Chapter Five

A LONG WAR AHEAD

1. Hardtack in an Empty Hand

SHILOH CHURCH had been built for the Prince of Peace and it had been named for an Israelite town in Ephraim, where the Tabernacle and the Ark of the Covenant had stood and where the boy Samuel had heard voices and seen a mighty vision. It was a bleak frame building on a hillside in a clearing, with the road from the steamboat landing going past on its way to Corinth, and like the peach trees whose pink blossoms caught the April sunlight, the little church had been put there as a hint that life was not all bleak and barren. But Shiloh would get a terrible name now, for armies with banners had gathered around it and in thousands of families it would become a name for horror and desolation.

They were not really armies, although that is what men called them. They were just collections of very young men, most of whom knew nothing at all about the grim profession they had engaged in, all of them calling themselves soldiers but ignorant of what the word really meant. Day after tomorrow they would be soldiers, but now they were civilians, gawky in their new uniforms, each one dreaming that battle would be splendid and exciting and that he himself would survive; and they came from North and South, from farm and cane-brake cabin and from small town and busy city, trudging the dusty roads and tensing themselves for the great test of manhood which seemed to lie just ahead.

General Johnston and General Beauregard had joined forces at Corinth, and they had brought forty-five thousand men up to smite the Yankees in the fields and woodlots above Pittsburg Landing and drive them into the river. Grant had about the same number of men, waiting in their camps for the word to move down to Corinth and win the last great battle in the West. With a few exceptions — each army had a sprinkling of men who could call themselves veterans, because they had been in one fight — these soldiers were completely green. A Confederate brigadier confessed later that until he got to Shiloh he had never seen a gun fired, nor had he heard a lecture or read a book on warfare; and there were Confederate batteries whose members had never even heard the sound of their own guns, ammunition having been too scarce to permit target practice. In the Union army conditions were little better. The colonel of an Ohio regiment remarked that before Shiloh his men had not put in as much as ten hours on battalion drill, and there were many regiments whose men had received their muskets while on the way to the field and who had never so much as loaded and fired them until the battle began. Not even at Bull Run had two more pathetically untrained bodies of men been thrown into combat.¹

The Confederate commanders knew perfectly well that the Federals were going to come down to drive them out of Corinth just as soon as Buell’s army joined Grant’s, and Johnston made up his mind to beat the Yankees to the punch. On April 3 he put his army on the road for Pittsburg Landing. The march was slow, disorganized, and noisy, as might have been expected of untrained troops; not until the evening of April 5 did Johnston have his men in position before the Union lines, and the men had made such a racket — whooping, yelling, and firing their muskets just to see if the things would really go off — that Beauregard wanted to cancel the whole plan and go back to Corinth, on the sensible ground that even the most inattentive Yankees could not help knowing that they were about to be attacked.

Beauregard should have been right, but he was not. Amateurish as the Confederate advance was, it was no worse than the state of the Federal defenses. Officers and men in Grant’s army knew that quite a few armed rebels were in their front, but nobody in the green front-line regiments knew anything about outpost duty; reports that went back to the rear were garbled and incomplete, and the notion that the Confederates would obligingly wait to be attacked at Corinth was overriding. Grant had six divisions in his army, five of them sprawled out between Shiloh Church and Pittsburg Landing. The sixth, under Lew Wallace, was placed at Crump’s Landing, four or five miles downstream, on the western side of the Tennessee. It seemed to Grant that the Rebels might be planning to assault this isolated force, and while Johnston’s men were floundering up from Corinth, Grant warned Sherman to “keep a sharp lookout for any movement in that direction” and alerted other division commanders to be ready to send help to Wallace’s men in case help was needed.² But neither Grant, Sherman, nor anyone else in authority had any idea that a head-on attack on the Shiloh position was remotely likely. The advance elements of Buell’s approaching army began to reach Savannah on April 5; in a day or two the Federal armies would be in full contact and there would be nothing to worry about.

It rained on April 5, and when the sky cleared at sunset the air was cool, and in the woods and half-cleared fields near Shiloh Church the opening leaves gleamed wet and green. There was a peach orchard a mile east of the church, and a little way back of it there was a country road, worn down by erosion so that its bed was a couple of feet lower than the featureless landscape it crossed; and in the orchard and in front of the sunken road and around the unpainted church thousands of Union soldiers had pitched their tents, with other thousands not far in their rear. The ground was good and the air was clear, the great victory at Fort Donelson lay comfortingly at the back of everybody’s mind, the new leaves and the pink blossoms on the peach trees were good to look at, and an Illinois soldier in Sherman’s division wrote: "We were as happy as mortals could be." Early in the afternoon, with the day’s drill over, regiments broke rank and hundreds of boys scurried down to Owl Creek for a swim. They were wholly unworried. There had been intermittent sputterings of rifle fire out on the picket lines for two or three days, but the men had got used to it; the high command was not fretting about it, so why should they?³

In the Tennessee River the wooden gunboats Tyler and Lexington lay at anchor not far from the landing. Downstream at Savannah there was Grant, in the house where Old Smith was nursing his infected shin. Grant had just received a dispatch from Sherman saying, “I do not apprehend anything like an attack on our position”;⁴ he endorsed this, saying that he felt the same way, and passed the reassuring news on to Halleck. And over the wooded plateau and the peach orchard and the river there lay an immense quiet and peace, the last hope of a war that would soon be over because the other side had lost the will to fight.

Within a few miles of Shiloh Church, Albert Sidney Johnston had finally shaken off Beauregard’s insistence that he give up the offensive and go back to Corinth, declaring: “I would fight them if they were a million.” His battle orders were drawn and issued: the Confederate army would move forward at dawn.

Five in the morning of April 6; patrols from the Union advance elements had gone forward a mile or two to see whether anything solid lay back of the Rebel skirmish parties that had been so much in evidence lately. As they went, Johnston was giving his general officers final instructions, closing with the remark: “Tonight we will water our horses in the Tennessee River.” The Union patrols kept on going, and before long they collided with Rebel skirmishers. For a little while there was a spat-spat of casual rifle fire, doing no particular harm, alarming nobody; then, up behind the Confederate advance guard, there came the enormous solid mass of a Confederate battle line, banked up to the full depth of three army corps, extending off to right and left through the woods and the underbrush beyond vision. There came heavy rolling volleys and the sound of thousands of men yelling, with the crash of field artillery exploding sullenly underneath.

Back came the Union patrols, and in the camps men fell in line and made ready. The advancing Confederates could see white tents on the hillsides, with ordered ranks drawn up in front of them, guns on higher ground, and all along the front they settled down to a savage fire-fight at the closest range. Great banks of dirty-white smoke hung in the air, caught by the foliage, seeping up above the tree tops as if the wilderness were on fire, and a prodigious fury of noise rocked and thundered, to be heard at army headquarters far downstream.⁵

Grant was at breakfast. He cocked an ear, quit his breakfast, got his staff and horses down to a steamboat, and took off for Pittsburg Landing with all speed. One of Buell’s brigadiers had just come up, and at the headquarters house he listened uneasily to the rising noise off beyond the horizon. He had gone up to Old Smith’s bedroom, to call on that disabled warrior, and Smith chaffed him, laughing at him for imagining that a real battle was in progress. This, he said, was just an affair of the pickets; green soldiers who had never fought before must not worry so, down here they were used to operations on a large scale. But the racket did not die down; it became an unbroken muffled roar, it sounded louder moment by moment and seemed to be getting nearer. At last Old Smith admitted that it might be a little more than skirmish-line stuff; part of the main army might be engaged.⁶

Part of the army was indeed engaged — all of it that was within range of Confederate weapons. Grant had had two divisions in front, and these offered a furious resistance, slowing down the Rebel assault and here and there driving it back with heavy loss, while the troops in the rear were hurried forward. In many of the Federal front-line regiments the men had heard the outpost firing and had assumed that the pickets were simply discharging their muskets to see if the previous day’s rain had dampened the powder charges — that was a common affair in this undrilled army. But they sent men forward to investigate, and the men came scampering back, reporting that “the Johnnies are there thicker than Spanish needles in a fence corner,” and in no time the fighting became general.⁷

Some units broke apart at the first shock, losing all cohesion and running for the rear, every man for himself. The colonel of the 71st Ohio took one look at the oncoming battle line, put spurs to his horse, and galloped back for the river landing and safety. The lieutenant colonel tried to rally the crumbling regiment as an Alabama regiment came shouldering its way through the saplings; he was killed, and the 71st ceased to exist as a fighting force. Sherman rode up to the 53rd Ohio, told its colonel to hold his ground and he would be supported, and rode off to another part of the field. His face gray as ashes, the colonel lay down behind a log; then, springing to his feet, yelled, “Fall back and save yourselves,” and headed for the rear. Most of the men followed him. Officers rallied a handful and got help from an enlisted man, Private A. C. Voris of the 17th Illinois, who had fought at Fort Donelson and knew about battle. Voris came over and went along the line, showing nervous recruits how to load, aim, and fire, telling them: “Why, it’s just like shooting squirrels, only these squirrels have guns, that’s all.” The fragment finally fell in with an Illinois regiment and fought the rest of the day.⁸

