Chapter Seven

I SEE NO END

1. The Best There Was in the Ranch

PRESIDENT LINCOLN had the Cabinet in, and he made a ceremony of the business. Here was the paper, ready to be signed, dignitaries looking as impressive as might be; fifty miles up the Potomac there was the stricken field of Antietam, the autumn air tainted with death, every house and barn for miles around serving as a hospital, a bruised army in bivouac nearby. What was being done at the White House had been ratified in advance by what had been done around the Dunker church and in the cornfields and woods, along the sunken road and by the crossings of the sluggish little creek. Twenty-five thousand Americans, North and South, had been shot in order that Lincoln might sign the Emancipation Proclamation.

Looked at objectively, this proclamation was nothing much. It was not, technically, a proclamation at all but an official warning that if the rebellion did not cease by the end of 1862 a proclamation would be issued. It declared slavery extinct in precisely the areas where the Federal government at the moment lacked all power to enforce its decrees — in the states that were in rebellion; it let slavery live on in states like Maryland and Kentucky, which had remained in the Union and in which the government’s power was unquestioned. It was of dubious legality, and in any case it hardly said more than an act of Congress which had been passed two months earlier — the Confiscation Act, which granted freedom to the slaves of all persons thereafter found guilty of treason and of all persons who aided or supported the rebellion. If the President was going to declare himself on slavery, this preliminary proclamation was just about the least he could say.

Yet it closed a great door in the face of the southern Confederacy. It locked the Confederacy in with the anachronism that was the Confederacy’s dreadful, fatal burden. Europe could not intervene now; the Civil War had been turned into something that no British statesman could touch. The South would be limited to its own resources, which were visibly inadequate. It could never get the help it needed from outside. Almost indiscernibly, but with grim finality, it had been isolated.

Beyond this, the stakes of the war had suddenly become incalculable. If the war should be won, the nation would for all time be wedded to the idea that all of its people must (as the proclamation said) be forever free. Free society and racism were defined as incompatibles. The race problem would have to be faced now, because by no imaginable subterfuge could it be dodged, and in time — in one generation, or in two, or in ten — it would have to be solved. People were committed to it now, the compact signed in the blood and fire of a war that went closer to the heart and the bone than any other experience in national history. An ideal that might be humanly unattainable had been riveted in so that it could never, in all the years to come, be abandoned.

The immediate effects of the proclamation were curious. First of them was the fact that it quietly cut the ground out from under the feet of General McClellan.

Not long after the document was signed and issued, McClellan met with a few officers in his headquarters tent. He wanted advice: what should he do about the proclamation? Democratic politicians and high army officers, he said, had been urging him to come out in open opposition to it. Should he do so, or should he keep silent? The proclamation seemed to him to be unwise and unsound, although he suspected that if he denounced it publicly some people might look upon his act as a species of military usurpation; still, he had been assured that the Army of the Potomac was so loyal to him that it would, to a man, enforce any decision he might make regarding war policy. What did these friends think he ought to do?

The friends spoke up promptly and sensibly. McClellan had been listening to dangerous nonsense, he must on no account let himself be made leader of the opposition, the people who were egging him on were his worst enemies; and anyone who supposed that this army would support open defiance of civil authority was imagining a vain thing, and skirting the edge of treason as well.… With all of this McClellan at length agreed. He concluded at last to issue a short address to his troops, reminding them that, however they might feel as citizens, they were bound as soldiers to accept and obey the decrees of the government.¹

His address neither disturbed nor excited anyone very much; and anyway, McClellan’s position by now was nearly hopeless. The war was calling for hard men, and he had no hardness. He could not, under any imaginable circumstances, move out to hound an enemy into the last ditch with no thought for anything but the knockout punch. He was not hounding anyone after Antietam. Through the rest of September and all of October he was waiting north of the Potomac, reorganizing and refitting, giving Lee the chance to do the same. (The Confederate army that had hardly numbered thirty thousand men when it retreated across the Potomac would contain seventy-five thousand men when next it went into battle; Lee used the time McClellan gave him to excellent advantage.) And the patience of President Lincoln was being pulled out past the breaking point.

With the Emancipation Proclamation, Lincoln had changed the war, for himself as well as for everyone else. The war now had been pushed past settlement; the unconditional surrender, the penitent submission to national authority, which the government would always insist on, had become something that Confederate leaders would not even consider. Lincoln might continue to try to rally all parties and all factions to his support; increasingly, now, he would have to rely on the bitterenders, the radicals, the men who tried furiously to make the southern revolution recoil on itself and destroy everything that had bred it.… It was not a good time for a Federal general to seem hesitant or lukewarm.

Senator John Sherman of Ohio was writing this fall to his brother, General William Tecumseh Sherman, remarking that old-line regular army officers seemed to fight more from a sense of duty than from “an earnest conviction that the rebellion must be put down with energy.” This would never do, and perhaps the only salvation was for “the people to resort to such desperate means as the French and English did in their own revolutions”; ultimately, the nation perhaps could do worse than “entrust its armies to a fanatic like John Brown.”²

Halleck had cited the parallel of the French Revolution, and now John Sherman was doing it; and when safe, cautious men like these drew that comparison, something was afoot. General Sherman was replying gloomily and cryptically that “the northern people will have to unlearn all their experience of the past thirty years and be born again before they will see the truth.” Northern armies, said the general, moved into the South as a ship moves into the sea — the vessel plowed a furrow but the wave immediately closed in behind and no permanent mark had been made; “I see no end, or even the beginning of the end.”³

No end; but a turning of the tide, in the West as well as in the East. All along the line the Confederate armies had been advancing; now, in weeks, every advance was checked and the great Confederate counterstroke had failed everywhere.

In Kentucky it seemed for a time that everything was being lost. Numbers of untrained Union regiments were hurried down to delay the Confederate advance until Buell could get there, and the oncoming Confederates had rolled over these with disdainful ease, taking prisoners and guns and driving the survivors in headlong retreat; but Bragg unaccountably missed his major opportunities, and by October his advance had changed from a menacing drive into a series of rather aimless maneuverings across north-central Kentucky. The Kentuckians had not risen in universal greeting, as had been expected. They had been cordial enough, but few recruits had come forward, and the wagonloads of muskets and equipment brought north for their benefit remained largely unopened. And while Bragg moved his men this way and that, following no discernible rational purpose, Buell finally got his army around in front and made ready to attack the invader.

Buell’s army had had its troubles. It had made a long retreat from the Tennessee-Alabama sector, and the men in the ranks had seen no sense in any of it; they could see only that they were giving up much that they had gained earlier, they were striking no blows at the Confederacy, and the farther they marched the worse their morale became. In addition, Buell had lost one of his most trusted subordinates, the three hundred-pound ex-naval officer, William Nelson, who had done so much a year earlier to help keep Kentucky in the Union.

Buell lost him in the simplest and most irreversible way imaginable. General Nelson was murdered: shot to death in a Louisville hotel lobby, before a large number of witnesses, by one of his own subordinates, a brigadier with the pleasing but improbable name (for a Union general) of Jefferson Davis. The loss of General Nelson was bad enough. What made it much worse, as far as Buell was concerned, was that he could never get Davis punished for it. The whole business was a startling example of the amount of leverage that a determined hard-war politician could exercise, and the utter helplessness that could affect an army commander whose politics were suspect.

Nelson had been feuding with Governor Oliver P. Morton of Indiana, a diligent Republican and one of the party leaders whose support Lincoln was not on any account going to forfeit. Davis (whose quarrel with Nelson was relatively unimportant — one man was overbearing and the other was insubordinate, and both were hot-tempered) was one of Morton’s pets. Buell, who was outraged and was demanding justice, had just had to beat a somewhat inglorious retreat all across Tennessee; furthermore, he had had sharp arguments with Tennessee’s Union war governor, a bitter-end anti-Confederate named Andrew Johnson, who considered him unsound and probably disloyal and who had a voice that would be heard in Washington. Because of all of this, nothing ever happened to Davis. He was not even spoken to harshly; instead, he was soon restored to duty and served throughout the war, a slim, dark-bearded man with haunted eyes, looked upon by subordinates with a certain amount of awe.⁴

Buell’s luck was not in, this fall, and it was at its worst when he tried to find a replacement for Nelson. He picked Charles C. Gilbert, a regular army captain of the crisp, take-his-name-sergeant variety, who in some vaguely irregular way had recently become a general. Buell and Gilbert believed that he was a major general, the War Department held that he was properly only a brigadier, and the United States Senate finally decided that he was no general at all, refusing to confirm his nomination and letting him slip back to his captaincy. But in his brief career as general Gilbert commanded a third of Buell’s army, and he offered a perfect illustration of the complete inability of a certain type of regular army officer to understand or to lead volunteer troops.

