Never Call Retreat (36 page)

Much more to the point was a fiasco at Sabine Pass, Texas, where the Federal power displayed a fumbling incompetence that would have been hard to explain away even in the early, amateurish days of the war.

Federal soldiers and sailors went to Sabine Pass because French soldiers had gone to Mexico. Napoleon III, Emperor of France, who had built his career by taking advantage of turmoil wherever it existed, was trying to set up a French-controlled empire in Mexico. He had chosen the luckless Habsburg prince, Maximilian, to be his puppet emperor there, and in June of 1863 he sent a French army into Mexico City, thereby fracturing the Monroe Doctrine in a way no American government could approve but which the government at this moment could not effectively resent. It seemed to Washington to be necessary to establish a Federal army in Texas, both as a warning of the wrath to come and as a hedge against the chance that Napoleon, having occupied Mexico, would go on to occupy Texas as well. So, early in the summer, General Banks was ordered to make immediate preparation to send a powerful expedition into Texas.

Here the Lincoln administration made a substantial error. The way to checkmate Napoleon was to win the war at home; once that was done, the French could be driven out of the New World without difficulty. To send an army to Texas now would not help much; indeed, it was a move in the wrong direction, a dispersion of force that cost more than it was worth. The Mississippi Valley had just been won, and the massive force that won it could have moved eastward across the cotton South, cutting the last supports out from under the Confederacy; both General Grant and General Banks wanted to do this, and they had been planning a descent on Mobile, Alabama, as a first step. The Texas expedition made this impossible. Grant was able to send Sherman out to drive General Johnston away from the city of Jackson, but he could do no more; he was immobilized for the summer, his army split into detachments, and in effect the entire Federal force in the great valley stood by to guard the rear while Banks invaded Texas.

Unhappily but dutifully, Banks worked out a plan. Giving up his earlier idea that the Red River offered the best way into Texas—the summer drought had made that stream too shallow for transports—he elected to go along the Gulf Coast to the mouth of the Sabine River, the dividing line between Texas and Louisiana. Sabine Pass, where the river reached the .Gulf, was lightly defended, and Banks believed he could move inland from that point and occupy Houston with 15,000 men; this would give him control of the Texas railroad network and the most populous part of the state, and his mission would be accomplished. (If accomplished smartly, there might still be time and strength enough to turn east and attack Mobile.) So on September 5 the advance guard of the expedition, a division of 4000 men under Major General William B. Franklin, got under way for Sabine Pass, escorted by light-draft gunboats.
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It should have been automatic. At Sabine Pass the Confederates had an unfinished fort mounting six light guns, manned by forty-odd members of the 1st Texas heavy artillery, commanded by Lieutenant Richard Dowling, and Banks had told Franklin to land along the coast and flank this force out of there. But Franklin, who had been so reluctant to use his troops at Fredericksburg, was equally reluctant now. He felt that it would be simpler to let the navy pound the fort into submission, and on the afternoon of September 8 the gunboats
Clifton, Sachem, Arizona,
and
Granite City
steamed in across the bar and opened fire.

They did not fire very long, and they did Lieutenant Dow-ling's little force no harm.
Sachem
was disabled by a shot through her boilers, lost steerage-way and could bring no guns to bear.
Clifton
ran aground and also got shot through the boilers. Both ships surrendered,
Arizona
grounded, got free and retired,
Granite City
never got into action at all, and after forty-five minutes Franklin considered the attack a flat failure, abandoned it, and sailed back to his starting point in Louisiana. A captured Federal officer went up to Lieutenant Dowling, found him "a modest, retiring, boyish-looking Irish lad," and blurted out his embarrassed tribute: "You and your forty-three men, in your miserable little mud fort in the rushes, have captured two gunboats, a goodly number of prisoners, many stands of small arms and plenty of good ammunition—and all that you have done with six pop-guns. . . . And that is not the worst of your boyish tricks. You have sent three Yankee gunboats, 6000 troops and a general out to sea in the dark."
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Ignominious failure, in other words, followed by the exchange of bitter words between the army and navy; damaging the Confederacy not at all, conveying no warning to the French, proving only that although the President of the United States was demanding all-out war he was not getting it. If the help of the radicals looked essential perhaps there was reason for it.