The Confederate attack was being driven home with fury, and the Union line could not hold long. Regiments that were not entirely routed fell back doggedly, firing from behind trees and logs, rallying briefly around the batteries; they were driven from their camps, and the jubilant Rebels ran on through the tented streets, some of them pausing to pick up loot and souvenirs. The first resistance had been spirited, despite the runaways; one Union brigadier reported that he lost more men in the first five minutes of the fighting than he lost all the rest of the day.⁹

Green troops, one officer said after the war, had this characteristic; they usually would either run away at once or not at all. Both armies were leaking men to the rear at a prodigious rate, but the men who did not run were fighting like veterans. The division that had been posted in front of the sunken road fell back to that eroded lane, found it a made-to-order trench, and got down in it to make a new stand. Wave after wave of Confederate troops charged them, running in through the brambles and the tangled woods, and were driven back by a deadly fire. The 15th Iowa, which had reached Pittsburg Landing that morning, found itself in this road, the men loading their weapons there for the first time in their lives; they had come up through a disorderly crowd of fugitives, who cried out that this was the Bull Run story all over again and that everything up front had been cut to pieces, but the Iowans were game enough and they hugged the ground in the road and opened fire. One private, apparently convinced that he would never get out of this place alive, was heard to call despairingly to his company commander: “Captain, if I’m killed, don’t bury me with a Republican!” In the peach orchard men lay flat to fire, and such a stream of Rebel bullets came in that the blossoms were all cut to pieces and floated down on the firing line like a gentle pink rain.¹⁰

Most of the soldiers knew nothing of tactics, and when they had to go from place to place they simply went as the spirit moved them: a charge was a wild rush forward, a retreat was a similar rush to the rear, and the only rule was to keep an eye on the regimental flag and go where it went. Brigade and regimental organization was lost, and men fell in with the first fighting group they came to and fought without orders. An Ohio soldier, wounded, was told to go to the rear. He wandered off, found fighting going on wherever he turned, and came back at last to tell his company commander: “Cap, give me a gun — this blamed fight ain’t got any rear.” The 15th Illinois came up from the river, fell in beside a six-gun battery, and found the rifle fire heavier than anything it had dreamed of; one man, getting ready to fight, found his musket stock shattered by a bullet, saw another bullet puncture his canteen, and was relieved of his knapsack when a bullet cut its strap. An Iowa boy, lost from his own outfit and fighting with the Illinois soldiers, got a bullet through the creased crown of his hat, looked at the hat and saw four neat holes in it, and hoisted it gaily on his ramrod for his comrades to see; then a shell burst overhead and he was killed, the Confederates swept in and captured the guns, the Illinois regiment broke, and the survivors fell in with scattered men from other broken regiments a quarter of a mile to the rear and began to fight all over again.¹¹

Behind the lines there was complete chaos. On the roads leading back to the river landing there was an immense disorganized huddle of routed men, teamsters and their wagons, dismounted cavalrymen, reserve artillery, ambulance details bringing back wounded, artillerymen who had lost their guns. The wildest rumors were afloat: half of the army had gone, the Rebels had reached the river landing, there were no officers left, the whole army had been surrendered. One panicky soldier at the landing tried to get others to help him fell trees and build a raft; perhaps they could float down the river to Paducah and safety.¹²

The panic and the scare stories were all at the rear. Many men were gathered there — before the day was over a good fourth of Grant’s army was huddling under the riverbank or wandering about in a vain hunt for someone who could turn chaos into order — but up front some of the deadliest fighting in American history was going on, and the terrible clamor of battle kept mounting to a higher pitch while all the woodland smoked and flamed.

In the 16th Wisconsin, made up of backwoodsmen, the men said they were going out on a turkey shoot when they went up to the front. A private found himself in line beside the colonel, who had picked up a musket and was firing with the rest, and the private asked how many rebels the colonel had shot. Pausing to make a careful reply, the colonel said that he had fired thirty-seven cartridges and so of course should have hit thirty-seven men, “but I don’t feel certain of six.” In a lull that descended on one part of the field an Illinois captain found himself commanding his regiment, all superior officers having been shot, and since both his division and brigade commanders had also been hit there did not seem to be anybody to tell him what to do. He heard very heavy firing in the woods somewhere off to the right, so he collected what was left of the command and moved over to get in on the fight. An Iowa colonel came to the field drunk, maneuvered his regiment with reckless inconsequence, and was removed by his brigadier from command and placed under arrest; sobering somewhat, he picked up a musket and fell in with another Iowa regiment. Someone recognized him and asked him what he thought he was doing. He replied simply: “I am under arrest and hunting a place to fight.” He stayed and fought, too, acting as private soldier for the rest of the day. An army surgeon who had once served in an artillery company found four guns standing idle on a hill, dead and wounded men lying all around, surviving gunners having fled. He rounded up men from a nearby infantry regiment and got the guns back into action; they fought for half an hour, until a caisson was exploded and two of the guns were disabled.¹³

The area in front of the sunken road saw especially bitter fighting. The Confederates assaulted this strong point so many times the defenders lost all count, and Southerners called the place “the hornets’ nest.” On the right and left, Federal troops gave ground, and victorious Confederates came in and got the road from three sides, but the division that was holding it stayed put. Its commander was an Illinois politician, Brigadier General Benjamin Prentiss, who had been a volunteer captain in the Mexican War, had had a tiff with Grant over rank in the old days at Cairo, and who was turning out today to be considerable of a soldier. He held his line, although the rest of the battle was obviously moving back to the rear, and his men fired so hard and so fast that an opposing Confederate felt that if he could just hold up a bushel basket it would be filled with bullets in no time, Also, these hornets’-nest people killed the Confederate commander, Albert Sidney Johnston.

In spite of this valiant stand Grant’s army was being pushed back to the river. Grant himself had got to the scene and was doing all that a commander could to hold the position, but the southern attack was being driven home with a grim determination not to be expected of men who were tired of the war and ready to quit. (The determination converted Grant completely; after Shiloh he expected a war to the finish, not to be ended until the Confederacy had simply been made incapable of fighting any longer.) He sent for Lew Wallace’s division to come up, drew up his siege guns and reserve artillery on high ground in front of the river landing, and he did his best to get the disorganized fugitives back into battle and bolster his sagging line.

There was not very much he could do. His army had simply been caught off balance, and the Confederates were pressing their advantage. Grant’s front line that dawn had not contained one regiment that had ever been under fire before; many of these regiments had evaporated completely, and short of the line of guns by the river landing there was no good place to make a stand. An energetic Confederate general rounded up sixty pieces of artillery and put them in line to hammer at the hornets’ nest at the murderous range of three hundred yards. Prentiss’s men held their ground, but the men on their flanks were driven off; the peach orchard, dead bodies and broken trees and bloody ground, pink blossom petals strewn over all, was gone now, and the division was nearly surrounded. Men who tried to get to the rear found that to retreat was worse than to stay in the sunken road; the sixty Confederate guns were firing just a little high, and charges of canister were ripping the saplings and brambles fifty yards back of the line, creating a deadly zone no one could cross. Late in the afternoon Prentiss saw that he could do no more, and he surrendered with some two thousand of his men. They were prisoners, but they had kept the Union army from being destroyed.

Dusk was coming on. Part of Grant’s army was cowering by the (riverbank, another part had been shot, and part had been captured. Most of the rest had been completely scrambled, regiments and companies all intermingled so that nobody knew where anybody was. Quite characteristic was the experience of an Ohio officer who, trying to lead a lost detachment back into action, met a major on Sherman’s staff and asked where his brigade was. The major confessed that he had no idea; he himself was so completely lost that a moment before he had found himself trying to report to a Confederate brigadier well inside the Confederate lines. The Ohioan never heard the rest of the story because just then a charge of Rebel canister came by, the major’s horse ran away, and the Ohio officer saw no more of him.¹⁴

As a general said afterward, both armies by late afternoon had ceased to bear much resemblance to organized armies; they were “mere fighting swarms,” with nothing but the flags to give them unity — the flags and the terrible determination that seemed to live in the hearts of these northern and southern boys who had never fought before but who, pitched into one of the war’s most dreadful battles, were showing an uncommon capacity for fighting.

By dusk the pressure eased. The Confederates had gained much ground, but by now they were in no better shape than the Federals, and the last attack that might just possibly have broken Grant’s final line and killed his army could not be mounted. (Many of the untrained Confederate soldiers had gone off, boy-like, to gawk at the big haul of prisoners taken when Prentiss surrendered.) Also, help was at hand at last.

Lew Wallace could have saved the day, but somehow he had got lost or had been directed wrongly, and he had not been able to get up from Crump’s Landing in time to help. But Buell’s advance guard was on the scene at last, and when the steamboats brought his men over the river and the men tramped up through the backwash of wounded men, fugitives, and displaced persons the real danger was over. Buell’s men looked scornfully at the disorganization they saw all about them and came tramping up the slope to the high ground full of cocky energy, flags flying, all their bands playing. Grant’s men raised a wild, half-hysterical cheer at the sight of them; one wrote that men wept for joy and said that the woods fairly quivered with the sound of the yelling, and an Iowa soldier confessed: “Never did strains of music sound so sweet as did the patriotic airs played by the brass bands marching at the head of each regiment.”¹⁵

Some of the beaten men who had been hiding by the river called out to Buell’s men not to come ashore — the day was lost, the Rebels were winning everywhere, they would be butchered — and Buell himself became convinced that his arrival had come just in time to prevent a great disaster. But by the time his troops began to form along the line marked out by Grant’s artillery the crisis was over. The new line was stabilized, the exhausted Confederates just could not fight any more until they had had a night’s sleep, and Lew Wallace’s division was coming in at last to provide a solid stiffener. Buell’s troops simply provided the clincher.