The army had been pushing along hard for days and the men were dead on their feet. Near midnight one exhausted column dropped by the roadside for a short breather when Gilbert and his staff went trotting by. Gilbert saw the sleeping men and was offended that nobody bothered to call them to attention and offer a salute so he collared the first officer he saw — a sleepy captain of infantry — and angrily demanded:

“What regiment is this?”

“Tenth Indiana.”

“Damn pretty regiment. Why in hell don’t you get up and salute me when I pass?”

“Who in the hell are you?”

“Major General Gilbert, by God, sir. Give me your sword, sir, you are under arrest.”

This racket roused the regiment’s colonel, who came up to defend his captain. Gilbert turned on him furiously, saying that he should have had the regiment lining the road at present-arms when the corps commander rode by. The colonel replied with some heat: his men had been marching day and night for a week, and he “would not hold a dress parade at midnight for any damn fool living.” The 10th Indiana, retorted Gilbert, was no better than an armed mob, and he would disgrace it; he would take its colors away that the army might know its shame.

The regiment was awake and on its feet by now, and the color sergeant took a hand in this row between colonel and major general. He would kill General Gilbert, he announced loudly, if he so much as touched the regiment’s colors. There was a loud murmur of approval, and one enlisted man shouldered his way up to General Gilbert and cried: “Here, you damned son of a bitch, get out of here or you’re a dead man.” Someone fired a musket, and some other person thrust a bayonet into Gilbert’s horse, causing the poor beast to spring in the air and take off at a headlong gallop. Gilbert’s staff followed, more horses were jabbed as they went by, and as the general disappeared in the darkness, still unsaluted, the 10th Indiana called after him, in confused angry chorus, that it would happily shoot him if it ever saw him again.… It took a certain knack to handle western volunteers, and not all regulars had it.⁵

On the evening of October 7, Buell had his army up near the town of Perryville, Kentucky, spraddled out on high ground west of the village along a stream known as Doctor’s Creek. Bragg’s Confederates were in and around Perryville, and apparently neither commander had a clear idea of what either he or his adversary was going to do next. The weather had been hot and water was scarce, advance elements of the two armies began to fight for possession of the pools of water in the little creek, and on October 8 they blundered into a battle that the generals neither desired nor understood.

The Confederates attacked the left end of Buell’s line with vigor, routed the greater part of one army corps, and brought on an unusually savage and expensive fight. On the Federal side there was an almost complete breakdown of communications, and Buell (who was several miles away) did not even know that a battle was going on until it was all over. He found out finally, at dusk, after he had lost some four thousand men. Concluding that the Confederates would renew the attack the next day, he made ready to receive them, and starchy General Gilbert (whose troops were accusing him of posting guards about the water holes to reserve the water supply for headquarters) pessimistically believed that the Confederates were about to win a great victory.

But Bragg had had enough. Kentucky had not risen to support him as he expected, there seemed to be armed Yankees all over the state, and — inexplicably — he abandoned his offensive plans just when he might have made something of them, and started his army back to Tennessee. A Confederate private, remarking that even if Perryville was a meaningless battle it was the hardest fight he was ever in, summed it up: “Both sides claim the victory — both whipped,” and Buell moved forward with great caution, not so much to pursue his antagonist as to escort him out of the state. A Union cavalryman wrote in disgust that his fellows believed Buell to be “either incompetent, a coward or a traitor.”⁶

In Washington both the White House and the War Department implored Buell to take off the wraps and show a little drive. Specifically they demanded that he march his army over into east Tennessee, as he had been ordered to do a solid year earlier. Buell agreed that there would never be real security for Kentucky (where he felt obliged to leave thirty thousand troops to guard communications and repel raids) until east Tennessee was occupied, but he remarked that there were problems. He could reach east Tennessee only by moving over two hundred miles of very bad mountain roads; he would need a supply train of ten thousand wagons, which he did not have, and the move would stir up a hornets’ nest anyway because the Rebels would consider it the most dangerous thrust of the war and would muster all their resources to stop it.

This did not placate Mr. Lincoln at all, and Buell got a very stiff note from Halleck: if east Tennessee was the heart of the enemy’s resources it might as well be the heart of Buell’s, and his army could support itself there if a Confederate army could. He could get his supplies from the countryside, seizing what he could not buy, which is just what Bragg was doing on his present retreat. The President, said Halleck sharply, “does not understand why we cannot march as the enemy marches, live as he lives and fight as he fights, unless we admit the inferiority of our troops and our generals.”⁷

Luckless Buell had all of McClellan’s fatal reluctance to move until everything was just so and, like McClellan, he was describing all of his deficiencies and putting an undue strain on presidential patience. Meanwhile, down in Mississippi there had been an important development.

From the Memphis area Grant had sent troops north to help Buell, and as a result he was short-handed; and while Bragg was moving up toward Perryville, Confederate Van Dorn with twenty-two thousand men swept in to recapture Corinth and knock out the keystone of Grant’s defensive line. There were perhaps twenty thousand Federals in Corinth, rattling around in the old defensive works Beauregard had laid out for an army two and a half times that large, and they were commanded by a heavy, red-faced, impulsive general named William S. Rosecrans, whom they were about to elevate to fame and a dazzling opportunity.

Rosecrans was a genial, likable sort; a West Pointer who was a little more excitable than a general ought to be but who was never in the least afraid of a fight. An Ohioan in his mid-forties, he had taught at West Point, had left the army to make money in business, and had come back in the spring of 1861 as captain of engineers; it was remembered that he had helped McClellan lay out Ohio’s first camp for recruits back when the war was young. He was a devout Roman Catholic, brother to the Bishop of Cincinnati, and although Ohio Democrats offered to back him for office — even for the presidency — he steadfastly refused to mix politics with military matters.

At Corinth his troops put up an enormous fight. Van Dorn massed his assaulting column and drove it in over a partly cleared field littered with stumps and fallen timber. It broke the Union advance line and came to close quarters around a strong point called Battery Robinet, where men fired so fast that their muskets became too hot to handle and too foul with burned powder to be reloaded. Ohioans and Texans fought hand to hand, with bayonets and clubbed muskets and fists, until at last the steam went out of the attack and Van Dorn’s men ran back, leaving the field strewn with broken bodies. That evening, October 4, the Confederate army drew off in retreat, and fiery Rosecrans visited Battery Robinet, bared his head, and told his soldiers: “I stand in the presence of brave men, and I take off my hat to you.”

Not far away, Union stretcher-bearers picked up a wounded Rebel officer, shot down near high-tide mark of the assault on the battery. As they did what they could to make him comfortable he told them: “You licked us good today, but we gave you the best we had in the ranch.”⁸

In a sense he was speaking for the whole Confederacy.

Terrible battles and dramatic counterstrokes lay ahead, but the South had just made its supreme effort. It had mounted an offensive that went all across the board — a co-ordinated attempt by three armies to win final control of the war, to prevent the inexorable invasion that would desolate southern farms and towns and ruin the proud, static, dream-possessed society that had supposed it could live on in a world of infinite change. It had given the best there was in the ranch, but it had been licked, and now there was a new war to fight; a war that must finally turn into a grim, all but hopeless fight to stave off disaster.

The Federals would pick up now where they had left off last spring, the initiative once more in their hands. They would have some different generals, however. After Antietam, Corinth, and Perryville, the area in which men like McClellan and Buell could be used narrowed to the vanishing point. General Halleck and Senator Sherman had said it: nations in revolution used up their generals pitilessly. This nation was in revolution now; it would do the same.

So Buell was removed, and Rosecrans took his place, the administration being impressed by his avoidance of politics and his uncomplicated willingness to fight. (Grant was not as pleased with him as Halleck and Lincoln were. He felt that Rosecrans should have followed up his Corinth victory by destroying Van Dorn’s army; any battle that left the enemy with any appreciable number of survivors was apt to strike Grant as imperfect.) And McClellan was removed, taking his farewell from the Army of the Potomac amid hysterical cheers, the men lamenting his departure so bitterly that timid folk in Washington worried needlessly, lest the army mutiny and depose the government. McClellan went home, out of the war forever. Bumbling, well-intentioned Burnside took his place, and the Army of the Potomac gloomily began to move down the Rappahannock River toward a sleepy little city named Fredericksburg.

The reverses of spring and summer had been canceled out. Thousands of men had been killed, tens of thousands had been wounded, there was bleak acceptance of tragedy in homes all across the land, and now there would be a fresh start, a new war with a different goal. The hard year 1862 was ending, to give way to a harder year, and in Virginia, in Tennessee, and in Mississippi the armies would move from their camps, drums muttering in a steady pulse-beat rhythm as the nation resumed its march into the mysterious future.

2. There Was No Patience

The armies were moving south, and the land they were entering was not wholly strange. The hills and woods were like those in the North, and men from midwestern farms could look appreciatively at the countryside and feel almost at home in it.

