee to a fight in the open, he had shrunk from the conflict.
Having skilfully and brilliantly so maneuvered as to place himself
on the flank of Lee's army with intent to assail and overwhelm his
adversary, he had suddenly shrunk back, as if appalled, into a
defensive attitude and had left it to Lee to determine when and where
and how the further fighting should be done. Having advanced from
Chancellorsville into the more favorable country beyond, he had quite
inexplicably fallen back to Chancellorsville again and fortified there
as if he had been confronted by an adversary of superior strength, and
when he clearly saw that Lee had divided his inferior force, he had
over-confidently assumed that retreat was intended instead of a blow.
But even after the blow had been delivered, with staggering effect,
Hooker had the war game in his own hands. It was his obvious policy
to order fifty or sixty thousand men or more from his unemployed left
wing, to Chancellorsville, to fall destructively upon each of Lee's
widely separated detachments, with the purpose of crushing them both.
He did nothing of the kind. Instead he stood upon the defensive against
Lee in front and Stuart upon his flank, and utterly failing to prevent
a junction between these two he retired still further and stood upon
the defensive again to receive their joint assault.
In the meantime he had unemployed troops in vastly superior numbers,
lying idly upon his left. Instead of ordering them into the conflict he
waited for Sedgwick, who was coming up after driving the Confederates
out of their works at Fredericksburg, to save him from defeat and
disaster.
In the meanwhile, and for lack of the reinforcements which he had
failed to send to the firing line, the Confederates had won a great
victory, reuniting their divided army and completely driving Hooker
from the defensive position which he had taken up at Chancellorsville.
Stuart's hurricane-like advance, begun early in the morning, resulted
long before noonday, not only in effecting the desired junction between
the two separated portions of the Confederate Army, but also in the
compulsory retirement of Hooker's army from the entire Chancellorsville
line and its retreat toward the river.
The fighting by which all this was accomplished has been wonderfully
well described in summary, by Colonel Dodge, in his admirably complete
and impartial history of this campaign. A quotation from that work
seems a quite sufficient showing-forth of what was done, with equal
justice to the heroism of the men on both sides of the terrible
conflict. Colonel Dodge writes:
There can be no limit to the praise earned by the mettlesome
veterans of Jackson's corps, in the deadly fight at Fairview. They
had continuously marched and fought with little sleep and less
rations, since Thursday morning [till Sunday]. Their ammunition had
been sparse, and they had been obliged to rely frequently upon the
bayonet alone. They had fought under circumstances which rendered
all attempts to preserve organization impossible. They had charged
through woods against well-constructed fieldworks and in the teeth
of destructive artillery fire, and had captured the works again and
again. Never had infantry better earned the right to rank with the
best which ever bore arms than this gallant twenty thousand--one
man in every four of whom lay bleeding on the field. Nor can the
same meed of praise be withheld from our own brave legions. Our
losses had been heavier than those of the enemy. Generals and
regimental commanders had fallen in equal proportions. Our forces
had, owing to the extraordinary combinations of the general in
command, been outnumbered by the enemy wherever engaged.... Well
may the soldiers who were engaged in this bloody encounter of
Sunday, May 3, 1863, call to mind with equal pride, that each met a
foeman worthy of his steel.
It is in this spirit that the present historian desires to write of the
events of that time, forty odd years agone. All the military skill, all
the heroism, all the personal courage that marked the events of that
struggle, whether upon the one side or upon the other, is a part of our
common American heritage of glory. For these men who fought each other
so gallantly and with such heroic determination, were all Americans,
and to all of them Americans owe the tribute of admiration.
After all these years the memory of their gallant deeds will be
cherished by the whole Republic and all its people, whether the heroism
of daring and endurance was shown on the one side or on the other. The
men who met in battle there were fighting on the one side and on the
other for liberty. Their views differed as to what would best minister
to liberty, but their purpose was the same. The questions that divided
them were long ago settled, and they no longer vex the Republic. The
time has come when we may rejoice as citizens of one country in the
devotion and courage that animated both sides in that great struggle
for the decision of questions that could be settled only by the
arbitrament of arms.