It rained hard that night; there were more wounded men than the overtaxed surgeons and stretcher-bearers could begin to care for, Officers were busy all night long trying to reassemble scattered commands, and gunboats Tyler and Lexington had found a place where they could fire their big guns — much heavier than anything the army had — down the length of the Confederate battle line; they kept it up at intervals all night long, and only a completely exhausted man could hope to get any sleep. By morning Grant was ready to take the offensive, and shortly after daybreak he sent the men forward, Buell’s troops on the left, the men of his own army on the right, in a huge counterattack.

Grant had a strong advantage in numbers by now, with Wallace’s and Buell’s men on the field, but the Confederates were very stubborn. They had not done any fighting before to speak of, but they did not propose to give up this fight until they had to, and they were hard to convince. Step by step they were driven back until most of the ground they had won the day before had been taken away from them, but they were not to be hurried, and some of this day’s fighting was as hard and as costly as anything that had happened on the first day. A regular army artillerist was told to take his six guns and blast some Rebels out of a thicket in his front. He hammered the place with canister and with shell, but it was a long time before this particular knot of resistance was broken. When he got to the place afterward he found one hundred dead Confederates and twenty-seven dead horses, not to mention a wrecked caisson, bushes uprooted by canister, and any number of young trees that had been splintered and knocked down by shell fire.… These Confederates had needed a great deal of persuading.¹⁶

But the tide had turned. By midafternoon Beauregard could see that his army had been fought out and that there was nothing to do but get back to Corinth as quickly as possible. The shattered Confederate army withdrew, and the Union army — equally shattered, except for its reinforcements — moved forward just far enough to make certain that its foes were really retreating, and then went into camp. It had lost thirteen thousand men and it had just been through two of the very worst days of the war. If the Southerners proposed to go back to Corinth, nobody near Pittsburg Landing wanted to keep them from doing it.

The battlefield was a fearful place, with unattended wounded men lying everywhere and hideous numbers of dead bodies turning black and swollen under the April sun. Burial details worked all week, sometimes digging regular graves, sometimes doing little more than toss dirt over dead bodies. In one place a great trench was dug to hold seven hundred dead Southerners.… A few weeks later a western regiment came up to the landing on its way to join the main body and tramped glumly across the littered fighting ground. The men passed one makeshift burial place from which, in ghastly symbolism, a lifeless arm was raised from the earth, an empty hand groping with stiff open fingers for the sky. A soldier looked at it, broke ranks, took a hardtack from his haversack, and put it in the open hand. Then he rejoined his comrades and the men tramped on to the front.¹⁷

2. Springtime of Promise

It had begun with flags and cheers and the glint of brave words on the spring wind, with drumbeats setting a gay rhythm for the feet of young men who believed that war would beat clerking. That had been a year ago; now the war had come down to uninstructed murderous battle in a smoky woodland, where men who had never been shown how to fight stayed in defiance of all logical expectation and fought for two nightmarish days. And because they had done this the hope for an easy war and a cheap victory was gone forever.

It had been possible, before, for a Northerner or a Southerner to believe that the other side was really not very much in earnest and would presently give up. Grant had had that delusion before Shiloh; so, perhaps, had Johnston, who whistled his men north from Corinth with contemptuous remarks about “agrarian mercenaries” in the northern army.¹ After Shiloh no intelligent man could feel as Grant and Johnston had felt.

For Shiloh underlined one of the basic facts about the war — that it was being fought by men of enormous innate pugnacity: tenacious men who would quit a fight once begun only when someone was beaten. North and South had not gone to war in a mere fit of peevish irritability; the men they sent into their armies had something on their minds and were desperately in earnest.

Yet the spring when this fact became obvious was also, for the North, the spring of greatest promise — the spring in which final victory, if it could not be inexpensive, could at least be considered fairly near.

On paper, Shiloh was a draw; actually it was one of the decisive battles of the war. It was a battle the Confederacy simply had to win. For it had been a blow struck to restore a disastrously lost balance, a desperate attempt to re-establish the Confederate frontier in the Kentucky-Ohio country, a crucial effort to save the Mississippi Valley. It had failed, and the fact that it had come close to being a dazzling victory did not offset the failure. Robert E. Lee, serving (with sadly inadequate authority) as Jefferson Davis’s general supervisor of military operations, recognized the crisis immediately. While Richmond was still celebrating what it believed to be a great triumph, and while Beauregard was reassembling his exhausted army in Corinth, Lee was wiring Atlantic coast commanders to send reinforcements west at any cost, warning: “If Mississippi Valley is lost, Atlantic States would be ruined.”²

That was just another way of saying that the outcome of the war would depend on what happened along the Mississippi, and in this spring of 1862 the Mississippi was visibly being won by the North. Federal John Pope, all bluster and heedless energy, had been doing his job. He had taken New Madrid and Island No. Ten, Federal rams and gunboats had smashed a makeshift Confederate fleet that protected Memphis, and before long Memphis itself would be evacuated; the river was open, or as good as open, all the way to Vicksburg.

Worse yet, as far as the Confederacy was concerned, the Mississippi was being lost at both ends. Since early winter the Federals had had troops on Ship Island, that Gulf-coast sandspit within reaching distance of the mouths of the Mississippi. Unaccountably, the Confederate high command had ignored this threat, even though it obviously meant that the Federals were meditating an attack on New Orleans. One reason, perhaps, was the fact that the Federal troops there were under command of Ben Butler, the one-time Democrat who had laid such a heavy hand on the Secessionists in eastern Maryland in the spring of 1861. At the end of February, Confederate General Mansfield Lovell, commanding at New Orleans, was writing contemptuously that Butler’s Ship Island expedition was harmless: “A black Republican dynasty will never give an old Breckinridge Democrat like Butler command of any expedition which they had any idea would result in such a glorious success as the capture of New Orleans.”³

There was much about Ben Butler that Lovell did not then understand, to be sure; but a more solid reason for optimism lay in the two forts that guarded the entrance to the Mississippi, Forts Jackson and St. Philip, downstream forty miles from New Orleans. These were solid masonry works, plunked down in almost impassable swamps. It was an unshaken military axiom just then that unarmored ships could not fight forts; these forts could be approached only by water; let the Federals assemble all the warships they chose, therefore, the southern approach to New Orleans was safe. A somewhat makeshift assemblage of river gunboats had been brought down to help the forts. There were fire rafts and river obstructions, and the New Orleans shipyards were building two prodigious ironclads, Louisiana and Mississippi; once these monsters were afloat and in commission, no imaginable power could come in through this gate.

Nevertheless, as the winter progressed things looked more serious. A brash young Federal naval officer named David D. Porter had sold the idea that these forts would be much less formidable if they were properly shelled; and he had got together twenty schooners, each one bearing a ponderous mortar capable of tossing thirteen-inch shells. Neither mortars nor shells existed when he brought his idea forward, but the North had a great military asset which had been overlooked — the great forges and foundries of Pittsburgh, operating on the iron ore that was coming down in ever-greater quantities through the Soo canal from the Lake Superior ranges. These turned to promptly, and by the time Porter had his schooners stripped for action the mortars were ready to be installed, along with thirty thousand of the heavy shells. By the middle of March these ungainly vessels had been towed across the bar and were creeping upriver, hugging the banks, looking for their spots.

Still another asset the Federals brought to the scene: a youthfully jovial flag officer in his early sixties named David Glasgow Farragut.

Farragut had been in the navy for more than half a century — had served as a very juvenile powder monkey on the famous frigate Essex when she cruised the Pacific in the War of 1812, and was still spry enough for a midshipman. He had a habit of turning a handspring on every birthday and told an amazed junior that he would not think he was growing old until he found himself unable to do it. He had been living in Norfolk, Virginia, when the war started; had warned his secessionist fellow townsmen, “You fellows will catch the Devil before you get through with this business,” and then had closed his house and gone north to stick with the old flag. Now he was in command of the fleet that had been appointed to attack New Orleans, and he was getting heavy sloops and gunboats up into the river. It was hard work — the mouths of the river were silting up, and his heaviest warships had to be left out in the Gulf — but at last he got the most of his fleet anchored three miles below the forts. There he made ready, perfectly confident that he could rush the forts and take New Orleans, and eleven days after the battle of Shiloh he signaled Porter to cast his mortars loose and commence firing.⁴

By now the Confederate command was awake to the peril, but by now it was too late. The huge new ironclads were not quite finished; troops had been sent north to fight at Shiloh and defend the upper river — if New Orleans was in danger, men had felt, the danger would be coming downstream, not up from the Gulf — and General Lovell was complaining bitterly that his defenses were manned entirely by “the heterogeneous militia of the city, armed mostly with shotguns, against 9 and 11-inch Dahlgrens.”⁵ His river fleet suffered from divided command and from bitter rivalry among leaders. New Orleans was suddenly looking very naked and undefended — and then Porter began tossing his thousands of heavy shells into the forts, dismounting guns and smashing emplacements and letting floodwaters into the parade grounds, while Farragut stripped his warships for action, weaving anchor chains along the sides for armor, smearing paintwork with Mississippi mud to reduce visibility at night, waiting for the moment when the bombardment would soften the defenses enough to make a bold dash possible.