An Indiana soldier in Rosecrans’s army, looking about him in Tennessee, remarked that “a more beautiful country than middle Tennessee would be hard to find anywhere on the map of the United States,” adding that although the land had been tilled for fifty years by slave labor it still produced plenty of corn. He confessed: “Even to men familiar with the rich soil of the Wabash and Ohio River valleys, the long lines of corncribs, full to bursting, on these Tennessee plantations were a marvel.” Reflecting on all of this plenty, he confessed that the men of his regiment were foraging quite liberally. The provost guard, he said, never got into action “until many a chicken had squawked his last squawk, and many a pig had squealed his last squeal.”¹

An Iowa boy wrote to his sister with even more enthusiasm. The soil here in Tennessee was not deep, he said, and an Iowa farmer would hardly think of trying to make a crop on it, but it would raise good corn or wheat and would do even better with cotton.

“Farming,” he explained, “is carried on entirely differently than at the north. Instead of the beautiful little farms and houses, every quarter or half mile along the roads, you see the large plantation or mansion.… In front of these planters’ houses are beautiful lawns of five or six acres, covered with the most lovely shrubbery peculiar to the South, and shell or gravel walks winding round and round until they reach the house. They look quite as lovely in the dead of winter as any we see in the North in mid-summer.”

Scribbling away at this letter and thinking of the charming society that lived in and about these mansions, the young Iowan fell into a daydream that carried him in an unexpected direction and forced him to cut his reverie short on the edge of disloyalty:

“I imagine, should I have come down here before the war, I should have been enchanted by these bewitching scenes and would have loitered in some of these parks, some warm summer day, and met one of those lovely Southern belles — declared my love — asked her hand — and been accepted; the result would have been disappointment, estrangement and separation, with love unworthy a son of the Northland.”²

In the Shenandoah Valley, Union soldiers were learning that southern civilians could be exactly like the folks at home and that there could be a touch of friendship now and then between the invaders and the invaded. The 13th Massachusetts was appealed to by a valley farmer for protection against foragers, and the colonel detailed four men to guard the place. The farmer insisted that they stay in the house and make themselves comfortable; he would go about his duties and would call them if any prowlers appeared. His wife would not let them bunk down in the yard when night came, but put them in bedrooms with soft mattresses and clean white sheets, told them to sleep until they were called in the morning, served breakfast at eight-thirty — hominy and bacon, potatoes and fried chicken, hot biscuits and coffee, all they could eat. When the regiment finally had to move on and the detail was called away, the farmer went to the colonel to testify what fine young men these soldiers were, and his wife sent a huge basket of biscuits and cakes for them to take with them. All the rest of the war the 13th Massachusetts nursed this memory.³

It was not all sweetness and light. Most of the northern soldiers had farm backgrounds, and as they went south they looked appraisingly at southern fields and farms; they remembered the infinite number of pre-war orations by southern patriots describing the “sacred soil” of Dixie, and they picked the words up and made a sneer out of them. A Pennsylvania private, moving down toward Fredericksburg with the Army of the Potomac, took a top-lofty attitude toward farming practices in the Old Dominion as his regiment came over the Potomac:

“We crossed the Long Bridge and set foot on the ‘sacred soil’; the soil may be sacred, but we sacrilegious Yankees can’t help observing that it is awfully deficient in manure.”⁴

There came to the armies this fall many new recruits, and the fact that they were coming in now, after the ebbing of the tide, reflected the defects in War Department planning.

Edwin M. Stanton was an energetic and competent Secretary of War, but he gave way at times to freakish impulses, and one of these had seized him in the spring of 1862: he had closed down all army recruiting stations and stopped enlistments, which was practically equivalent to announcing that the war was about over and that no more men would be needed. His timing was unfortunate, because a series of Union reverses immediately took place — heavy casualty lists East and West, defeat in the Shenandoah Valley, defeat at Richmond, Rebel armies of invasion slipping the leash and taking the initiative everywhere. More recruits were badly needed, but the high enthusiasm of early spring had cooled, and when the recruiting stations were reopened they did not do a very good business.

To get more men a publicity operation of considerable magnitude was needed, and it was promptly arranged. The governors of the northern states got together and framed a public appeal to the President, asserting — with blithe optimism — that war spirit was running high and that they would be happy to raise new levies if the President thought he needed them. Mr. Lincoln, in turn, publicly appealed to the governors to get him three hundred thousand men and to get them sooner rather than later. A big recruiting campaign was launched in July, someone wrote a patriotic song with the line, “We are coming, Father Abraham,” and with much drumbeating and oratory the men were obtained.

They spent the summer in training camps, and in the fall they began to reach the armies in the field. Their uniforms were unfaded and unwrinkled and, like all green soldiers, they were heavily loaded down with all sorts of surplus equipment. The veterans jeered at them unmercifully, calling out “Fresh fish!” whenever a new regiment showed up, and making caustic remarks about their possessions.

“Knapsacks,” wrote one veteran scornfully, “were a foot above their heads; overcoats, two suits of clothes and underwear, all kinds of trimmings, bear’s oil for the hair, gifts from loving and well-meaning friends but useless to the soldier. On the back of their knapsacks were strapped frying-pans, coffee pots and stew pans, pairs of boots hanging to the knapsacks, blankets and ponchos, making in weight one hundred pounds to the man, while the vet carried about twenty-five pounds.”

In the Army of the Potomac, old-timers hooted at the new 118th Pennsylvania, which came in equipped with oversized knapsacks, extra pants, and other incidentals, and told the recruits to throw all that stuff away (starting with the knapsacks themselves) and roll up their essentials in their blankets. A rolled blanket could be tied in a horsecollar loop and worn over the shoulder; it weighed little and there were no straps to cut a man’s collarbones on a long march. The Pennsylvanians refused to take this advice and kept their ponderous knapsacks, and a Massachusetts veteran remarked that the boys would learn: “I don’t suppose there was a spare shirt in my company.”⁵

Men of the 103rd Illinois, coming down to join Grant’s army, were told that they did not amount to much — they had enlisted only to escape the draft, wear a uniform, get free rations, and enjoy the privilege of marching along with the veterans; when a real fight began they would all scatter and the veterans would have to do the work. When the 24th Michigan arrived near Antietam battlefield to become part of the Potomac army’s crack Iron Brigade, the men were treated as outcasts for two solid months; the veterans had heard that these Michigan boys had enlisted only because high bounties were being offered, and they refused to treat the recruits as comrades until after they had proved themselves in battle.⁶

Although the veteran refused to carry any more equipment than he absolutely had to have, he considered it his duty to replace his used garments with any new ones that could be lifted from the recruits, and he devised ingenious ways to do this. The commonest was for the old soldier to wander into a green regiment’s camp, select an innocent-looking recruit, sit down beside him, and give him friendly advice about the evils that would befall a man who kept too much in his pack. The recruit would be impressed and before long would be opening his knapsack and pulling out spare pants, shirts, and boots whose weight (according to this expert advice) he would find oppressive. At this point the veteran would peel off his own worn clothing, put on the new, give the recruit a fatherly pat on the back, and strut off to his own regiment. If on arrival he was asked how he had got his new clothing he would grin and say: “By giving a recruit good advice.”⁷

There was one noteworthy thing about the new soldiers: they believed in foraging with a free and heavy hand. War propaganda had begun to take effect, and recruiting-campaign orators were no longer simply appealing to love of country and the desire for adventure; they were demanding that the South be made to sweat for the crime of secession, and recruits had been receptive. New soldiers in camp around Memphis considered themselves entitled to take anything edible: “They would slaughter a man’s hogs right before his eyes, and if he made a fuss cold steel would soon put a quietus on him.” Commanding generals tried in vain to restrain them. William T. Sherman was especially strict, breaking offending non-coms to privates and ordering men tied up by their thumbs all night long, but it did very little good. On the march in northern Mississippi, Grant’s men developed the playful habit of setting fire to dead leaves caught in the angles of rail fences; if this fired the fences and in turn set houses and barns ablaze, nobody cared. Along the line of march, any house whose occupants had fled was certain to be burned. An Ohio artilleryman remarked that “the cotton gin was then like the coal-breakers in the time of a great strike — many are burned; among soldiers and miners there is a lawless element that delights in destruction.” Gaunt, blackened chimneys stood where burned houses had been, and when soldiers saw one they would point to it and call: “Here stands another Tennessee headstone.”⁸

These Tennessee and Mississippi civilians were lucky in just one respect: the Federal armies which were advancing on them at least contained few Kansas troops. The Kansans, rejoicing in the nickname of “Jayhawkers,” were the most notorious freebooters and pillagers of all, and where they marched in Missouri or Arkansas they left a red scar on the land. They brought a personal venom into the war; they remembered the bitter lawlessness of the border troubles of the 1850s, they felt that they had a grudge to pay off, and anyway they tended to be a rowdy untamed crew operating under an uncommonly sketchy discipline. So notorious was their reputation that even their own army was wary of them. A Wisconsin cavalry regiment, moving east from Arkansas, told how in a camp beyond the river one of the Wisconsin troopers had died and a detail went out to the cemetery and dug a grave for him. While funeral services were being held back in the camp, the 5th Kansas found it necessary to bury one of its own men. Going to the cemetery, the Kansans found the open grave dug by the Wisconsin men; they buried their own man in it, put in earth, and went back to camp. When the Wisconsin funeral procession got to the spot and saw what had happened, the men instantly and unanimously accused the Kansans. In all the army, they declared, only the Jayhawkers would be capable of stealing a grave!⁹