On Sunday, before noon, Hooker was completely driven from the
Chancellorsville line and compelled to retire to a new position of
extraordinary strength. Lee, with an army much smaller and considerably
disorganized, but inspirited by repeated victory, confronted him.
It was Lee's purpose to move again to the assault, in the conviction
that the delivery of another of his tremendous blows would result in
breaking Hooker's resistance and driving him across the river. It is
true that Hooker still had a vastly superior force, but events had
clearly shown that the Federal commander did not know how to handle
his superior forces in a way to make the most of their superiority.
Lee confidently believed that even with his smaller numbers he could
deliver a blow that would drive his adversary out of the new lines as
his previous assaults had already driven him out of the old ones.
The new position taken up by the Army of the Potomac is described by an
engineer officer of high authority as "well-nigh impregnable," and the
Army of Northern Virginia was very nearly worn out with the work it had
done in conquering the former situation. But it was Lee's habit of mind
to do and dare, and he had sufficiently tried conclusions now, to know
beyond all question, that in the war game he was immeasurably more than
Hooker's match.
So about noon on Sunday he began feeling of Hooker's new lines,
searching for the most favorable point at which to hurl himself upon
them in the hope of breaking them and driving his enemy into final
retreat. For Lee's strategy no longer had any element of defensive
purpose in it. He was no longer thinking of defense indeed or of
securing lines of retreat. It was his bold thought to assail Hooker and
destroy him with all his superior forces, or at the very least to drive
him back across the river and take into his own keeping the problem
of where and how the campaigning of 1863 should be done. Says Colonel
Dodge:[6]
[6] "The Campaign of Chancellorsville," p. 156.
Hooker still had in line at Chancellorsville, counting out his
losses of Saturday, over eighty-five thousand men. Lee had not
exceeding half the number. But every musket borne by the Army of
Northern Virginia was put to good use; every round of ammunition
was made to tell its story. On the other hand of the effective of
the Army of the Potomac, barely a quarter was fought _au fond_,
while at least one half the force for duty was given no opportunity
to burn a cartridge to aid in checking the onset of the elated
champions of the South.
So much for disparity in generalship. The South had found its great and
masterful commander, who knew how to utilize to the utmost such forces
as were placed at his disposal. Mr. Lincoln had not yet found a general
capable of employing to the full measure of its capacity, the superb
army which the North had created by a lavish expenditure of treasure
and by the eager volunteering of Northern youth for their country's
service. Ulysses S. Grant was still the subordinate of Halleck and the
Army of the Potomac was commanded by a general utterly unequal to the
task of holding his own in a contest with Robert E. Lee.
In his new position Hooker stood upon the defensive and appealed to
Sedgwick, who held the position below Fredericksburg, to come to his
rescue and save him from disaster.
Sedgwick responded promptly, as it was his custom to do, though the
task set him was a difficult one. He must assail Lee's works at
Fredericksburg, drive out the 8,500 confident Confederates who were
holding the trenches there, and then by a march of some weary miles
fall upon Lee's right and rear, thus rescuing Hooker from the peril of
the great Confederate's persistent assaults.
A whole library of controversial literature has been written in
conflicting efforts to show who was to blame for the failure of
Sedgwick to relieve Hooker in time to save him from the vengeance of
Lee. With that controversy the present narrative of facts in no way
concerns itself. Let us simply tell what happened.
Already in command of an available force twice as great as Lee's,
Hooker, driven from his chosen line, had fallen back to a more
concentrated one. Finding Lee disposed, with one man to his two,
to assail him on this new line, he called upon Sedgwick as already
stated, to come to his relief, against enormous obstacles. The order
was received late at night. Its execution required a complete change
in Sedgwick's dispositions, which had been made with the entirely
different purpose of cutting off Lee's retreat after Hooker should have
broken the Confederate resistance at Chancellorsville. So far from
breaking that resistance Hooker had been forced to yield to it and
retire before it.