The moment came soon after midnight on April 24. Red lanterns were hauled to the masthead of Farragut’s flagship, the wooden steam sloop-of-war Hartford, and with a great creaking of windlasses and clanking of anchor chains the ponderous fleet got under way and started upstream.

It was an eerie business; pitch-dark night all around, broken by a wild red glare as the Confederate fire rafts were pushed out into the current. Fort Jackson lay on the western shore of the river, with Fort St. Philip lying opposite and a little farther north; Farragut’s ships had to run straight between the two, fire rafts floating down on them, Confederate gunboats lying off to deliver a raking fire. Porter’s mortars had hammered the forts mercilessly, but there were plenty of guns still in position, and men to fire them, and as the smoky light of the burning rafts lit the night the forts opened fire with everything they had. A cigar-shaped Confederate ram, almost invisible on the black water, had come down to help discomfit the Yankees; great clouds of smoke went billowing out from forts and ships, to lie on the water and create blinding pockets in the firelight; a tugboat was out in the night, trying to shove one or another of the burning rafts up against some Union warship. Farragut’s navigators had to feel their way along, the ships jarring and shaking with the shock of heavy broadsides, guns going off everywhere, great noise and red-smoky darkness all about, outright disaster lurking not far away. Disaster almost came, at last, when Hartford ran aground by Fort St. Philip and the tug jammed a blazing raft under the ship’s side; quick spirals of flame began to snake up the rigging, Rebel gunners were hitting their mark, and the men on Hartford’s littered gun deck flinched and began to draw away. But old Farragut was shouting down from the poop: There was a hotter fire than any Rebel raft could show for men who failed to do their duty, and how about giving that tugboat a shell where it would do the most good? The gun crews ran back to their posts, a fire-control party got to work on the flames, the tug staggered off with a shell through her vitals, the raft drifted away, Hartford’s hull plowed out of the mud, and the fleet went on upstream.⁶

And then suddenly it was all over. Most of Farragut’s ships were above the forts, the Confederate gunboats had been sunk or driven ashore, and by daybreak the old admiral was anchoring his fleet halfway between the forts and the city, giving decent burial to his dead and making repairs to damaged hulls and rigging. The forts still held out, but they were dead ducks now, wholly cut off, their garrisons on the edge of mutiny with fatigue, battle-weariness, and a general sense of defeat; they would surrender presently and be occupied by Union troops, and New Orleans would surrender, too, as soon as the fleet got there, because with the forts and gunboats gone it had no means of defense.

Rain was coming down as Farragut’s ships came steaming up to the New Orleans levee. Onshore there were thousands of people, jeering and cursing and shouting impotent defiance at the Yankee ships; and on Hartford’s deck an old tar lounged negligently against a ponderous nine-inch gun, the lanyard in his hand, patting the side of the gun and smiling serenely at the yelling crowd.⁷ Officers came ashore, United States flags blossomed out over public buildings, and in a short time Breckinridge Democrat Butler would be on the scene with occupation forces. The victory was complete, city gone, forts gone, the two unfinished ironclads destroyed; and by the end of April the Confederacy owned no more of the Mississippi River than the stretch between Baton Rouge and Vicksburg.

So the war was looking up, in the spring of 1862. On the seacoast the navy was tightening its blockade. It owned deep-water harbors in South Carolina now as bases for its blockaders, the army had knocked Fort Pulaski to pieces at the mouth of the Savannah River, the North Carolina sounds were under almost complete Union control, and hopeful people in Washington were beginning to ask if Farragut could not simply go steaming on up the Mississippi and open the river singlehanded. (Not yet did they realize that running past a fort was not the same thing as destroying it.) The general idea set forth in Scott’s Anaconda Plan seemed to be working; perhaps if the armies got busy now victory might be very near.

This meant opportunity for generals; especially for Henry Wager Halleck, commander in the West.

Halleck had assembled a huge army near Pittsburg Landing: Grant’s army, Buell’s army, and the army with which Pope had been opening the upper Mississippi. He had come to the spot himself to take active field command — for the first and only time in the war — and he had given Grant a dubious sort of promotion, making him second-in-command of the united army and giving the troops Grant had been leading to George Thomas. Grant was finding that his job carried a fine title and prestige but no responsibility and little authority; for the time being he was on the shelf and he was bitterly dissatisfied.

Halleck may have been led to shelve him by the criticism that came down on Grant after Shiloh. Grant had won the battle, to be sure — or at any rate the battle had been won and he had been in command when it happened — but the fame he had won at Fort Donelson had been rubbed down a good deal.

The Confederates had hit him at Shiloh when he was not expecting it, and northern newspapers made a big thing of it. The first account of the battle to reach northern newspapers had been written by a correspondent who got to Shiloh on the second day of the fight and picked up his news from members of the rear echelon — the panicky crowd that hugged the bank by the steamboat landing, circulating doleful rumors of catastrophe. From these he got a fine collection of scare stories — a whole division had been captured, sound asleep, at daybreak; men had been bayoneted in their tents; some regiments were surprised at breakfast and ran away, leaving the Rebels to eat the meal — and all of this got printed and talked about all across the North.⁸ In addition, some of the officers who ran away and were cashiered for it had political influence and defended themselves by asserting that the whole army had been shamefully caught unawares. Grant, of course, was held responsible — Grant and Sherman — and the old story about Grant’s fondness for whiskey was told and retold. Sherman was fuming at a great rate, denouncing all of these stories as tales “gotten up by cowards to cover their shame,” but for a time Grant was under a cloud.⁹

By the end of April, Halleck had assembled 120,000 men. Not twenty miles away, at Corinth, was Beauregard, getting reinforcements for his shattered army but still able to muster less than half of Halleck’s numbers. He could be swamped any time Halleck chose to make a solid lunge at him, and after that nothing on earth could keep Halleck’s soldiers from going anywhere in the Deep South they wished.

Halleck recognized his opportunity; unfortunately he also recognized a vast number of dangers, including some that did not exist. Grant had been bitterly criticized because he had not entrenched at Shiloh. Halleck would not lay himself open to the same criticism; accordingly, whenever his vast army halted it entrenched, turning each camp into a minor fort. It spent so much time digging trenches, indeed, that it had little time left for marching. An Illinois soldier recalled that they spent two hours every evening digging trenches and then got up at three in the morning to stand in line in the trenches until daybreak; they marched, he said, from a quarter of a mile to two miles each day. There were times when it appeared that Halleck was going to burrow his way to Corinth.¹⁰

Roads were very bad and there were numerous swamps, and when an unpaved road crossed a swamp it had to be corduroyed. Ten-foot logs would be cut and laid side by side across the roadway, from solid ground to solid ground. Sometimes the watery mud was so oozy that many layers of logs had to be piled up. Often enough the nearest wood was half a mile away, and the troops would have to carry the logs in, six or eight men to a log. When finished, these roads were both atrocious and dangerous, the sole advantage being that they could at least be used by a moving army, as roads of bottomless mud could not. If an unskilled driver let his horses get too near the edge, one wheel of wagon or gun might slip off the logs into the mud, in which case the whole business would capsize — whereupon all the soldiers in the vicinity had to get into the swamp and hoist everything back on the road again. Sometimes, when mud and water were very bad, a horse that slipped off the corduroy was simply left to sink down out of sight and die. Years after the war an Indiana veteran remembered with distaste “the black slimy water and the old moss-covered logs” of those Mississippi swamp roads.¹¹

When the roads were not too wet they were apt to be too dry. Mississippi heat was something new, even to boys who knew what heat could be like in Illinois and Indiana. Roads were narrow, and they frequently ran between tall pines that met overhead, cutting off all air and sunlight. The soil was a fine sandy-white loam, and in dry weather a road would be ankle-deep in dust; and a moving column would kick up unending clouds of it, so that a road through a forest would be a choking tunnel in which some men would collapse from exhaustion while others would stagger along, retching and vomiting. One veteran wrote feelingly: “You load a man down with a sixty-pound knapsack, his gun and forty rounds of ammunition, a haversack full of hardtack and sow belly, and a three-pint canteen full of water, then start him along this narrow roadway with the mercury up to 100 and the dust so thick you could taste it, and you have done the next thing to killing this man outright.”¹²

The army did move, and with infinite caution it approached Corinth, averaging less than one mile a day. In some way Halleck was getting fantastic reports about Confederate strength. It was believed at headquarters that Beauregard would presently get sixty thousand fresh troops; then credit was given to a report that one hundred thousand Rebels were waiting at Corinth, with more coming in daily. Assistant Secretary of War Scott, who was traveling with Halleck as a War Department observer, wired Stanton in the middle of May that “the enemy are concentrating a powerful army” and suggested that Halleck ought to be reinforced. An attack by Beauregard was expected daily, at practically any point along the front, and the army was kept ready to go on the defensive at any moment. A captured army surgeon, recently released, assured Grant that while behind the enemy lines he had learned there were one hundred and forty-six thousand Rebels in Corinth, with enough reinforcements on the way to raise the number to two hundred thousand; he added, not wishing to draw too dark a picture, that a number of these reinforcements would of course consist of old men and boys.¹³

A month after it left Shiloh field the army found itself squarely in front of the Rebel lines at Corinth. Beauregard had received all the reinforcements he was going to get, and he had, all in all, just over fifty-two thousand men.¹⁴ He had not a chance in the world to fight off Halleck’s army and he knew it; seeing that the Federal was at last nerving himself for an assault, Beauregard abruptly left the place — left it at night, arranging one final deception for the Yankees by having steam engines come puffing and whistling into town at intervals to the accompaniment of loud cheers. Pope, commanding the Federal advance, heard it all, told Halleck that lots of fresh troops were coming in to Beauregard’s aid, and predicted that he would be attacked in heavy force by daylight. Then at last, when the Confederate rear guard blew up such supplies as it could not remove, Pope caught on, and on May 30 his regiments went cautiously forward into an empty town. Beauregard kept on going until he reached Tupelo, fifty miles south. He was not pursued with any great vigor.