Armies are strange human societies — rootless, wholly self-contained, creating derisive legends and folk tales as they tramp along toward death and destiny. These soldiers liked to tell tales about themselves; tales like the one about the teamster in the Indiana regiment who was the champion sprinter in his brigade. He was so prodigious a runner, indeed, that he beat every other runner in camp and finally, inspired by his speed, ran all the way out of the army, was listed as a deserter, and was never seen again at all. They cherished the memory of the Irish private’s wife, in an Illinois regiment. By some superhuman effort this woman managed to get all the way from Chicago down to Nashville to visit her husband, and by some even more unimaginable effort she had brought with her a five-gallon keg of whiskey for his refreshment. But when she reached camp she found that he had basely deserled both the army and herself — whereupon, undaunted, she erected a tent, peddled the whiskey to her absconding husband’s comrades at fifty cents a drink, and so raised a stake for her future support.

There was a tale about an Iowa cavalry regiment that had a very fat trooper who was unhorsed one day in a clash with rebel cavalry and who, his own regiment riding off in rout, sought to escape capture by crawling under a small culvert. This bridge was treacherous — two limber stringers, with crosswise planking, spanning a very shallow ditch. It sagged when it bore a load, and the fat cavalryman became stuck, face down, under the middle of it as the Rebel troopers went over it at a pounding gallop … and the Iowan got the father and mother of all spankings, so that he was totally unable (after he had been extricated) to sit in a saddle for months to come.¹⁰

There was also a Kentucky regiment which swore that one of its members owned a lifetime furlough signed by General George H. Thomas himself. This soldier, it was said, quite early in the war had been notified that his wife was dying, and he obtained from the general a pass permitting him to go home and to stay there until after her death. Most considerately the lady had then recovered, and it seemed likely that she would survive for at least fifty years more; and her husband, who cherished her, stayed at home with her, except that now and then he would go back to camp for a friendly chat with his comrades.…¹¹

Increasingly the men ran into the problem of slavery, and as they did they began to encounter an arrogance in the southern attitude toward slavery that increased their own antagonism. Slavery seemed to be central. It was the one sensitive, untouchable nerve-ending, and to press upon it brought anguished cries of outrage that could be evoked in no other way.

A Union general in Kentucky wrote reflectively that he had recently called off an advertised property sale in a county-seat town on the ground that since half of the residents were excluded from the town as pro-secessionists the sale could not be fair. Nobody complained in the least, he said, at the prohibition that was put on sales of land and livestock, but the fact that slave auctions were also barred drew furious protests. “A single Negro,” wrote the general, “is sufficient to demand the attention of the Governor.” The peculiar institution’s chief peculiarity, it began to appear, was the fact that it was wrapped in a special kind of inviolability. It could not simply be left alone, it had to be given favored treatment; its claims were positive and not negative.

The Union soldiers which this general commanded (he wrote) were new men from the Northwest, recruited that summer. When fugitive slaves came into camp these boys would shelter them; yet there were not really very many cases of this kind, after all, “and had the owners been satisfied to exercise a little patience when the fugitives could not readily be found the soldiers would soon have got tired of their new playthings and turned every black out of camp themselves.”¹²

But there was no patience. The slaveholder was driven on by a perverse and malignant fate; he could not be patient, because time was not on his side. Protesting bitterly against change, he was forever being led to do the very things that would bring change the most speedily. He was unable to let these heedless Federals get tired of their new playthings. He had to prod them and storm at them, and because he did, the soldiers’ attitude hardened and they grew more and more aggressive.

They were growing aggressive just as President Lincoln himself was doing, and for much the same reason.

Lincoln had promised to decree emancipation by the first of the new year; and as his armies began to move late in the autumn, he sent a message to Congress on December 1 suggesting the adoption of a constitutional amendment providing for gradual, fully compensated emancipation all across the land, in loyal states and in rebellious states alike.

Geography, said Lincoln, was controlling; there could not be two nations here, the land itself would compel a reunion even if the attempt at secession won; and without slavery, the effort to force a separation could not long continue. Why not meet the inevitable halfway? Compensated emancipation would be expensive but would not cost as much as the war itself was costing; also, it would kill no young men. To save their country, men must disenthrall themselves from the dogmas of the past. To give freedom to the slave was to preserve it for all others, and “the fiery trial through which we pass will light us down, in honor or dishonor to the latest generation.”¹³

It was no use. The peculiar institution’s inviolability ran across the North as well as across the South; for emancipated slaves might demand jobs in mill and shop and elsewhere, might someday have to be treated like ordinary human beings, would infallibly compel all sections, sooner or later, to face up to the problem of race relations. Neither above nor below the Mason and Dixon line could the thing be treated rationally. The fiery trial Lincoln was talking about was an ordeal no one could avert.

It did not, as a matter of fact, seem a promising time for the Lincoln administration to propose vast new experiments, for the administration just now was in trouble. It had done very badly in the fall elections, losing seven important states to the Democrats and retaining control of Congress by an extremely thin margin. As far as anyone could see, neither emancipation nor the way the war was being run had made a very good impression on the voters. Each would have to justify itself, and during the immediate future it would all be up to the armies.

There were three principal armies, owning a common background and sharing a common heritage, yet somehow standing in the oddest contrast to each other.

There was McClellan’s old army, the Army of the Potomac — “General McClellan’s bodyguard,” Lincoln once called it in a despairing moment; the only American army ever to be suspected (however falsely) of a desire to overthrow the government and set up a military dictatorship. The army was jaunty, setting much store by military formalities, consciously serving what was imagined to be a romantic ideal; and it had acquired thus early a dark foreknowledge of disaster, a remarkable reputation for bad luck, and a fine legend that would survive years of war and win a place at last in the national memory. It could fight hard, it could endure a fantastic amount of killing, serving faithfully under any general who came along; it could, in short, do practically anything except win the war. Without suspecting it, the army was a Cinderella.

Then there was Rosecrans’s army, recently taken over from luckless Buell, officially styled the Army of the Cumberland. It was not unlike the Potomac army in some ways — it had been schooled to a certain amount of spit-and-polish discipline (not all of which quite registered) and taught to admire parade-ground formality — but it never acquired any glamor, in its own eyes or in anybody else’s, and its reputation was that of an enduring work horse. It would finally go under the command of George Thomas, and far ahead of time it was beginning to resemble him: it was unbreakable, somewhat plodding, with an unexpected volcanic capacity for exploding all over the landscape just when an explosion was most needed. All in all, it may possibly have been the best army of the lot, but its great day was far in the future.

Finally there was Grant’s army, eventually to be known as the Army of the Tennessee. Never was there an army quite like this one. It was half instrument of destiny and half frontier mob, an army that refused to accept discipline and that stamped its own imprint on its generals; predominantly and eternally, it was an army of enlisted men. Taking nothing very seriously, it would go across the land like the embodiment of wrath, pillar of fire by night and pillar of cloud by day to mark its passage, both pillars largely of its own making. For the moment it was an army forgotten, lying in obscure camps far to the south, not yet ready to trample out the way that was appointed for it. The other two armies would take the stage first, to fight terrible battles on frozen fields, providing unendurable drama at a price almost too great for payment.

3. Thin Moon and Cold Mist

Winter was approaching, a winter of cold blue moons and frozen fields, with deadly rivers winding across landscapes that had a doom on them. There was the Rappahannock, coming down from the Virginia piedmont and broadening out for a lazy curling route to the sea, the lovely town of Fredericksburg drowsing on its right bank just below the fall line; and in Tennessee there was Stone’s River, the market town of Murfreesboro lying just to the south of it, rolling Tennessee farm country all about. Two rivers and two towns, drawing the tide of war to them, with two Union armies coming in and two Confederate armies making ready for defense. Rappahannock and Stone’s rivers would be crossed, and Fredericksburg and Murfreesboro would be occupied, but many young would die before it was done.

In Virginia, whiskered Burnside considered his problem and made up his mind to do other than as McClellan had planned. The Army of the Potomac lay east of the Blue Ridge, on the Orange and Alexandria Railroad, with Lee’s army grouped loosely in its front. It seemed unlikely that Lee could be outmaneuvered here, which is what McClellan had contemplated, and Burnside decided on a long sweep to his left; he would go forty miles to the southeast, cross the Rappahannock quickly at Fredericksburg, and so compel Lee to come down and fight him at a disadvantage.

