Never Call Retreat (32 page)

Grant tried the unconditional surrender approach, found that Pemberton was not ready for it, and concluded at last to take what he could get—which unquestionably was enough. Pemberton was surrendering all he had, the sole qualification being that his soldiers would be released on parole instead of being taken north to prison camps. Reflecting that most of Pemberton's men were so disheartened that they would probably ignore their paroles and go home, and that to ship 31,000 prisoners up the river would have tied up a great deal of shipping anyway, Grant accepted this proviso, persuaded himself that it was even an advantage to the Federals, and on Independence Day marched his troops into Vicksburg.

The news went downstream to Port Hudson, where Banks for several weeks had been laying siege and making fruitless assaults, and on July 8 that place also surrendered. The Mississippi was open at last, and Banks assured Mrs. Banks that the Confederates had received a mortal wound: "We have taken from them the power to establish an independent government. It can never be done between the Mississippi and the Atlantic. You can tell your friends that the Confederacy is an impossibility."
¹⁷

2.
The Notion of Equality

FOR A FEW DAYS Richmond lived on rumors.

According to one report, Lee's army had been practically destroyed and nothing remained but disorganized fugitives trying frantically to get back to Virginia, hard-pressed by aggressive foes; which led one devoutly patriotic woman to lament that "a single day had served to crush the hopes of a speedy peace and to cloud the horizon of the future." A more welcome story asserted that it was really Meade's army that had been destroyed (as a detail it held that Lee had taken 40,000 prisoners) and a member of the home guard assured an army friend that Grant and Banks would doubtless be beaten before long and that "the beginning of the end approaches." But by the end of the second week in July most of the truth was at hand, and although neither the best nor the worst of the tall tales from Pennsylvania was verified it was painfully clear that in the west there had been genuine calamity. The last grip on the Mississippi was broken and the western Confederacy was a fragment; and to make matters worse, Federal Rosecrans was finally on the move. Bragg in fact had to retreat south of the Tennessee River, leaving all of central Tennessee in the hands of the Federals and bringing the war down to the northern border of Georgia. A War Department official called the past week "one of unexampled disaster since the war began," and confided to his diary: "We are
almost exhausted."
¹

President Davis was not quite sure whether the ruin had been brought on by fate or by human incompetence, but he wasted little time on post-mortem investigations. Confessing privately that the losses in the west had left him "in the depths of gloom," he looked resolutely to the future. To General Edmund Kirby Smith, now commanding all Confederate forces west of the Mississippi, he sent a warning that Smith's command would have to be largely self-sufficient from now on. Smith must play a lone hand; he must develop mining and manufacturing resources, set up a rolling mill, provide his own munitions and supplies, if possible build ironclads to keep the invaders from using the western rivers; in general he must get along with little or no help from Richmond. The President believed that "we are now in the darkest hour of our political existence," and he urged Senator R. W. Johnson of Arkansas (whose people were showing a dismaying tendency to talk about making terms with the Yankees) to persuade his constituents that "it would be mad, suicidal for any state of the Confederacy to seek safety by separation from the rest."
²

Mr. Davis believed that he had done all he could to avert the western collapse, and later in the summer he wrote frankly to an old friend: "The disasters in Mississippi were both great and unexpected to me. I had thought that the troops sent to the state, added to those already there, made a force large enough to accomplish the destruction of Grant's army. That no such result followed may have been the effect of mismanagement, or it may have been that it was unattainable." An investigation was under way, but since the disasters had already occurred "it would afford me but little satisfaction to know that they resulted from bad generalship and were not inevitable." He had to confess that many people were looking for scapegoats, criticizing the President and his generals for letting bad things happen, and he dwelt on the fact in a letter to General Lee: "Misfortune often develop! secret foes and oftener still makes men complain. It is comfortable to hold some one responsible for one's discomfort."
³

Among the discomforted was General Beauregard, against whose stronghold at Charleston the Federals were about to open a new attack, heavier than the one made earlier, with army and navy together going all-out to capture the city. At the beginning of July Beauregard wrote to Joe Johnston, complaining that the government had tried to take some more of his inadequate forces away from him and asking bluntly: "Of what earthly use is that 'raid' of Lee's army going into Maryland, in violation of all the principles of war? Is it going to end the struggle, take Washington or save the Mississippi valley?" It would have been much better, said Beauregard, if Lee had remained on the defensive in Virginia and had sent Longstreet's corps to Tennessee to enable Bragg to defeat Rosecrans.
⁴