Sedgwick changed front, drove Lee's 8,500 men out of the works at
Fredericksburg, and pushed on to assail Lee's flank. Lee detached, to
meet him, all of his small force except the Jackson corps of 19,000
men, with which he undertook, personally, to hold in check any
movement that Hooker might make with the 80,000 or more of hardened
veterans whom the Federal commander had under his immediate orders.
But Hooker made no determined movement. On Sunday a fierce battle was
fought between Sedgwick and those of Lee's forces which were engaged
in trying to check his movement. It ended in the Confederates holding
their ground and defeating Sedgwick's purpose of coming to the relief
of his commander.
Early on Monday morning the Confederates succeeded in reoccupying the
Fredericksburg Heights in Sedgwick's rear, which left him, in case of
defeat, with no course open to him except to retreat across the river
and give up the contest.
To compel this the Confederates, falling upon him at six o'clock in the
evening, pressed him at every point while Hooker, with the main body
of the Federal army, lay quite inert in rear of Chancellorsville. Soon
after nightfall Sedgwick crossed the river, leaving the Confederates
in full possession of the Fredericksburg Heights and of all the region
east of the fords upon which Hooker depended for retreat in case of
necessity.
Lee next set about the task of compelling that retreat. With full
confidence in the willingness and the abundant ability of his men to
respond to any demand he might make upon them for activity, he quickly
ordered the reinforcements with which he had strengthened his right
wing for the day's work, to return, and with the bulk of his force thus
reunited, after having disposed of Sedgwick he was ready to fall upon
Hooker.
During these operations against Sedgwick Lee's army had been for the
second time divided. A great part of it had been sent half a dozen
miles or more away to force Sedgwick back to the river and across it.
In the meanwhile Lee, with a mere fragment of his force, had lain in
front of Hooker. Why Hooker did not fall upon him and destroy him
with the eighty thousand men whom he could easily have brought to
bear against less than twenty thousand, is a question that can be
answered only by the reminder that Hooker was not equal to the task of
successfully handling the marvelous fighting machine which the North
had so successfully created. Great as he was as a fighter under some
other and abler man's direction, Hooker in command of 120,000 men seems
to have been paralyzed by the magnitude of his task. He left it to Lee,
with his greatly smaller force to determine when and where the fighting
should be done. He lay still and let Lee alone while the greater part
of Lee's army was detached upon the mission of driving Sedgwick across
the river and recapturing the heights at Fredericksburg. He lay still
while Lee was bringing back the troops thus detached and putting
himself in readiness to strike that final blow that should break the
Federal lines, drive them back across the river, and make an inglorious
end of Hooker's superbly planned but phenomenally ill-executed campaign.
On Monday, May 4, he had 80,000 men (Dodge) under his immediate command
at Chancellorsville, with more than 20,000 under Sedgwick within easy
call, as an available reinforcement. At the very most Lee could
bring less than 30,000 to bear against him even if every movement in
concentration should be successfully made. Yet according to his own
testimony, given two years later, Hooker decided on Monday to retreat
across the river. He called his major generals together "not as a
council of war" he says in his testimony, but merely to find out how
they felt with regard to the alternative policy of making what Hooker
himself regarded as "a desperate move against the enemy in our front."
That "desperate move" was the assailing of less than 30,000 men by more
than 80,000 of as good soldiers as ever pulled a trigger, while 20,000
more remained within call as reinforcements.
It was decided by Hooker, against the nearly unanimous advice of his
lieutenants not to make that "desperate move," and the history of war
records no more lame and impotent conclusion than that. It was decided
by Hooker that the great army which had made a splendid strategic
movement for the purpose of fighting Lee in the open and destroying him
by overwhelming numbers, should run away from him and escape beyond the
river if he should graciously permit it to do so.
To that end--to render possible the escape of 80,000 resolute men from
the assault of less than 30,000 of the enemy, all the engineering skill
that the Army of the Potomac could command was brought to bear. It
protected the roads with abattis and the bridge heads with batteries
which the aggressively insistent Confederates shelled persistently.