In Tennessee, Rosecrans had his Army of the Cumberland at Nashville. As far as he could learn, Bragg’s army was at Murfreesboro. Rosecrans would march down and fight, and when Bragg had been crushed, the way to Chattanooga and eastern Tennessee might at last be open. Grant, meanwhile, from the Memphis area, could perhaps do something about taking Vicksburg and opening the Mississippi all the way to New Orleans.

It was Burnside who got started first. Through dismal late-November weather his men plodded cross-country amid failures of supply and equipment that told an ominous tale about defects in army management; and they got to the Rappahannock at the town of Falmouth, opposite Fredericksburg and a mile upstream, before Lee realized what was going on. Lincoln had told Burnside that his plan might work if he moved fast, and in the beginning Burnside moved very rapidly. At the end of a fortnight everything had worked as he had hoped. It remained now to cross the Rappahannock, base himself in Fredericksburg, and then go driving on to a region where Lee would have to come and attack him.

Crossing the Rappahannock, however, presented problems. There were places above Fredericksburg where sturdy men could easily wade the river, but it seemed to Burnside that it would be very rash to put troops across until he could build proper pontoon bridges for his supply trains; and when he made ready to do this he found that the pontoons he had been counting on were not there.

They were missing because — to put it at its simplest — this was an army in which some arrangement or other was always going wrong. Men could be recruited, fed, drilled, and disciplined in large numbers; they could even be led into a battle, after a fashion, with their own bravery making up for many failures in leadership; but to take care of the daily routine of housekeeping and maintenance was for some reason beyond the capacity of this army’s authorities. Burnside had ordered pontoons sent to Fredericksburg to be ready for him when he needed them, but in some way his orders had gone astray; the pontoons were not where everybody supposed they were, and anyway, when the orders finally reached them, nobody remembered to explain to the men in charge that there was a great hurry about things. So the Army of the Potomac sat in idleness by the Rappahannock while these mistakes were set right; and because it took a long time to set them right, Lee brought his army to Fredericksburg, arrayed it carefully on high ground back from the river, and calmly waited to see what Burnside would do next.¹

Burnside would do just what he had set out to do, for there was a great stubbornness in him — a great stubbornness, and nothing more. He had said he would cross at Fredericksburg, and at Fredericksburg he would cross, even if destruction awaited him. By December 11 everything was ready, pontoons and all, and on the next morning the engineers came down to the water to build the bridges.

The Confederates were waiting, and from houses and riverside shacks they laid fire on the river, killing many of the engineers. Bridges half built, the engineers had to stop, while more than one hundred Federal guns hammered the town, pulverizing houses, knocking bricks and timbers into the empty streets, and sending a great cloud of smoke billowing up toward the autumn sky. Silence again, and a new rush by the engineers; then Rebel sharpshooters, little harmed by the fire that had wrecked the town, opened fire again, more of the engineers were killed, and once more the bridge-building failed.

In the end Burnside’s men took some of the ponderous pontoons, filled them with infantry, paddled them across the river in spite of the musketry, and drove combat patrols through the town, gouging the sharpshooters out of their holes. This ended the resistance. By midafternoon the bridges were finished, and at last the great, sinewy Army of the Potomac began its crossing. It moved glacially, hour after hour, the enormous blue columns coming down the banks to the river and swaying endlessly over the bridges, flooding the town and fanning out into an open plain just downstream; it moved with flags and with bands and with a great rumbling of moving cannon, making a display of might that impressed the waiting Confederates, impressed even Lee himself. Yet this Union army which seemed to move so irresistibly was in fact plodding blindly into a trap.

Fredericksburg was deceptive. The Rappahannock, coming down the distant Blue Ridge on a general easterly course, turns south just above the town, and for a time it flows very nearly on a north-to-south line, with Fredericksburg lying on the west bank. An army crossing the stream and entering Fredericksburg finds a shallow open plain west of the town, extending for several miles downstream; and just beyond the plain, perhaps three quarters of a mile from the river, there is a long chain of wooded hills running roughly parallel to the river. To get out of the town and make any progress whatever, the army must start by passing that chain of hills.

It looks innocent enough because the hills are not very high, and toward the south they trail off into gentle rolling country where the railroad to Richmond curves past them. But the hills are just high enough to make an ideal defensive position, and in December of 1862 all of Lee’s army was securely posted along the crest, with guns ranked so that they could comb all of the plain, lines of infantry at the foot of the hills and other lines higher up. Facing the town itself, as it happened, a sunken road ran along the foot of the hills, with a stone wall nearest the town, the road packed full of Confederate infantry, with many guns just above. In all the war no army moved up against a tougher position than Burnside’s army encountered at Fredericksburg. Without a miracle, the Confederate position here could not be taken by storm.

The Army of the Potomac having crossed the river — having committed itself to an advance at this spot — there was nothing whatever for it to do but try the impossible, and this Burnside ordered it to do. He put half of his army in the town itself and ranged the other half near the river on the open plain to the south, and on the morning of December 13 he called for a two-pronged attack. One column would issue from the town, swarm over the stone wall and the sunken road, and reach the heights there; the other would go out a mile or so to the south, hitting for the place where the wooded hills sloped down to meet the plain; and the man apparently believed that Lee’s army would be broken and driven in flight, with the two assault columns triumphantly joining hands on the far side of the ridge.

There was a fog that morning, and for several hours the plain was invisible while many divisions of Federal troops got into position, steeples and chimney tops of Fredericksburg just visible above the banked mist to the waiting Confederates on the hills. Then the sun burned away the fog, and all of a sudden the whole panorama was in the open — a breath-taking sight, one hundred thousand men fighting men ready for work, an army with banners uncoiling in the sunlight, gun barrels gleaming. Lee watched from the highest point on the ridge, and the sight took hold of him — this strong warrior who held himself under such iron control — so that he burst out with something like a cry of exultation: It is well (he said) that we know how terrible war really is, else we would grow too fond of it.… Then the moment of high drama passed (unforgettable moment, hanging suspended in the memories of that war forever after) and the fighting began.

The fighting was sheer murder. Coming out from the town, Burnside’s men crashed into the stone wall and were broken. Division after division moved up to the attack, marching out of the plain in faultless alignment, to be cut and broken and driven back by a storm of fire; for hour after hour they attacked, until all the plain was stained with the blue bodies that had been thrown on it, and not one armed Yankee ever reached even the foot of the hill. The plain was filled with smoke, shot through with unceasing flashes of fire, and the wild rolling crash of battle went on and on through all the afternoon and there seemed to be no end to it. Burnside was east of the river, encased in the ignorance that besets headquarters, sending over orders to carry on with the attack. His men obeyed every order, until whole divisions had been cut to pieces and the town and the sheltered banks by the river were clogged with men who had been knocked loose from their commands, but from first to last it was completely hopeless. Never, at any time, was there the remotest chance that this attack could succeed.

Downstream things were a little better, although not enough better to help very much. A column led by that grizzled, bad-tempered soldier named George Gordon Meade — a hawk-nosed Pennsylvanian, this man, with goggle eyes and a straggly gray beard and a great simple fidelity to his duty — got into a wooded swamp where the Confederate line was low and punched a small hole in the defenses. Stonewall Jackson was there, and just for a moment it seemed that he might be in trouble; but he brought up reinforcements in a vicious countercharge, the Federal support troops that might have helped Meade’s boys did not appear, and after a while the Federals came staggering back out of the swamp and the underbrush and the hole in the Rebel line was plugged up for good. By sunset the attack was a hopeless failure at both ends of the line; the Union army had lost twelve thousand men, and the Confederates waited confidently to see if the Yankees cared to have another try at it next day.²

The Yankees did not care to. Burnside, to be sure, remained stubborn; he even had some wild idea of going into Fredericksburg, rallying the shattered formations, and personally leading a forlorn-hope attack on the deadly stone wall, but he was talked out of it by his subordinates. For a night and a day his beaten army clung to the ground, looking dumbly up at the armed heights; then, on a night of wind and sleeting rain, the army gave up, pulled its ponderous length back across the bridges, and the attack was given up for good. The great battle of Fredericksburg was over. In front of the stone wall lay hundreds and hundreds of dead bodies gleaming nakedly in the cold December light; during the hours of darkness needy Confederates had come out from their lines to take the warm uniforms which these Yankees would never need.

The Yankees who had not been shot and who went into dispirited camp on the far side of the river had uniforms enough but needed other things; chiefly hope, good management, reason to believe that their terrible fighting was taking place to some good purpose. The high command was quarreling with itself, Burnside and his subordinates bitterly at odds over the way the wasted battle had gone. The administration, already depressed enough by an unhappy congressional election and still carrying the commitment to make the Emancipation Proclamation good by the first of the new year, was aware that Burnside would not do for this army, and it was not aware just who could properly be put in his place. Handsome Joe Hooker, hard-drinking and hard-fighting, looked like the ablest soldier among Burnside’s lieutenants, but he was talking too much just now. He would say presently that what the country needed was a dictator; in saying it, he may well have had himself in mind, and word of what he had said would get back to Lincoln. If the President’s anxious gaze turned away from Virginia that December and fixed itself on Tennessee it is not to be wondered at.