This, to be sure, had not been done, and now Rosecrans threatened to inflict another reverse as bad as the one at Vicksburg. By the loss of the Mississippi the Confederacy had been cut in half; Rosecrans' advance seemed likely to bisect what remained, and the War Department official who had been so discouraged in July grew even gloomier in August. Comparing the Confederacy of 1861 with the Confederacy of 1863, he wrote: "Nearly half of the whole area is in the hands of the enemy or outside of our lines. We have never substantially recovered any territory once lost, never retaken any important strategic point once occupied." The confirmed pessimist Colonel Lucius B. Northrop, commissary general, notified the War Department that the meat ration for troops would have to be cut to one-quarter pound daily—except for soldiers actually on the march, who could get half a pound. The reason, said Colonel Northrop, was that no more supplies could come from beyond the Mississippi, or from the states of Mississippi and Tennessee, or from parts of Alabama and Georgia, and if the army meat ration was not cut there would be no meat at all for the Negro slaves. Loss of territory was beginning to mean loss of ability to feed the fighters and the workers.
⁸

Bragg did his best to get foodstuffs out of Tennessee while he could. The central part of the state was raising this year the largest crop of wheat it had ever had, although Bragg's officers had conscripted farmers so rigorously that as the grain ripened there was no one to harvest it. Rosecrans and his Yankee host were not far away, but they were quiet and as long as they remained so Bragg was willing to beat his spears into pruning hooks; so in June he detailed whole regiments for work in the wheat fields, sending them from farm to farm and encouraging the farm women to provide harvesters' dinners for them, and they brought in so much wheat that he proudly predicted that "in a little while we shall have an abundance of flour, an article of luxury for the last four months."
⁰
His reapers finished their work barely in time; less than a week after Bragg recorded this achievement Rosecrans began his advance.

In the opinion of General Halleck he did not begin a second too soon; an opinion heartily endorsed by Rosecrans' own chief of staff, Brigadier General James A. Garfield. All spring Rosecrans clung to his strange idea that he ought not to move against Bragg until Vicksburg fell because if he made Bragg retreat Bragg would simply go to Mississippi, join Johnston, and fall upon Grant; he seems also to have felt that his own army was the North's last reserve, to be saved until all other points were secure. Early in June he approved a detailed plan for advance, drawn up by Garfield, and then conferred with his principal generals and found that most of them did not think Bragg had sent any troops to Mississippi, doubted that he could be attacked to advantage, and considered an early Federal advance inadvisable. Approval of the advance was cancelled. Garfield gave Rosecrans his own vigorous dissent, and wrote privately that he felt "a sense of disappointment and mortification almost akin to shame"; and to his fellow Ohioan, Secretary Chase, Garfield wrote that Rosecrans' Army of the Cumberland was probably the best army the country ever had but that it lacked "that live and earnest determination to . . . make its power felt in crushing the shell of the rebellion."
⁷

Two weeks later, however, on June 24, the advance did begin, and the Rosecrans who had been so inert for six months, endlessly discovering new reasons why he ought not to move, suddenly began to operate with daring, skill, and energy. His army had been resting in Murfreesboro since the beginning of the year, and a few miles to the south Bragg's troops held the gaps in the hills where the roads from Murfreesboro led south; and when the Federal army began to move there was a pelting rain that was to last the better part of a fortnight. Holding a strong numerical advantage in infantry, Rosecrans feinted with his right and then sent Thomas and Crittenden off through the hills fifteen miles to the eastward. With a minimum of fighting, this force got around Bragg's right flank and swung in behind the gaps in a way that made Bragg order a quick reconcentration at Tullahoma, a dozen miles to the rear. It developed that this was not far enough. Rosecrans kept moving, his infantry stumping manfully along roads that were deep in mud, and Bragg found that he also must move. On July 1 he left Tullahoma and headed south, and about the time Grant got into Vicksburg Bragg's army was below the Tennessee River, in and around Chattanooga, while Rosecrans halted his own army fifty miles to the northwest.