A sudden rise in the river for a time threatened the retreat with
failure and placed a part of the force in danger of destruction or
capture. But in the end Hooker succeeded in extricating his army from
its position. Early on the morning of May 6, the last battalions of the
Army of the Potomac withdrew across the river.
Thus ended in failure the most brilliantly planned attempt that had yet
been made to destroy Confederate resistance, conquer the Confederate
capital and make a mercifully early end of a fratricidal war of
stupendous proportions.
Hooker reported his losses during the campaign at 17,285 men; Lee's
loss was 12,277.
If Lee could have attacked Hooker's fleeing columns when they were
huddled together at the bridge ends on the river, demoralized and
without organization as they were, he might easily have multiplied
the Federal loss in killed, wounded, and prisoners by two or three.
General Schurz once expressed to the present historian his astonishment
that Lee neglected to do this. Perhaps the best answer is given in an
extract from Colonel Dodge's exhaustive history of the conflict. He
writes that Lee "was doubtless profoundly grateful that the Army of
the Potomac should retire across the Rappahannock and leave his troops
to the hard-earned rest they needed so much more than ourselves; but
little thanks are due to Hooker, who was, it seems, on the north side
of the river during these critical moments that the casualties of the
campaign were not doubled by a final assault on the part of Lee while
we lay in this perilous situation.... Providentially the artillery of
the Army of Northern Virginia had expended almost its last round of
ammunition previous to this time."
Thus accident alone saved the rear of Hooker's defeated army from a
disaster and demoralization comparable with that of Manassas, at a
time when, in the urgently expressed opinion of General Sickles, the
conspicuous rout of the Army of the Potomac would necessarily have
meant the abandonment of the struggle by the North. "If," he alleged,
"this army should be destroyed, it would be the last one the country
would raise."
Hooker had lost, by his own incapacity, a decisive opportunity to end
the war with Federal success, and Lee, because of a lack of ammunition,
had lost a still more obvious opportunity to end it by a decisive
triumph of the Confederate arms.
CHAPTER XXXVIII
THE GETTYSBURG CAMPAIGN
When the campaign of Chancellorsville ended in defeat for the Federals,
the two armies returned to their former positions at Fredericksburg,
confronting each other with a river between--a river which neither of
them was for the time being disposed to cross with fighting intent.
Hooker, as his orders issued at that time showed, was content as
McClellan had been the year before, that he had saved his great
army from disastrous defeat and capture. He was glad to escape with
what remained of his army from a position which he had brilliantly
achieved in the confident expectation of there completely crushing Lee,
compelling his surrender, and marching unopposed into Richmond. His
escape had been a very narrow one, made possible only by the exhaustion
of the Confederate ammunition, but at any rate he had escaped, and he
was disposed to congratulate himself on that.
Lee, on the other hand had good reason to be satisfied with the results
of his work. With one man to his enemy's three he had so brilliantly
maneuvered as to strike his foe at each point with a superior force; he
had, by virtue of superior genius alone inflicted disaster upon an army
vastly greater than his own in numbers, and possessed of commanding
strategic positions; he had beaten that army in a succession of
battles, and driven it into hurried and uncertain retreat; he had saved
Richmond and again made himself master of the military situation.
His army needed rest after its arduous work, and to give it rest he lay
still for some weeks.
But in the meanwhile he did not lose sight of that supreme purpose
which had inspired him from the beginning of his career as the
commander of the Army of Northern Virginia. That purpose was to
transfer the seat of war northward, to press the enemy, to protect
Richmond by putting Washington on its defense.
There were special reasons for the adoption of this policy now.
Operations at the West had been disastrous and discouraging to the
Confederates. Their armies had been driven out of Kentucky and
Tennessee. The fall of Island Number Ten and Memphis a little later in
the northern reaches of the Mississippi and Farragut's capture of New
Orleans at its southern end had left the Southerners only a small hold
upon the great river at Vicksburg, Port Hudson and the space between.