In Tennessee, Rosecrans at last had his army on the move. December was getting on and the roads were not good, but the army was in tolerable spirits; it was facing south again, the long frantic race back to the Ohio River was forgotten, and this new general — “Old Rosy” to all ranks — seemed to be a promising sort. He showed himself about the camps, his huge red nose a beacon as he poked his face into mess shacks or inspected waiting lines of infantry. At reviews he liked to rein in his horse and give his men soldierly advice: “Boys, when you drill, drill like thunder.… It’s not the number of bullets you shoot but the accuracy of aim that kills men in battle.… Never turn your backs to the foe; cowards are sure to get shot.… When you meet the enemy, fire low.”

He liked to stroll through regimental camps in the evenings, and if he saw a light burning in a tent after “taps” he was likely to whack the canvas with the flat of his sword. At such times the men in the tent were fond of shouting profane abuse, and when the general’s crimson face came through the tent flaps they would offer profuse apologies, swearing that they had thought him a rowdy wagon driver who was in the habit of annoying them, and insisting that they really had not heard the lights-out call.

Old Rosy was able to take this sort of thing in good part. His officers found him convivial and approachable, fond of bantering with his staff members. He seemed to have studied his profession attentively, and in conversation around the mess table he could display a vast theoretical knowledge of war. When he discussed some immediate problem he was apt to cite parallel cases out of the textbooks. It was noted that in battle he became restless, was likely to talk so fast that he could hardly be understood, and all in all generated a high pitch of excitement. But he was a friendly man and he worked hard at his job, and after the aloof, enigmatical Buell he seems to have been a relief.³

Washington had been reminding him that what it wanted most of all was a Federal army moving into east Tennessee, but Rosecrans was beginning to see Buell’s point of view — that such a move was easier to plan in Washington than to execute on the spot. He concentrated at Nashville, perceived that Bragg and the Confederates were concentrated at Murfreesboro, less than thirty miles away, and on the day after Christmas, 1862 — a gloomy day, low clouds everywhere, a chilling mist in the air, with intermittent rain coming down to soak men’s clothing and spoil the roads — Rosecrans called his army out of its tents and set off southeast to find Bragg and fight him.

He was starting out with some forty-three thousand men. There were more than that in his command, but he was in enemy country infested by a great many highly active Confederate raiders, and he had to leave extensive details behind to guard bridges, supply lines, and wagon trains. Unfortunately most of the men taken for these details came from the troops of Rosecrans’s best corps commander, George Thomas, who would be short one entire division when the army went into action. Thomas, who had turned down the chance to replace Buell before Perryville, seems to have felt hurt when the government finally gave Buell’s job to Rosecrans, and Halleck was soothing him with kind words by letter — soothing him, as it finally would prove, not too effectively.⁴

Corps commanders with Thomas were Thomas L. Crittenden, son of the distinguished Kentuckian who had tried so hard and so unsuccessfully to work out a compromise between North and South in the final months before Sumter, and Alexander McD. McCook, a cheerful, bluff regular whose men had done most of the fighting at Perryville and who possessed a division commander who was just beginning to attract notice as a furious driving fighting man — a brand-new brigadier, recently a colonel of cavalry, by name of Philip Sheridan. Rosecrans spread his three corps out over the wet roads, and after marches made slow by sporadic skirmishing and cavalry fighting his troops pulled up in front of Murfreesboro on the evening of December 29.

On the following day, noticing that Bragg had all of his army drawn up in front of the town ready to fight, Rosecrans spread his own troops out into line — McCook off to the right, Thomas in the center, and Crittenden massed on the left, on the edge of icy Stone’s River, which came wandering down to curve west between Bragg’s army and Murfreesboro. As night came down, both Bragg and Rosecrans were determined to fight as soon as there was daylight.

By the oddest chance, each general had formed precisely the same battle plan — to hold with his right and attack with his left. Rosecrans would send Crittenden’s corps over the river to come in on Bragg’s right flank, breaking it and driving it out of action, while the rest of the army held on and waited for the breaks; Bragg, in his turn, proposed to mass troops on his left and crush the Federal right, trusting to elements on high ground behind the river to keep his right safe. Conceivably, the two armies might swing around each other like the halves of a revolving door. Even more conceivably, the army that struck first might very well win the battle.

The night was cold and the ground was wet, and campfires were alight. It occurred to Rosecrans to deceive his opponent and make him think the Federal right was longer and stronger than was actually the case, so campfires were lighted where no men camped, for two miles beyond McCook’s right. The strategy apparently backfired; Bragg saw and believed but simply ordered his own assaulting columns to sweep more widely to the west, which meant that when they struck they would extend far beyond McCook’s flank.⁵

Dawn came in cold and sullen. Awakening Federals felt that they had picked a gloomy place for a battle. Everything was wet, with soggy clumps of black cedars massed in ominous-looking bits of forest, deserted cotton fields all about with cotton wool still visible in the open bolls. They did not have long to reflect on this, because Bragg’s men, struck with overpowering might at the moment of dawn, completely canceling all of Rosecrans’s plans and compelling him to throw his entire army on the defensive.

The men at the right end of McCook’s line got it first, and it came with very little warning. They had been turned to at the moment of daylight, and while they were still blinking the sleep out of their eyes they made out an appalling mass of Confederates coming at them from the south — four solid columns, a brigade to a column, with immense reserves taking shape in the gray half-light beyond. The Confederates came quietly, slipping out of cedar thickets without noise, swinging into battle line and charging on the dead run, raising the Rebel yell only when they actually reached the Union line. In five minutes from the moment the Federals first saw their foes one of the most desperate battles of the war was in full blast.

McCook’s line was hopelessly swamped, hit from the flank and in front by seemingly limitless numbers, and it dissolved almost immediately. An Illinois soldier remembered, as characteristic of the scene, watching a Federal battery which had been firing canister and which started to limber up to withdraw to better ground; the Rebels, he said, swept it with one inconceivable volley which killed seventy-five horses and left the men unable to move a single gun — whereat the surviving artillerists abandoned their guns and fled for the rear. Men in reserve a mile behind McCook’s line hardly heard the crash of battle when fugitives from the front came scampering through their camps, spreading panic in their flight. An Indiana regiment remembered with grim amusement a captain who had been so afflicted with rheumatism that he could walk only with great difficulty, with the help of a cane. Caught up in the rout, he dropped the cane and went to the rear at a breakneck run, so that his men (whom he rapidly outdistanced) guffawed and pointed and cried: “My God, Look at the captain!”⁶

McCook’s corps was routed, all of Rosecrans’s right wing had vanished, and now everything was up to Pap Thomas, who had his two divisions posted on high ground near a railroad crossing and a four-acre plot of dark cedars known locally as “the round forest.” Thomas was imperturbable. He got reinforcements from Crittenden’s corps (which had long since abandoned any idea of crossing the river to hit the Confederate right), and his men held their ground, pouring out an enormous volume of fire that some of the men felt was louder and more ear-shattering than any other fire they heard in all the war. Charging Confederates were seen to pause in the cotton fields and stuff cotton in their ears to deaden the sound.⁷

While Thomas held, Rosecrans was riding about the field in a fury of activity. An officer who rode with him that day said that from dawn to dusk the general did not stay in one spot as long as half an hour.⁸His chief of staff, riding beside him, was beheaded by a cannon ball, blood spattering Old Rosy’s uniform; and with his riding and shouting Rosecrans got together a long line of guns at the right of Thomas’s position and formed a new line of infantry from regiments that had been driven out of McCook’s position earlier. By afternoon the Union army was drawn up in an arrowhead formation, right and left wings standing almost back to back; and there, finally, as the cold day waned, they made their stand and held on grimly, beating off the last of the Rebel attacks.

There was a council of war that midnight, Rosecrans and his principal commanders; and Thomas tilted his chair back and went sound asleep while the generals asked one another whether the army could possibly stay where it was. The word “retreat” came to Thomas through his sleep; Rosecrans was asking him if he could protect the rear while the army withdrew. Thomas opened his eyes and said flatly: “This army can’t retreat,” then went back to sleep. His word held. The idea of retreat was abandoned and Rosecrans decided to hold his army in position and fight.⁹

It was a hideous night. A mist lay on the field, with a thin moon shining through it; a cold wind swayed in the cedars, the mud froze, no one was allowed to light a campfire, and the air was full of a steady crying and groaning from the thousands of wounded who lay all about, untended. In the morning a red sun came up, tinting the mist so that all the landscape looked bloody. One soldier on the skirmish line remembered being so stiff with cold that he had to take his right hand in his left and force his finger around the trigger of his musket before he could fire.¹⁰

New Year’s Day was anticlimax. Bragg had driven his enemy to the edge of destruction; now, unaccountably, he failed to resume his attack, and the day passed with nothing more than skirmish-line firing. Bragg wired Richmond that he had won a great victory, but he refused to try to make anything of it. Not until January 2 did he resume the attack. This time he tried to hit the Federal left; the ground was unfavorable, and a great bank of the Federal artillery caught his charging brigades in flank and broke them apart, crushing the attack almost before it got started. Bragg waited some more — and then at night ordered a full retreat, drawing his army miles to the rear and leaving Rosecrans in full possession of the field. Unable to believe their good fortune, the Federals realized that they had, in a way, won a victory. At least they had the battlefield, along with thirteen thousand casualties. If they could pull themselves together they could continue the invasion. But Stone’s River was not a field they ever cared to remember.