For Halleck clung to the thought that the war might be won without very much fighting. To him, the occupation of Rebel territory was the big thing. Here he was, sitting in an important junction town, occupying a healthy stretch of the Memphis and Charleston Railroad; as far as he could see, this was victory. He wrote to Pope that all he wanted was for Beauregard to go far enough south so that he could not menace the railroad line: “There is no object in bringing on a battle if this object can be obtained without one. I think by showing a bold front for a day or two the enemy will continue his retreat, which is all I desire.”¹⁵

Memphis was in Union hands now, and Grant was sent over to take charge of it. This assignment marked the beginning of the upswing for Grant. He had been on the verge of quitting the army during the march down to Corinth, feeling humiliated because Halleck was giving him nothing to do, and Sherman had talked him out of it — Sherman, who had lost his command and been written off as insane early in the war, but who had come back and was now solidly established, the last of his nervous anxiety having been burned away in the fires of Shiloh. Now Grant had a job again. Before long it would grow bigger.

Bit by bit Halleck was scattering the huge army that Beauregard had not dared to fight. He had to occupy Memphis, Corinth, many miles of railroad, a network of towns behind the railroad. Also, he was sending Buell east to take Chattanooga — an eminently sound idea, one which the Confederates just then did not know how they were going to stop, except that it was all being done very slowly. Buell was a cautious, methodical man and Halleck was the last man on earth to make him less so; Buell went inching along toward Chattanooga, rebuilding as he went the railroad line which the Rebels had been tearing up, and it was almost an open question whether he would reach Chattanooga before the war was over.¹⁶

Meanwhile the army had lost a good man — old C. F. Smith, who had damned the volunteers and led them to victory at Fort Donelson, who had given Grant the framework for his “unconditional surrender” message, and who should have been spared for more battles; there was plenty of fighting ahead, and a man of his kind would be useful. But the old man had been ill for weeks with his infected leg, and a few weeks after the battle of Shiloh had died at Savannah, Tennessee. They would miss him.

3. Invitation to General Lee

This was the spring when they could have done it. The irresponsible overconfidence of the old “On to Richmond” days was gone forever, and there was a sullen new respect for the fighting capacity of the southern soldier, but the chance was there just the same. Now was the time to move fast and hit hard, because the other side was badly off balance. The Confederate war potential, limited in any case by comparison with that of the North, had not yet been fully developed. Final victory could be won before summer if the strong northern advantage was pressed to the limit.

Yet the great Federal offensive moved with leaden feet. In the West, Halleck was profoundly cautious, inching along with pick and shovel, leaving nothing to the chances that might go against him, blind to the chances that might work in his favor, asking only that Beauregard leave him alone. And in the East, where the Confederate capital and nerve center lay a scant hundred miles from Washington, the Federal command was demonstrating that speed was a word it did not understand.

Richmond had become very important. Not only was it the capital, the living symbol of the Confederacy’s ability to exist as an independent nation. In the largely rural South it was now the metropolis, the great industrial center, the heart and core of the war-production machine. Memphis was gone, and Nashville, and New Orleans; now Richmond was the keystone, and if it fell the Confederacy’s ability to resist would be fatally limited. To take and hold Richmond this spring was to win it all.

But there were problems. While the Westerners were moving up the Tennessee toward what would soon be the Shiloh battlefield, Confederate Joe Johnston was stoutly entrenched around the old Bull Run battlefield, and McClellan at last moved forward to drive him out But McClellan’s army was more than twice as big as Johnston’s, and Johnston had no intention of waiting to be destroyed; he got out of there before McClellan arrived, falling back behind the Rappahannock River and leaving nothing for the Yankees except miles of trenches, a string of log huts and barracks, a number of wooden guns that had been mounted for purposes of deception, and smoldering piles of burned foodstuffs and equipment that could not be carried away. McClellan looked things over, decided that an overland pull down to Richmond would be too risky, and returned to Washington; he would put his army on boats and steam down to Old Point Comfort, where the James River came into the lower end of Chesapeake Bay. From there he would march up the long peninsula between the James and York rivers, striking Richmond from the east, trusting to Federal sea power to protect his flanks and give him his supplies.

The plan was good enough, and the army sailed with high confidence. By the first week in April thousands of troops were going ashore near Fortress Monroe; like their general, the men assumed that they would be in Richmond in a few weeks, and the mere sight of the great fleet of transports and warships, the waving flags and the visible display of northern power, convinced them that they were irresistible. Richmond was perhaps fifty miles away, and in the state of Virginia there were at least twice as many Union soldiers as Confederates. A quick march up the peninsula, one big battle at the gates of Richmond, and that would be that.

Yet the march was not quick. McClellan got his army to the peninsula before Johnston did, and for a few crucial days there was nothing much there to stop him. Yorktown was fortified, and a sketchy line of works ran across the peninsula from York River to the James, but there were no more than fifteen thousand armed Confederates present. McClellan had fifty-three thousand men with him, more were coming down on every boat, and one hard smash would probably have settled things. But McClellan was an engineer and he wanted to study the situation with an engineer’s careful eye, and while he was at his studies the local Confederate commander played a game on him.

This officer was General John Bankhead Magruder, an imposing-looking gentleman whose military talents were limited but who for years had been an enthusiast for amateur theatricals, and the show he put on now had a sure professional touch that completely baffled McClellan. Magruder marched his skimpy forces back and forth and up and down, making a great show, behaving as if his force was unlimited, and McClellan was greatly impressed; he concluded presently that the Confederate line was too strong to be stormed, and so he halted his army, began to wheel up a ponderous array of siege guns and heavy mortars, built works for their protection — and, in the end, lost an entire month, during which time Johnston and his army showed up and the invasion came to a stalemate.¹

Other things went wrong, military errors being cumulative.

The Union navy ruled the waters, and it had been supposed originally that any Rebel line on the peninsula could easily be outflanked: warships could steam up either of the rivers, hammering down any fieldworks that might exist and landing troops in the Rebel rear. But just at this time the navy had utterly lost control of the waters around Hampton Roads, and the flanking device McClellan had counted on was not available. This had happened because when the Federals evacuated Norfolk navy yard in the spring of 1861 they had done an imperfect job of destruction on one warship which they had been obliged to leave behind — U.S.S. Merrimac, a powerful steam frigate, temporarily immobilized because of defective engines.

Merrimac had been burned and scuttled, but when the Confederates took over the yard they raised the hulk, found it largely intact, and with vast ingenuity created a new marine monster that almost won the war for them. Merrimac was cut down to her berth deck and was given a slanting superstructure with twenty-four-inch oaken walls covered by four inches of iron plating, with ports for ten guns. For Merrimac’s bow the unorthodox naval architects devised a four-foot iron beak. The defective engines, not at all improved by having spent some weeks at the bottom of the harbor, were more or less repaired, the vessel was rechristened Virginia, and early in March this unique creation came steaming out into Hampton Roads to upset Yankee strategy.

She looked like nothing anybody had ever seen before. Before and abaft her superstructure, her decks were just awash, so that from a distance the craft looked like a derelict barn adrift on the tide, submerged to the eaves. She drew twenty-two feet of water, her decrepit engines wheezed and creaked and frequently broke down, she was so unhandy it could take half an hour just to turn her around — and at that moment there were not more than three warships in the navies of the world that would have been a match for her. She cruised about, sinking two wooden warships with ease and driving another ashore, and the frustrated Yankee gunners who fired whole broadsides at her at point-blank range discovered that they might as well have been throwing handfuls of pebbles: the missiles bounced high in the air when they struck, making a prodigious clanging and whanging but doing no particular harm to anyone.²

For twenty-four hours the Federal authorities were in a state of panic, the most panicky of the lot being that eccentric war minister, Secretary Edwin M. Stanton. Merrimac could destroy the whole Federal fleet, she could steam up the Potomac and destroy Washington, she could go up the coast and clean out New York Harbor, she could go down the coast and obliterate the blockading squadrons; perhaps, in this promising month of March, the whole war would be lost because of this ungainly waddling warship. (In actual fact, Merrimac drew too much water to ascend the Potomac and was far too unseaworthy to go out into the open ocean, but Washington did not realize this.) At the very least she could upset all plans for the lower Chesapeake Bay.

Then, just when all seemed lost, another wholly fantastic warship came into the lower bay to restore the balance.

This was U.S.S. Monitor, which had been designed, built, and commissioned in the very nick of time. In all the story of Civil War coincidences, none is more remarkable than the one that brought these two ships into Hampton Roads within twenty-four hours of each other.