Grant was insistently hammering at Vicksburg, with every prospect
of soon capturing that key to the river and completely cutting the
Confederacy in twain. But if Lee could capture Washington or compel
its evacuation by pushing himself into its rear and perhaps seizing
upon Baltimore, Philadelphia and New York, the disasters at the West
would count for nothing in the reckoning. Europe at least would accept
the successful invasion of the North and the conquest of its capital
as events decisive of the war in behalf of the South; and European
intervention was still the one thing most dreaded at the North and most
ardently hoped for at the South.
Again there was a strong party at the North, embracing a minority
so great that a small influence might easily convert it into a
majority, which was opposed to the war in every way and bitterly
antagonistic to the Lincoln administration. That party held the war
upon the seceding states to be wrong, wicked and without adequate
constitutional warrant. It contended also that the conduct of the war
had been recklessly wasteful of life and treasure, and that in point
of fact it had failed of its purpose. In support of this view the
people opposed to Mr. Lincoln cited the Manassas panic, the defeat
of McClellan before Richmond, the utter overthrow of Pope, the drawn
battle at Sharpsburg, the defeat of Burnside at Fredericksburg, and
finally the all-conspicuous defeat of Hooker at Chancellorsville. If
Lee could add to such a list of achievements the conquest of Washington
or Philadelphia or if he could win a great battle anywhere north of
the Potomac, this minority of protesting and complaining malcontents
at the North, must be quickly converted into an overwhelming majority,
clamorous for the ending of the war by the concession of all that the
Confederates demanded.
Still another influence had its bearing upon Lee's mind. His army,
after its experiences in the Seven Days' battles, in the second
Manassas campaign, at Antietam, at Fredericksburg, and finally in the
campaign of Chancellorsville, had come to regard itself as absolutely
invincible when led by Robert E. Lee. It was ready and more than ready
for any enterprise that he might direct it to undertake. It believed in
itself. Still more confidently it believed in Lee. It wanted to fight.
It was restlessly eager for whatever Lee might prescribe of daring and
endurance. Probably there was never an army, great or small, whose
spirit gave to its leader a stronger inducement to desperate endeavor.
Those men wanted war. They courted battle. They welcomed hardship,
exposure, fatigue, starvation--if only at the end of it all they might
come face to face with the enemy, under the leadership of Lee.
A skilled military critic on the Northern side has characterized them
as the best soldiers on earth. The phrase is not an extravagant one, as
every close student of the Confederate war must clearly see, and their
spirit meant more to the enlightened mind of Lee than a hundred guns
and a score of infantry divisions could have signified.
There was still another fact to be taken into account. Under the
mistaken system of short-term enlistments which had been adopted at the
North, more than thirty thousand of Hooker's best and most seasoned
soldiers were about this time going home. Enlistments at the North had
well-nigh ceased under the discouragement of repeated failure, while
at the South the conscription law--extended as to age--had resulted in
putting pretty nearly every able-bodied white man in all that region
into the army. The Army of Northern Virginia was being rapidly swelled
in numbers, while the Army of the Potomac was losing many of its best
fighting regiments and brigades. The Army of Northern Virginia was
flushed by recent and conspicuous victory; the Army of the Potomac was
sadly disheartened by a defeat which, in view of its vast superiority
in numbers, it could in no wise account for or understand. The Army
of Northern Virginia had unbounded confidence in itself and limitless
belief in its commander; the Army of the Potomac had no longer any
reason to trust itself, and it had utterly lost confidence in the
general who had so badly handled it as to subject it to humiliating
defeat where it had justly expected to achieve victory quick, certain
and decisive.
Moved by these considerations Lee at once planned a new invasion of
the region north of the Potomac. The enemy confronting him was still
superior in numbers, equipment and everything else except spirit
and fighting quality and its general. It would not do for Lee to
move northward, leaving that army in his rear with full opportunity
to destroy his communications, rush upon Richmond and possess the
Confederate capital. He must so maneuver as to compel Hooker to fall
back upon Washington, precisely as he had done in McClellan's case the
year before.