4. Down the River

The war was expanding at the end of 1862. Its potentialities were becoming immeasurable; so was the cost of fighting it, as the twenty-five thousand Federal casualties of Fredericksburg and Stone’s River attested. Burnside had been hopelessly beaten, and Rosecrans had been brought to a full stop. It remained to be seen whether U. S. Grant could do any better.

Grant held western Tennessee and was responsible for the territory north of it all the way back to the Ohio. He had some forty-eight thousand men in his command, although he had to use a good half of these to guard railroads, highways, supply dumps, and what not in his rear, and during the early fall he had been unable to advance. But after Bragg’s thrust into Kentucky was turned back, Grant was promised reinforcements, and it seemed to him that if he attacked the Confederates in his front vigorously he could keep them from bothering his rear too greatly. At about the time when Burnside began his unhappy move from the Blue Ridge foothillls to Rappahannock tidewater — early in November — Grant started south. He proposed to clear the last Rebel resistance out of western Tennessee and then strike down into Mississippi, where the Confederate General John C. Pemberton was waiting for him with an army that Grant believed to be about the size of his own.

Vicksburg was the objective, and Vicksburg was a hard place to reach, principally because of the existence of the Yazoo Delta.

The Yazoo River is the product of a large number of smaller streams, and it begins to be a river at a point near the Tennessee line, not far inland from the Mississippi itself. It wanders east into the state of Mississippi, picking up more rivers as it goes, drops south, and at last comes back to flow into the Mississippi a few miles above Vicksburg. To the east of the Yazoo there is high ground, but to the west of it — between the Yazoo and the Mississippi — there is a vast lowland, 170 miles long by 50 miles wide, a Venetian complex of sluggish streams, bayous, backwaters, and interconnecting sloughs, with a flat country all around subject to flood when the waters are high. As roads and wheeled transport existed in 1862, no army of invasion could hope to march across this Yazoo Delta. To reach Vicksburg, Federals in western Tennessee would either have to go straight down the Mississippi by steamboat or march down east of the Yazoo and come up to Vicksburg from the rear. The Yazoo country was an impassable barrier.

In the Mississippi the Union had a powerful naval squadron led by Admiral David Dixon Porter — an impish, long-bearded man of the rough-sea-dog type, too outspoken for his own good, and given to embroidering the tale of his own exploits, but for all that an energetic and capable naval officer. It was perfectly possible for Porter to steam down and bombard Vicksburg, but the place could never be captured that way; it lay upon high bluffs, and Confederate engineers had turned it into a fortress. It had to be approached from the east, and the army that tried to get there from western Tennessee would dangle at the end of a very long supply line, exposed to incessant Confederate raids.

Nevertheless, Vicksburg was all-important. As long as it held out the Mississippi was closed, and the administration was being warned that unless the river could be opened fairly soon the farmers of the Middle West, who felt, with reason, that the eastern railroads were gouging them mercilessly, might become highly sympathetic to the Confederacy. Furthermore, Vicksburg connected the two halves of the Confederacy; if it fell the South would automatically lose an irreplaceable part of its strength.

Accordingly, Grant began to move. He had no sooner begun than he discovered that something very mysterious was going on far to his rear.

One of Grant’s principal subordinates was Major General John A. McClernand of Illinois, a wiry, aggressive, ambitious man whom Grant eyed with deep distrust. McClernand was a Democratic politician; he had spoken up boldly for the Union cause after Fort Sumter, when the administration was in a mood to prize pro-war Democrats, and he had been made a general as a reward. There was nothing wrong with his fighting heart, but he was an unskillful soldier and he had so much seniority that he outranked everybody in Grant’s army except Grant himself. Grant had felt no especial sense of loss when late in August he got orders from Halleck detaching McClernand and sending him back to Springfield, Illinois, to help organize new volunteer troops. But by the end of November, Grant began to realize that McClernand was up to something.

In its great need for more soldiers that summer, the administration had played with the idea of getting some combination military and political hero to do a recruiting job. Mayor George Opdyke of New York, chairman of a big-name National War Committee, had asked Stanton to let either Frémont or Ormsby Mitchel tour the North to raise a special corps of fifty thousand men. Stanton had turned him down; the administration wanted no more of Frémont just then, and Mitchel had been ordered to duty along the Carolina coast (where he would presently die of a fever); but the basic idea was appealing, and shortly thereafter McClernand had come in with a plan of his own.

Let him go through the western states, he pleaded, getting and organizing recruits; then, when a force of perhaps thirty thousand of all arms had been raised, let him take it and move boldly down the Mississippi, answerable to no one but Washington. He would capture Vicksburg; this would open the river to the Gulf, split the Confederacy, assuage midwestern farmers, dampen the rising tide of northern Copperheads, and possibly win the war.¹

Lincoln and Stanton told him to go ahead, and McClernand went west, conferring with governors and other men of influence and then taking to the stump to raise volunteers. He was popular with western Democrats and he was a good stump speaker, and before long new volunteers began to appear in quantity, especially in Illinois. McClernand busily organized them into regiments and wrote jubiliantly to Stanton, who assured him that “everything here is favorable for your expedition,” told him to make frequent reports, and added: “I long to see you in the field striking vigorous blows against the rebellion in its most vital point.”²

That McClernand was raising and organizing troops was, of course, public knowledge, but the rest of the program was top secret. Plenty of rumors were afloat, however, and these reached Grant; and then, on November 10, after he had wired Halleck asking why the reinforcements that had been promised him were not arriving, Grant received a very odd reply. A number of regiments were on the way, said Halleck, and more would quickly follow, and “Memphis will be made the base of a joint military and naval expedition on Vicksburg.”

Since Grant’s own plans called for an overland hike on the eastern side of the Yazoo Delta country, this sounded very much as if someone else were coming in to supersede him, and that someone could only be McClernand. Grant sent Halleck an anxious inquiry.

Halleck was playing his cards carefully. He had no use for McClernand, an independent Vicksburg expedition struck him as absurd, and if in the preceding winter he had tried to elbow Grant out of the army he was very much on Grant’s side now. Studying the McClernand case, Halleck discovered that the administration had put in McClernand’s orders a little escape clause, and of this Halleck now was prepared to take full advantage.

The War Department on October 20 had given McClernand confidential orders instructing him to do all of the things he had asked to be allowed to do. Among other things, these orders told McClernand to send the new troops he was raising to Cairo, Memphis, or such other place as Halleck might direct, “to the end that, when a sufficient force not required by the operations of General Grant’s command shall be raised,” McClernand might lead his men against Vicksburg.

Halleck was a good lawyer, and he saw through all of this without difficulty. The troops would go forward, as fast as McClernand got them ready, into Grant’s department. On arrival, it might easily turn out that they would be “required by the operations of General Grant’s command,” especially if McClernand himself did not at once go with them. Blandly Halleck wired Grant that he was not being superseded; all troops entering his department were under his command.³

Grant put Halleck’s messages on top of all the rumors he had been hearing and worked out a new program. He would march down into Mississippi as he had planned, following the line of the Mississippi Central Railroad, which goes roughly parallel to the Yazoo, thirty or forty miles farther inland. Simultaneously a joint army-navy expedition would leave Memphis for Vicksburg. It would include some of the troops that had been in the department all along, and all of the McClernand troops that had arrived, but it would be under the command of William Tecumseh Sherman.⁴

Together, these two thrusts might be very effective. Grant’s own advance should force Confederate Pemberton to come up to meet him. Meanwhile Porter and his gunboats would convoy Sherman clear down the Mississippi to the mouth of the Yazoo. By ascending the Yazoo a short distance Sherman could put his army ashore at the foot of the Chickasaw Bluffs, just a few miles north of Vicksburg. If the Confederate defenders were kept busy opposing Grant’s thrust from the north, Sherman could storm the bluffs and take the city; if the Confederates concentrated against Sherman they could not very well keep Grant from moving on down the railroad. And, in any case, the big Vicksburg expedition would be put in motion without McClernand.