Monitor was a flat raft, pointed at the ends, her deck hardly more than a foot above water. Near the bow there was a little wart of a pilothouse, near the stern a smokestack; between them there was a ponderous revolving turret containing two eleven-inch guns. She had no masts, she was heavily plated with iron, and she was as complete a departure as Merrimac herself from all conventional standards of what a vessel had a right to look like. Orthodox naval men had shaken their heads dolefully when Swedish designer John Ericsson presented the plans for her; the decision to build her seems to have been made largely by Abraham Lincoln himself, who possessed less than his normal allotment of orthodoxy. She was not much more seaworthy than Merrimac, had almost foundered steaming down from New York in a storm; and now, the morning after Merrimac’s spectacular debut, she came chuffing in through the Virginia capes, ready for battle.

The day was March 9, memorable for the most momentous drawn battle in history — a battle that nobody won but that made the navies of the world obsolete. Merrimac and Monitor circled one another, got in close, and then fired away furiously, but neither seemed able to do the other very much harm. Merrimac tried to ram once, but the blow was ineffective — her iron beak had been twisted off the day before in the process of sinking a Federal frigate — and at day’s end each warship hauled off, battered and dented but fully operational.³

Washington was jubilant: Merrimac had met her match. But so, for that matter, had Monitor — which meant trouble for McClellan. The navy people were too well aware that until more ironclads were built the one they had must be preserved at all costs, and soMonitor was kept strictly on the defensive; if she went out and provoked a finish fight she might conceivably get sunk — a disaster too horrible to think about. So for two months the rival ironclads glowered at one another from opposite sides of Hampton Roads … and when McClellan asked the navy to go up the James and outflank Joe Johnston’s defensive line on the peninsula the navy could not do it. Just by staying afloat Merrimac was paralyzing Union activity on the James River.

So McClellan spent all of April preparing to attack the Confederate defenses. He finally got all of his heavy guns into position, ready for a scientific bombardment that would flatten the opposing works, and on May 4 — just as he was about to touch it off — he found that the works were empty. Johnston, outnumbered two to one and greatly mistrusting the strength of his fortifications, had waited until the last moment and then ordered a retreat.

That was the end of Merrimac. When Johnston retreated the Confederates had to evacuate Norfolk, which the Federals immediately occupied, and Merrimac no longer had a home. Her deep draught kept her from escaping up the James, and at last, on May 10, she was abandoned and blown up. She had had just over two months under the Confederate flag, and she had accomplished a good deal more than she usually gets credit for. She was, in fact, one of the reasons why the North did not capture Richmond in the spring of 1862.⁴

When Johnston retreated McClellan followed. His advance ran into Johnston’s rear guard in a chain of fieldworks near old Williamsburg and fought a hard, wearing battle that did nothing but produce twenty-two hundred Union casualties and prove that both armies had long since got past the clumsy amateurish stage of the Bull Run era. Johnston kept on retreating until he had backed all the way into the suburbs of Richmond, and McClellan followed at a pace not much faster than the one Halleck had been displaying in Mississippi. May was nearly over by the time the Army of the Potomac was in line near the Confederate capital — badly behind the “three or four weeks” schedule McClellan had so optimistically laid down on February 20.

By now other things were going wrong, most of them growing out of a bitter difference of opinion between General McClellan and the Lincoln administration.

At bottom the difference of opinion reflected divergent ideas on the kind of war the country was fighting. ‘The administration had accepted it from the first as a revolutionary struggle, calling for hard blows hit fast; McClellan always saw it as a traditional war-between-gentlemen affair, of the sort which a professional soldier could play straight. The administration wanted relentless combat but lacked military knowledge; McClellan had military knowledge but could not see that at bottom this was a political war. It was becoming very hard for McClellan and Lincoln to agree about anything whatever.

A disagreement between general and government could have odd potentialities this spring. There was a great division of opinion in the North about war aims. The administration was coming to suspect that to put down the rebellion it would have to destroy slavery — and, with it, the social and economic system for which slavery was the base. It was nearly ready, in other words, to say that it would stamp out everything the South was fighting for. Northern Democrats, on the other hand, wanted nothing but simple restoration of the Union. On almost everything but secession itself they accepted the southern point of view. Northern Democrats were complaining that the Republican administration was growing intolerably oppressive, ruthless, and dictatorial; the Republicans were suspecting that Democrats believed in a soft and ineffective war and stood on the edge of outright disloyalty.

And McClellan embodied the Democratic position. Any military program he might adopt could be considered a Democratic program, and it was all too easy now to consider a Democratic program treasonous. So when general and administration differed about anything at all — the placement of a division of troops, a proper route for invasion and supply, the appointment of a soldier to command an army corps — neither one could quite trust the other’s motives.

The first disagreement had come because McClellan refused to invade the Richmond area until he was satisfied that his army was entirely ready. Because of this disagreement, in mid-March he had been deposed as commanding general of all the armies and reduced to command of the Army of the Potomac. Then, when he did move, there had been an argument over the way in which Washington should be protected.

McClellan felt that if he kept the Confederates busy in front of Richmond the defense of Washington would pretty well take care of itself. Lincoln and Stanton felt that a strong body of troops should be left behind, and when McClellan went down to the peninsula they held back some thirty-five thousand of his troops — under the luckless McDowell, who had commanded at Bull Run — to watch the line of the Rappahannock and upper Virginia. McClellan complained bitterly that he was being sent to do a job with inadequate strength, and he darkly suspected McDowell of wanting to carve out an independent role for himself. In the Cabinet, meanwhile, there were men who whispered that McClellan had tried to leave Washington defenseless because in the depths of his heart he sympathized with the South.

This suspicion led to increasing fragmentation of the Federal forces in Virginia. In the Shenandoah Valley there was a Union army of ten thousand men under Nathaniel Banks, an important Republican leader from Massachusetts who rated a general’s commission for his services to the party (he had been Speaker of the House of Representatives) but for no other discernible reason; and farther west, in the western Virginia mountains, there were fifteen thousand more under none other than John Charles Frémont, the Pathfinder himself, uneasily resurrected this spring and given another chance to lead troops in action.

All of these bodies — McDowell’s, Banks’s and Frémont’s — had dual roles to play, and if they were ever to act in harmony the direction would have to come from the War Department, because they were not particularly answerable to anyone else. All of them were supposed, first of all, to protect Washington. In addition, McDowell was expected to march down and help McClellan capture Richmond. Banks was to maintain Union control in the valley, and Frémont was expected to do nothing less than move down the long diagonal into eastern Tennessee, occupying a portion of the vital east-west railway line, bringing aid and comfort to the pro-Union folk in that area, and ultimately capturing Knoxville.

All of this might just possibly have worked if the Confederate defenses had remained properly supine. Everybody was supposed to assume that it would work, anyway, and when McClellan got his men in line before Johnston’s entrenchments on the outskirts of Richmond he formed his army on that assumption.

Six miles from Richmond the Chickahominy River flowed sluggishly along, roughly parallel to the James; an unimpressive little stream with marshy banks and an amazing capacity for overflowing them whenever it rained, coming down through an eroded, farmed-out, pine-thicket country where all the roads were bad and no decent maps existed. Because he expected McDowell to come down at any moment, McClellan extended a wing of his army to meet him; formed his troops, that is, astride the Chickahominy, part of them on the south side confronting Johnston and part of them north of it confronting nobody much but prepared to make contact with McDowell. Militarily it was a bad position, for a sudden rain could make the Chickahominy impassable at any moment, but if McDowell showed up on schedule the risk could be taken.

Johnston quickly detected the flaw in McClellan’s position, and at the end of May, when a quick downpour turned the Chickahominy into a foaming, menacing torrent, he attacked the smaller part of McClellan’s army that lay south of the river, hoping to destroy it before it could be reinforced.

For two days the armies fought, in swamps and clearings around a farm known as Seven Pines and a railroad station called Fair Oaks, and the result was a bloody stalemate. Luckily for the Union, Confederate staff work was wildly inefficient and Johnston’s attack was not made as he had planned it; many assault units did not get into action at all, others got in one another’s way, and weaknesses in the Union position were not exploited. Also, McClellan’s engineers had bridged the Chickahominy, and the bridges held in spite of the flood, so that ample reinforcements could be rushed to the scene. In the end, neither army had lost anything of consequence — except for five or six thousand soldiers on each side, whose loss was just the small change of warfare — and life in each camp went on about as it had gone before. The one significant result of this battle was that Joe Johnston was wounded; to replace him, Jefferson Davis sent in Robert E. Lee.

The defect in McClellan’s position remained, for McDowell was still expected. But McDowell never did get there (although a good portion of his troops reached McClellan by water), and the things that began to go wrong now were things happening far from McClellan’s lines and altogether outside his control. What hurt most was the intervention of a humorless, gawky, fire-and-brimstone Presbyterian, with a killer’s blue eyes looking unemotionally out from under the broken visor of a mangy old forage cap: Thomas J. Jackson, known to fame as Stonewall.

Jackson was the sort of general Lincoln would have wanted, if that makes any difference: a dedicated hard-war man in whose eyes the enemy were a people to be exterminated with Old Testament fury. (What he would have done, as a Unionist leading a punitive column across Georgia in Sherman’s place, is something to think about with awe.) Jackson began to take a hand in the game toward the end of March, and before he got through he had fatally disrupted McClellan’s plan of campaign.

Late in March, Jackson attacked a Union outpost in the lower Shenandoah Valley, at Kernstown. He was outnumbered, and after a sharp little fight he had to retreat, fairly beaten, but the battle had strategic consequences: Union authorities were impressed by his aggressiveness, figured that he must be much stronger than he actually was, and were confirmed in their feeling that to protect Washington some of the troops McClellan wanted must be held in upper Virginia.