Again he successfully played upon the excessive concern felt at the
North for the safety of Washington. Having brought Longstreet with
two strong divisions from the south side of the James river for his
reinforcement, and having brought up every battery and battalion that
could be spared from any other position, Lee played again the game
he had played against McClellan. While still strongly and securely
holding his position at Fredericksburg, he began detaching forces in a
way to threaten Washington with an attack in the rear, and to compel
Hooker to retire upon the national capital for its defense.
First he sent Stuart with his splendid cavalry to Culpeper Court House.
Then, a little later, he sent Ewell's and Longstreet's corps to the
same point, retaining only A. P. Hill's corps to hold the works at
Fredericksburg. Should Hooker deem this an opportunity and seek to
seize it, it would require fully three days at the very least for him
to lay pontoon bridges and push a column across the river for purposes
of assault. In the event of such a demonstration two days would amply
suffice Lee to bring his two detached corps back to the works at
Fredericksburg, there to defend them irresistibly. Hooker was much too
discreet a general not to see this, and so he undertook no crossing of
the river.
Lee was thus left in complete control of the military situation.
The transfer of two of his army corps to Culpeper was a threat to
Washington and Washington promptly responded--as Lee intended that it
should do--by calling upon Hooker for the retirement of his army for
the defense of the National capital.
Hooker ordered all his cavalry, under Pleasanton, to move against and
assail the Confederate horsemen under Stuart at or near Culpeper. The
two forces met at Brandy Station, where for the first time in the
history of the Confederate War a strictly cavalry contest of great
proportions ensued. The Confederates had distinctly the better of it.
They repelled the assault, with losses about equal on either side, and
left the Federals with no further information as to the Confederate
movement than they had had before the action. As the acquisition of
such information was precisely all that Pleasanton had fought to
secure, it must be reckoned that he had failed in his purpose. But he
had at any rate proved that the Federal cavalry men had at last learned
how to ride their horses, an art in which they had proved themselves
distinctly inferior to the Confederates in all previous conflicts
between horsemen of the two sides.
On the thirteenth of June Ewell's corps was in the Valley of the
Shenandoah marching northward; Hill was still holding the entrenchments
at Fredericksburg, while Longstreet was in a position near Culpeper,
from which he could reinforce either at will.
Hooker had by this time recovered the sanity which he had so completely
lost during the campaign of Chancellorsville and he at once asked
permission of Washington to push the whole of his vastly superior force
in between the separated fragments of Lee's army and destroy them in
detail. This was obviously the right thing to do, but Halleck was still
in supreme control at Washington, and Hooker, by his phenomenal failure
at Chancellorsville, had justly lost Halleck's confidence. Moreover Lee
knew all about this situation, and, knowing Halleck quite as well as he
knew Hooker, he was reckoning upon that general's character.
Halleck forbade Hooker to make the bold move he proposed, precisely as
Lee had expected him to do, and Lee was thus left free to direct the
course of the campaign as he pleased.
Hooker, under orders, retired toward Washington, leaving Lee free to
add Hill's corps to the forces with which he was advancing northward.
Ewell swept down the valley and assailed Winchester, where he
completely broke and destroyed Milroy's force of ten thousand men,
capturing four thousand of them and driving the rest into disorderly
retreat upon Harper's Ferry.
Lee promptly threw Hill's corps into the Shenandoah Valley, while
Longstreet moved northward upon parallel lines, east of the mountains.
Presently the Confederate cavalry crossed the Potomac and reached
Chambersburg in Pennsylvania. The infantry and artillery promptly
followed, and by the twenty-second or twenty-third of June, the
whole Confederate army was in Pennsylvania--threatening Washington,
threatening Baltimore, threatening Philadelphia, and gravely menacing
even New York.
A great panic ensued among the Northern people, to whom the fact of war
had not often before been brought home in this intimate and terrifying
fashion. Women and children fl
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