McClernand, meanwhile, back in Illinois, was happily sending new regiments down to Memphis, where Sherman was hastily giving them brigade and division formation and preparing to march them on transports. By the middle of December, McClernand was reporting to Washington that he had sent most of his men and that there was nothing of importance remaining for him to do in Illinois: might he not now be ordered to go to Memphis and assume the promised command?

The orders did not come, but news of what was going on at Memphis did, and on December 17 McClernand sent an outraged wire to Lincoln: “I believe I am superseded. Please advise me.”⁵ To Stanton, on the same day, he telegraphed a similar complaint.

Stanton sent him the most innocent of replies, brimming with reassurance. McClernand was not being superseded; Grant had been ordered to form the troops in his department into four army corps, McClernand would be named commander of one of these, and as soon as Grant signed the papers McClernand could go south, assume command of his troops, and head for Vicksburg. Simultaneously orders to proceed with the corps formation and the appointment of McClernand went from the War Department to Grant.

There was a letdown in this. Being a corps commander under Grant was not quite the same as being an independent army commander. There was also a catch in it. Grant made out the orders next day, December 18, and wired McClernand that his corps was ready and that it would “form a part of the expedition on Vicksburg”; Grant hoped that when McClernand reached Memphis he would find all preparations complete and the expedition ready to move.⁶ The catch lay in the fact that there was somehow a delay of several days in the transmission of this wire. By the time McClernand reached Memphis — he came down by special steamboat as soon as he got Grant’s message — he found that the expedition had not waited for him. Gunboats, transports, and two solid army corps, one of them belonging to McClernand and the other subject to his orders because he outranked its commander, had gone on down the river without him. There was nothing for him to do but go chugging down-river after it, fuming and fruitlessly demanding an explanation.

McClernand, in other words, had been given a neat double shuffle. He had dreamed up the expedition and he had brought in most of the troops for it, men who might not have enlisted at all without his efforts; now the expedition had moved out from under him, and although he would eventually overtake it, the moment of glory might easily elude him. He was never able to prove a thing on anybody, although it was clear that some very fancy footwork had been performed. Many years afterward Grant confessed: “I had good reason to believe that in forestalling him I was by no means giving offense to those whose authority to command was above both him and me.”⁷

Perhaps the Confederates helped a little, although the price of their help came high.

Grant’s army was moving down the line of the Mississippi Central Railroad while all of this was going on. It got as far as Oxford, thirty-five miles below the Tennessee line; some twenty miles in its rear, at the inconsiderable town of Holly Springs, Grant had established a huge supply dump. The country was wooded and thinly populated, and the inhabitants seemed to hold unanimous anti-Yankee sentiments of considerable bitterness. One reason, perhaps, was that the western troops were doing an uncommon amount of senseless looting. A Union officer remembered seeing in one occupied town a cavalryman staggering off, carrying a huge grandfather’s clock. Asked what on earth he proposed to do with it, the man explained that he was going to dismantle it “and get a pair of the little wheels out of it for spur rowels.”⁸ The idea took hold, and other cavalrymen were doing the same. Meanwhile the roads were poor, the weather was wet, most of the streams were swollen, and the army had no pontoon train.

Then, just as things seemed to be going well, two Confederate cavalry leaders taught Grant a lesson about the evils of exposing a long supply line to enemy action.

The first was curly-haired Earl Van Dorn, old-time friend of Grant at West Point, who brushed aside an incompetent Yankee cavalry force, scared a timorous infantry colonel into surrender, and seized the supply base at Holly Springs. The gray troopers made holiday in this town, burning more than a million dollars’ worth of Federal supplies and leaving Grant’s army in danger of starvation.

Worse yet was the incredible feat performed by Nathan Bedford Forrest.

Forrest took a newly recruited cavalry detachment, imperfectly mounted and largely unarmed, and swung far up into Tennessee, gobbling up one Federal base after another, seizing enough horses and arms so that his whole outfit could be fully equipped, cutting the railroad in several places, and destroying courier routes and telegraph lines so effectively that for days Grant was entirely cut off from communication with the rear echelon. It is possible that this was what delayed his message to McClernand: possible, too, that the complete silence (its cause not then known in Memphis) led Sherman to hurry off to Vicksburg in the belief that Grant had plunged deeply into Mississippi. McClernand, at any rate, was never able to prove that this was not the case.

The real importance of the raids, however, was that they brought Grant’s army to an abrupt standstill. All hands were put on half rations, and to keep his army from starvation Grant sent his wagons out into the country to seize supplies. They got so much stuff, incidentally, that Grant’s eyes popped out, and in the months to come he reflected long and hard on the likelihood that an army in Mississippi could abandon its supply line entirely and live off the country.⁹ This conclusion came to him later, however; at the time he could only call off his advance and wait while communications were restored. He could not get word to Sherman, and that officer sailed down-river for Vicksburg, confident that everything was going according to schedule.

Late in December, Sherman’s flotilla entered the mouth of the Yazoo, and the soldiers went ashore and made ready to assault Chickasaw Bluffs. As far as Sherman knew, Grant was approaching Vicksburg from the northeast, and the Rebels must be too busy fending him off to make a good defense at the bluffs.

Disillusionment came quickly. Pemberton did not have to worry about Grant, and he had plenty of men waiting for Sherman’s attack. The position on Chickasaw Bluffs was so strong that when it was properly manned it could not possibly be stormed, and when the Federals made their attack on December 29 they were quickly defeated, with over seventeen hundred casualties. Sherman got his men back on the boats, moved out of range, and glumly wondered what to do next. The expedition was a flat failure, and it seemed advisable to do something to put a good face on matters. He and Admiral Porter talked things over and agreed that something might be salvaged from defeat by making a quick stab at Confederate Fort Hindman, otherwise known as Arkansas Post — a stronghold forty miles up the Arkansas River, which entered the Mississippi seventy miles above Vicksburg. No real attack on Vicksburg, Sherman argued, could be made until this post was reduced; besides, a victory there would help the North forget about what had happened at Chickasaw Bluffs.¹⁰

No sooner had they agreed on this than the steamer Tigress came in bearing McClernand — angry and eager. McClernand issued a proclamation assuming command of everything — between the men who had come down with him and the ones Sherman had led, there were now thirty-two thousand Federal soldiers in the vicinity — and he announced that this would hereafter be known as the Army of the Mississippi. Sherman would command one corps in this army and the other would be under General G. W. Morgan.¹¹This rubbed Sherman where he was raw; he felt that Morgan had let him down badly in the fight at the bluffs by failing to attack as ordered, but McClernand was boss and there was no help for it.

McClernand did respect Sherman as a soldier, and when the Arkansas Post idea was explained to him he immediately approved it. He had reached the scene on January 3, and by January 10 his army and Porter’s flotilla had gone up the Arkansas River and were hammering away at the fort.

The fort caved in quickly, the Federals took nearly five thousand prisoners, and here was a neat little success to counterbalance Chickasaw Bluffs. McClernand, Sherman, and Porter dropped down the river again to a point near the mouth of the Yazoo; and Grant, who had returned to Memphis, got the news.

Grant was not in a mood to give McClernand a thing, and when he learned that the expedition had gone into Arkansas — this news reached him before he learned of the victory itself — he assumed that it was all McClernand’s doing, and he wrote indignantly to Halleck denouncing it as a senseless wild-goose chase. Then later returns came in: news of the victory, and the information that the idea had been Sherman’s. Grant promptly reversed himself and sent Halleck a message praising the move which he had just condemned and calling it an essential step in the Vicksburg campaign.¹²

At the same time he reversed his earlier strategic plan. It was obvious that the original route down the line of the railroad was very long and risky; obvious, too, that there was going to be a major drive down the river whether Grant liked it or not. McClernand had so much rank that wherever he went he would be in command unless Grant himself were present, and it was impossible for Grant to think calmly about things that might happen to an army in the steaming mud flats just north of Vicksburg with impulsive, unskilled McClernand in charge.

Grant would put all his eggs in one basket. The attack on Vicksburg would be made from the river. As large an army as Grant could assemble would be concentrated there, and Grant would go down to take personal command. On January 30, Grant joined McClernand, Sherman and Porter at Milliken’s Bend on the west bank of the river, ten miles above Vicksburg, and the decisive campaign of the Civil War had its beginning.

It would begin very slowly, and for a long time it would look like nothing so much as failure. Grant’s earlier impression that Vicksburg could not be attacked from the north and west — the only directions from which an army at Milliken’s Bend could conceivably approach it — was eminently correct. Ideally, it would have been much better to bring everyone back to Memphis and make a fresh start down the eastern side of the Yazoo Delta. But this just was not in the cards. The move down the river had been approved at Washington. Withdrawal now would be an unmistakable confession of defeat; the political situation in the North was excessively delicate, and it seemed likely that Fredericksburg and Stone’s River were, between them, about as large a budget of bad news as the citizenry would be likely to accept. There was nothing for it but to go ahead.