Then, early in May — about the time Johnston was beginning his retreat from Yorktown — Jackson really went into action.

First he moved west and jumped Frémont’s advance guard near one of the passes in the Alleghenies. In itself the fight was not especially important, but it completely upset Frémont. The Pathfinder had not changed much since his experiences in Missouri. His hastily assembled army was looking goggle-eyed at “his retinue of aides-de-camp dazzling in gold lace,” and the soldiers felt that the pomp and circumstance that surrounded him — very foreign looking and sounding, most of it — was completely out of place in the rugged West Virginia mountains. Frémont seems never to have worked out a clear plan for his projected move into eastern Tennessee, and Jackson’s attack thoroughly disrupted any plans he did have. While he was pulling himself together and trying to get ready for what Jackson might do next he was effectively immobilized for more than a fortnight; Jackson contemptuously turned his back on him and hurried back to the Shenandoah for other adventures.

Reinforced by now to a total strength of fifteen thousand men, Jackson moved rapidly toward the lower valley, baffled the expectant Banks by slipping over to the east side of the Massanutten mountain ridge, captured a detachment which Banks had guarding his communications at Front Royal, and compelled the former Speaker of the House to retreat toward Harper’s Ferry. Jackson followed, struck him en route, tore his rear guard apart in a savage morning fight at Winchester, and in the end drove him on in a desperate rout that did not end until Banks and his disorganized men were north of the Potomac. Jackson followed closely, and wild rumors went on ahead of him; Washington got the idea that he was about to invade the North, frantic telegrams went out to alert the Northern governors, and McClellan’s chance of getting any help from McDowell went down to the vanishing point.

There were plenty of Federals in upper Virginia to overwhelm Jackson’s little army, and the War Department barked and sputtered over the telegraph wires to get them into action. Fremont was ordered to march east from the mountains to cut off Jackson’s retreat at Strasburg. McDowell was moved west, with an advance detachment marching on Front Royal. His army reorganized, Banks was ordered to move down from Harper’s Ferry. Altogether, something like forty-five thousand Federal troops were converging on Jackson, who was reluctantly pulling back from the Potomac, and it looked as if he might be destroyed.

But there was no co-ordination among the pursuing columns, and Jackson slipped between them unscathed. He moved back up the valley, knocked Frémont back on his heels when that officer chased him, marched east and routed the advance of McDowell’s forces, and then calmly withdrew to a pass in the Blue Ridge and awaited further orders.⁵

The result of all of this was that McDowell never did make his move down to help McClellan, and by the middle of June the Army of the Potomac was still waiting, part of it on one side of the Chickahominy and part of it on the other, in a position that fairly invited attack. And the Confederates in front of Richmond were now under General Lee, to whom nobody ever had to extend such an invitation more than once.

4. Delusion and Defeat

The real trouble was away down inside somewhere. McClellan had his problems, to be sure. His government had interfered with his plans, it had promised troops that were not sent, and it had all but openly accused him of wanting to lose the war — or at least of not wholeheartedly wanting to win it. But the tragedy that was about to unfold in the steaming swamps and pine flats around Richmond came mostly from within the man. At bottom, it was the tragedy of a man who could not quite measure up.

McClellan had nearly all of the gifts: youth, energy, charm, intelligence, sound professional training. But the fates who gave him these gifts left out the one that a general must have before all others — the hard, instinctive fondness for fighting. Robert E. Lee was one of the most pugnacious soldiers in American history, and McClellan himself did not like to fight. He could not impose his will on the man who stood opposite him. He was leading an offensive thrust that had taken him to the suburbs of the southern capital, yet it was just a question of time before the initiative would be taken away from him.

By the end of the third week in June, McClellan had an effective strength, present for duty in front of Richmond, of approximately one hundred and five thousand men. They were arrayed in secure fieldworks, safe from any direct counterthrust, and although the humid lowland heat was so oppressive that many men had fallen ill and the air was hideous with the odor of bodies still unburied from the Fair Oaks-Seven Pines battles, morale was high. The men understood McClellan’s plan and believed in it: to advance by slow stages, fortifying each gain, wheeling the heavy siege guns forward until finally they could blast the Confederate works out of the way and go on into Richmond.

Lee understood this plan, too, and on the surface it did not appear that there was much he could do to stop it. When he had scraped together the last possible reinforcements (including Jackson’s men, who finally slipped down from the valley to join him) he had perhaps eighty thousand men. During most of June his total was far short of that, and it could never go any higher. His defensive works were not nearly as powerful as they were to become two years later. If he was to drive McClellan away he would have to work something like a military miracle.

McClellan’s own hopes were high. During the first three weeks of June his dispatches to the War Department and his letters to his wife (as revealing a set of documents as any general ever wrote) were full of promises. He was always going to make his big move in just two or three more days — as soon as the rains stopped, as soon as so-and-so’s division joined him, as soon as this or that or the other thing was all ready. The two or three days would pass, the rains would stop, the other things would work out right, but nothing would happen. Never could he bring himself to the point of action.¹

He believed that he was horribly outnumbered. He had always believed it — even in the fall of 1861, when Johnston waited in his works at Manassas with no more than half of McClellan’s strength. He had believed it on the peninsula in April, when Johnston was writing scornfully that “no one but McClellan would have hesitated to attack.” He believed it now. Lee, he was convinced, had between one hundred and fifty thousand and two hundred thousand men, possibly more.

These figures came mostly from Allan Pinkerton, whose intelligence reports were detailed, explicit, incredibly wrong — and believed down to the last digit. What McClellan believed, the whole officer corps believed. The attitude spread like an infection, and finally it was an article of faith all through the army that the Confederates had a huge advantage in numbers and that this invasion was a risky business that must be carried on with extreme caution.

It will not do to blame it all on Pinkerton. He ran perhaps the most unaccountably inefficient intelligence service an American army ever had, but his fantastic reports did not have to be accepted. Away back in Washington, Quartermaster General Montgomery Meigs that spring combed the Richmond newspapers, made a note of all infantry regiments and brigades mentioned, added this to other intelligence that was coming out of the Confederate capital, and made a very fair appraisal of Lee’s manpower.² What Meigs did could easily have been done at McClellan’s headquarters, but nobody made the effort. Back of the blithe acceptance of the Pinkerton reports, obviously, there was a will to believe. McClellan believed that he was outnumbered because it was his nature to overestimate his disadvantages. As a result, it was impossible for him to take advantage of his opportunities.

His opportunities were not going to remain open very much longer. Lee had no intention of waiting to be hit. He proposed to do exactly what Albert Sidney Johnston had done at Shiloh — smite the invader while he was still off balance — and he was aware of the potential weakness of McClellan’s right wing, dug in north of the Chickahominy waiting for the absent McDowell.

In the middle of June, Lee sent his cavalry out on a wide sweep to find out if the Yankees had any real protection north and west of that exposed flank. Lee’s cavalry was under a picturesque young soldier named Jeb Stuart, who managed to be a headline-hunting show-off and a very solid, energetic cavalry leader at the same time, and Stuart rode completely around McClellan’s army: a prestige item that humiliated the Federals and that also gave Lee the information he wanted. (It must be remarked that Stuart did not have much to fight just then. McClellan had plenty of cavalry, but it was all in fragments — one regiment here, another there, stray detachments all over the lot, with no solid fighting corps anywhere; as his army was organized, McClellan simply could not send out a body of cavalry that could meet Stuart on even terms.) As a result of this raid, Lee understood that the way was open for him to jump McClellan’s right wing, provided he moved fast.

He would move fast; also, when he moved, he would move with great strength. Lee was a gambler, ready to take long chances because he knew that if he did not take them the law of averages would inexorably catch up with him. Outnumbered though he was, Lee arranged to give himself an overpowering numerical advantage when he made his fight.

North of the Chickahominy, McClellan had the V Army Corps, between twenty and twenty-five thousand men under a handsome, careful major general named Fitz-John Porter. Lee prepared to strike this force with more than fifty-five thousand men.

To do this he would have to press his luck to the uttermost. McClellan’s main body was south of the river, facing Richmond — eighty thousand men or thereabouts. Lee calmly arranged to leave twenty thousand men in the trenches facing this host and trust to the great god of battles that they could keep McClellan from marching into Richmond while Porter was being crushed. Most of these twenty thousand, as it happened, were under command of the same John Magruder who had deceived McClellan so outrageously down on the peninsula early in April. Now Magruder would have to play the same sort of game, looking numerous and pretending to be aggressive. If it worked, the rest of the Confederate army could go north of the river, Stonewall Jackson could bring his army down from the valley, and the exposed Federal corps could be hacked to pieces.

So the man who was outnumbered was going to take a long chance, risking his country’s independence on his ability to perform a strategic deception; and the man who had all the advantages waited in his trenches, cautiously refraining from doing anything because the chances might possibly go against him; and the war was going to go on, as a result, for nearly three more terrible years.