It seemed in Washington that Rosecrans might well have kept going a bit longer, and Secretary Stanton sent him a stimulating telegram: WE HAVE JUST RECEIVED INFORMATION

THAT VICKSBURG IS SURRENDERED TO GRANT ON THE 4th OF JULY. LEE'S ARMY OVERTHROWN, GRANT VICTORIOUS. YOU AND YOUR NOBLE ARMY NOW HAVE THE CHANCE TO GIVE THE FINISHING BLOW TO THE REBELLION. WILL YOU NEGLECT THE

CHANCE? Rosecrans felt that the needle was being applied unjustly, and he retorted that Mr. Stanton must have failed to observe that "this noble army has driven the Rebels from middle Tennessee," adding a needle-thrust of his own: "I beg in behalf of this army that the War Department may not overlook so great an event because it is not written in letters of blood."®

It was true that he had won much at small cost; true, also, that he had turned a good phrase; but he was talking to the wrong people. The President and the War Department were grimly willing to have this summer's chapter written in letters of blood if it could just be the last chapter, ending the whole story of fighting and killing forever. When they talked of finishing off the rebellion they talked of what they considered a real possibility: they believed the war could be ended now, this month, if generals pressed their advantages. The elation Mr. Lincoln felt when Lee was repulsed at Gettysburg owed less to the removal of a threat than to the conviction that Lee's army was retreating with its neck in a noose. On July 7, Halleck notified Meade that Vicksburg had fallen and that the President had said: "Now, if General Meade can complete his work, so gloriously prosecuted thus far, by the literal or substantial destruction of Lee's army, the rebellion will be over." The President was in no mood to rejoice over the recovery of lost territory. He wanted Confederate armies wiped out.

The President's feeling of frustration began when he read a congratulatory order Meade issued after Gettysburg, inviting the army to keep up the good work and to "drive the invader from our soil." To Secretary John Hay Mr. Lincoln exploded angrily: "Will our generals never get that idea out of their heads? The whole country is our soil." (The Union was endangered, not because Lee's army was in Pennsylvania, but because Lee's army existed at all.) As Lee went back to the Potomac, Meade cautiously following, Mr. Lincoln grew more impatient, and when newspaperman Noah Brooks left to visit Meade's headquarters the President confessed his fear that "something would happen" to save Lee's army from annihilation. On July 14 news came that Lee's army had indeed escaped, crossing the Potomac at night on an improvised pontoon bridge and returning to Virginia bruised but alive. Brooks wrote that the President's "grief and anger were something sorrowful to behold," and Hay remembered the President saying: "We had them within our grasp. We had only to stretch forth our hands and they were ours." Mr. Lincoln wrote a sharp letter to Meade, then soberly concluded not to sign it and left it in a pigeonhole; but enough of his discontent got through, via Halleck, to make the testy Meade offer his resignation. Halleck calmed the general, the resignation was not accepted, Meade was given promotion to brigadier general in the Regular Army, and on the surface all was well. But it was not a good time for General Rosecrans to explain that he had induced Bragg to leave Tennessee without a fight.
⁹

Mr. Lincoln may have wanted too much. Meade's army had had about all it could take. It had marched hard and fought hard, thousands of men lacked shoes, some of the best regiments were reduced to sixty or eighty men, and an Iron Brigade colonel said that the campaign now ending was by far the worst the Army of the Potomac ever experienced. Meade himself was living on nothing much more than a stern sense of duty. On July 8 he wrote to Mrs. Meade: "From the time I took command until today, now over ten days, I have not changed my clothes have not had a regular nights rest & many nights not a wink of sleep and for several days did not even wash my face & hands—no regular food and all the time in a state of mental anxiety. Indeed, I think I have lived as much in this time as in the last 30 years." He did not honestly feel that he had won a great victory; the most he would say was that "Lee was defeated in his efforts to destroy my army." He hoped to overtake Lee and defeat him, but in all of its career the Army of the Potomac had never yet made an energetic pursuit and it was hard to begin now. Meade was still new in command, some of his lieutenants were second-raters, the army was tired and he was tired, and almost in despair he wrote: "I
suffer
very much from anxiety & responsibility—I can get no reliable information of the enemy and have to grope my way in the dark—it is wonderful the difficulty I have in obtaining correct information— I
want Corps Comdrs."