Even so, McClellan very nearly beat Lee to the punch. On June 25 he carefully moved his skirmish lines forward, south of the Chickahominy. There was some sharp fighting in weedy fields and swampy woods, the Confederates gave ground, and a full-dress attack by three army corps was planned for the next day along a road leading past a place called Old Tavern.³ Meanwhile some of McClellan’s cavalry squadrons, ranging off far above the river, picked up a Confederate deserter, a ragged, footsore chap who was willing to answer his captors’ questions. He belonged to Stonewall Jackson’s corps, he said, and the whole outfit was just a day’s march away, hot-footing it down to fall on Porter’s unprotected right and rear. McClellan put Porter on the alert, and the plans for a big push at Old Tavern were temporarily laid aside.

They were never picked up again. Next day, June 26, Lee took the initiative, and from that moment on McClellan had to move in step with his opponent. The greater part of Lee’s army crossed the Chickahominy, brushed Union pickets out of the suburban hamlet of Mechanicsville, and went charging east across a wide plain that slanted down to shallow Beaver Dam Creek, behind which Porter’s men were in line, waiting. Confederate arrangements had got all messed up; nobody made contact with Jackson and his men did not get into action, but the assault was made anyway — a frightful, botched affair that could have been written off as an outright Confederate disaster if either of the rival commanders had chosen to interpret it that way. The Confederates went in, head on, against a trench line that was as strong as a regular fort, and the Federal cannon had a clear sweep across the plain and up and down the creek valley. The Southerners gave up, finally, after dark, fearfully cut up. They had done Porter’s men very little harm and had gained nothing worth talking about; furthermore, the Union commanders south of the river were reporting that a number of the Rebel camps opposite them seemed to be deserted, and now was perhaps a very good time for a solid whack at Magruder’s lines.

But McClellan had pulled in his horns. From the moment when he learned of Jackson’s approach he had gone entirely over to the defensive. He abandoned his supply line, which led from the Chickahominy to the York River, and set about establishing a new one leading down to the James. Porter was told, even before the June 26 attack hit him, to send his wagon trains and siege guns south of the Chickahominy so that he could get away fast if he had to; and both Lee and McClellan, on the night of June 26, were thinking about exactly the same thing — whether the entire Federal army might not presently be destroyed.

Porter’s men had won their fight, but they could not stay where they were. Although Jackson had not got into action he was known to have reached a spot where he could come slicing down behind Porter’s lines first thing next morning, and so during the night Porter’s corps retreated five miles to the east, posting themselves at last in a wide, irregular crescent on rising ground that covered some of the most important bridges over the Chickahominy.

The Confederates took out after them soon after daylight on June 27, broke through a rear guard at Gaines’s Mill, and early in the afternoon the biggest assault of the entire war, down to that moment, got under way — fifty-five thousand Confederates, Jackson and his corps in action at last, swarming in through swamps and dense underbrush to attack about half their number of Yankees.

All afternoon Porter’s men held their ground. They had a good position, they were supported by some first-rate artillery, and McClellan had brought them to a sharp fighting edge. Long afterward some of the survivors on both sides said that they never had a hotter fight than this one of Gaines’s Mill. Along most of the line the Confederates made so many separate assaults that the defenders lost all count of them. Rifle fire reached terrible intensity, splintering muskets in men’s hands, cutting down brush and saplings, strewing the fields with dead and wounded. A tremendous clamor of artillery fire shook the air, and heavy siege guns planted south of the Chickahominy joined in the fight, reaching far across the river to send huge shells into the Confederate ranks. Porter wrote afterward that some Confederate assault waves seemed to dissolve as they approached the Union lines, but as fast as one line disappeared another would come up from the rear, the men fairly clambering over their comrades’ bodies as they charged up to get within good musket range.⁴

Then, along toward sunset, there came a lull: hurricane center, with its deceptive peace, one unhealthy patch of clear sky in the murk overhead, the worst of the storm yet to come. Porter began to hope that perhaps the thing was over — and then, from end to end of the line, there was a great new crash of firing, and every man Lee had north of the river came on the run in a final, desperate, all-or-nothing charge. The Union line broke, guns were captured, whole regiments were surrounded and taken, and as darkness came and the triumphant Confederates held the edge of the plateau it was clear that all of the Federals would have to be south of the Chickahominy by morning.

McClellan himself does not seem to have known exactly what was going on this day. His headquarters were south of the river, and he stayed in them, quite as much concerned by the reports he was getting from his commanders there as by the things that were happening to Porter on the north side. For that devotee of amateur theatricals, John B. Magruder, was putting on the best performance of his life today. Hopelessly outnumbered, holding a line that would be pulverized if the Federals ever attacked it, Magruder all day long played the part of a general who was just about to launch a shattering offensive. His skirmish and patrol parties were constantly active, his batteries were forever emitting sudden bursts of fire, he kept bodies of men in movement on open ground in the rear where the Yankees could see them, and with drums and bugles and human voices he caused noises to be made in the woods like the noise of vast assembling armies — and all of it worked.

It worked, partly because Magruder was very good at that sort of thing, and partly because the Federal command was fatally infected by the belief that Lee had overwhelming force at his command. This was the grand delusion that brought other delusions after it, the infection that made victory impossible. And so the Federal generals told McClellan that a powerful Rebel offensive was on (or, if not actually on, due to start at any moment) and they said that while they hoped that they could hold their ground they could not possibly do anything more than that. McClellan notified Washington that evening that he could not yet be sure where the principal Rebel attack was going to be made. He added that he had that day been assaulted “by greatly superior numbers on this side” — by which, of course, he was referring to nothing on earth but Magruder’s shadowboxing.⁵

There could be just one outcome to this sort of thing, and it was ordered that night at a corps commanders’ conference in army headquarters: retreat to some safe spot down the James River before these overpowering Rebels destroyed the army entirely.

The retreat was very ably handled. Huge quantities of supplies had to be destroyed, of course, a number of field hospitals and their occupants were abandoned outright, and any detachments that strayed away from camp or march were left behind for the Rebels to capture at their leisure, but the army itself, with its artillery and its immense trains, was neatly extricated from the pocket into which Lee had maneuvered it. Indeed, McClellan conducted the retreat so smartly that Lee lost touch with him for a day or so, and the bright Confederate hope that the Army of the Potomac could be kept from getting to the James never came close to realization. There were furious isolated actions, at places like Savage Station, White Oak Swamp, and above all at the seedy little hamlet of Glendale, but these did nothing but increase the casualty lists on both sides. Lee was never quite able to get around in front and head the retreating Yankees off.

Last act came on July 1. The army was getting away clean by now, the van coming to the James at Harrison’s Landing, where there were wide fields for camps, fine mansions for headquarters, deep water for supply vessels and protecting gunboats. Lee was following hard, furious because his enemy was getting away alive, and it was going to be necessary to fight one more rear-guard battle. The road to Harrison’s Landing led up over a broad, undulating height called Malvern Hill, and McClellan told Porter to take his own corps, as much of the rest of the army as he thought he would need, and all of the reserve artillery, and make a stand there.

Porter did as he was told. His position was immensely powerful — so much so that he needed few troops besides the men of his own hard-fighting corps. He had long ranks of artillery ranged hub to hub where they could sweep every field of approach, he had siege guns farther back, and in the river there was a naval squadron that could toss horrendous large-caliber shells into the Confederate ranks. If Lee had one more attack in his system, the army was going to be ready for him.

The attack came late in the afternoon. Lee had had much trouble getting his army into position — the roads were bad, the maps were poor, and officers and men alike had been worn to a frazzle by a week of fighting and marching — and when the Confederates tried to move up their artillery to soften the Yankee line with gunfire, Porter’s gunners all but murdered them; fifty Federal guns, at times, would turn on one Confederate battery trying to get into position, killing horses and men, smashing caissons, knocking guns off their carriages, and leaving a horrible pile-up of wrecked wood and metal and torn bodies. On no other field in the war did artillery have such dominance as the Federal guns had here at Malvern Hill.

Yet Lee’s assault was made; made, finally, by fourteen brigades, which struggled to cross open ground covered by one hundred guns, with solid Federal infantry waiting with musket fire for close range. Some of the men did reach the Union lines, briefly. Others managed to hold advance positions long enough to inflict a painful fire on Porter’s men. But most of the attacking columns were simply destroyed. The Confederate General D. H. Hill, who led one of the divisions in this attack, wrote afterward of his amazement at discovering that more than half of the six thousand casualties the Confederate army suffered that day were caused by cannon fire. This fight, he said, was not war, it was just plain murder; and on reflection he added that with Yankee artillery and Confederate infantry he believed he could whip anybody on earth.⁶

Murderous the fight had been, and when night came and the hot cannon were quiet at last, the Union position on Malvern Hill was wholly unshaken. Lee’s army, in fact, had had something like a disaster. The important factor, however, here as in the fight at Mechanicsville, was that neither McClellan nor Lee was prepared to act as if there had been anything but a Confederate victory.

McClellan conceivably might have resumed the offensive next day. He had a firebrand of a division commander, one-armed Phil Kearny, who stormed and swore in great fury because McClellan would not make a drive for Richmond the next morning, and even Porter — very careful and intensely loyal to McClellan — wondered if the army might not have won a great victory on the heels of Malvern Hill. But McClellan would not hear of it. He had Porter bring his men and guns down off the hill after dark, and by the morning of July 2 the Confederates had the place to themselves. McClellan’s army was safe within its lines at Harrison’s Landing, and the great campaign was over.

The soldier who had fought with all the odds against him had taken hair-raising risks and had won; the soldier who had had all of the advantages had refused to risk anything and had lost; and now the last chance that this ruinous war could be a relatively short one was gone forever.