Perhaps . . . and yet the appearance was deceptive. Dark shadows were rising around the Confederacy, and neither Yankee failure at Charleston nor Yankee bungling in Texas altered the fact. Surveying the scene with cold realism, Jefferson Davis in mid-summer conceded that one of the South's fundamental hopes was gone forever: Great Britain was not going to help the Confederacy win its independence, neither directly with its fleet nor indirectly with a benevolent neutrality. To James Mason, who had so brightly gone to London two years earlier to plead the Southern cause, went a letter from Secretary of State Judah P. Benjamin, who notified Mr. Mason that President Davis had concluded that "the Government of Her Majesty has determined to decline the overtures made through you for establishing friendly treaty relations between the two Governments and entertains no intention of receiving you as the accredited Minister of the Government near the British court. Under these circumstances your continued residence in London is neither conducive to the interests nor consistent with the dignity of this Government, and the President therefore requests that you consider your mission at an end and that you withdraw with your secretary from London."
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Mr. Davis was saying that King Cotton was dead. The dream that King Cotton would compel the outside world to make the new nation permanent had been basic at Montgomery, when the man and the hour met under bright flags and secession looked like a logical step toward a destined goal. Now the dream was gone forever. Her Majesty's Government was acting upon the belief that the North was going to win the war, and it gave the soberest proof of this before Mason even got Secretary Benjamin's letter: it sent a gunboat and a detachment of marines to the Laird's building yard at Birkenhead and announced that the famous ironclad rams, now almost completed, would not be allowed to sail.

These rams had given United States Minister Adams a distracting summer. No one over the age of ten doubted that they were being built for the Confederacy, but to prove it was another matter. Commander James Bulloch, the Confederate agent who had arranged for their construction, had acted with skill, and the legal record still showed they were being built for Messrs. Bravay of France. Mr. Adams had been bombarding Lord Russell with affidavits, his Bostonian inflexibility stiffened by the grimmest instructions from Secretary Seward. If the cruisers sailed, said Mr. Seward, the United States Navy would go after them, pursuing them if necessary into neutral ports—obviously, though the Secretary did not say so, into British ports—and this would inevitably lead to shooting. "If," wrote the Secretary, "through the necessary employment of our means of national defense, such a partial war shall become a general one between the two nations, the President thinks that the responsibility for that painful result will not fall upon the United States."
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It did not seem to Mr. Adams that the British government was going to stop the rams. On September 5 he sent a sober dispatch to Lord Russell, who was then in Scotland, reciting his case against the rams and climaxing his argument with a sentence which became famous: "It would be superfluous in me to point out to your lordship that this is war." He wrote this, he privately confessed, in "utter dreariness of spirit," and concluded that his only hope was to play for time by letting it be known that he must await further instructions from Washington.
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In point of fact Mr. Adams had already won his battle, although he did not then know it, and his famous sentence was sent to a man who had already backed down. On September 1 the British Under Secretary for Foreign Affairs wrote to the Treasury that "so much suspicion attaches to the ironclad vessels at Birkenhead, that if sufficient evidence can be obtained to lead to the belief that they are intended for the Confederate States Lord Russell thinks the vessels ought to be detained until further examination can be made." Two days later, on September 3, Lord Russell wired to the Under Secretary to stop the ironclads AS SOON AS THERE IS REASON TO BELIEVE THAT THEY ARE ACTUALLY ABOUT TO PUT TO SEA, AND TO DETAIN THEM UNTIL FURTHER ORDERS. On the Same day he wrote to the Prime Minister, Lord Palmerston: "I have thought it necessary to direct that they should be detained. The solicitor-general has been consulted and concurs in the measure as one of policy though not of strict law." Lord Palmerston approved. He had felt all along that Britain would be playing "a suicidal game" if it let the Confederacy have these ships, and by now he wanted to avoid "even a diplomatic wrangle" with Washington. He did have reservations about Mr. Adams' language—after all, semi-colonial types from beyond the seas ought not to talk as Mr. Adams had talked to a British Foreign Minister—and late in September, after the crisis was over, he told Lord Russell: "It seems to me that we cannot allow to remain unnoticed his repeated and I must say somewhat insolent threats of war. We ought I think to say to him, in civil terms, 'You be damned,' and I endeavored to express that sentiment to him in measured terms."
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Mr. Adams could bear up under this. The big point was that the rams never crossed the Atlantic. They had looked like doom itself, and Mr. Adams had had dreadful visions of the Federal blockade crumbling before them, but in the end the British put the broad arrow on them and they became two more warships in the British Navy, H.M.S.
Wivern
and
Scorpion,
obsolescent when commissioned, wholly obsolete shortly thereafter because warship design then was moving ahead with great speed. A few years later Mr. Adams saw a naval review at Portsmouth, studied one of these precious

ironclads, and reflected: "As I looked on the mean little thing I could not help a doubt whether she was really worth all of the anxiety she had cost us."
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Probably not. Yet what the British government did about these rams closed an iron door on the Confederacy, and when he addressed the Congress at Richmond at the end of the year Mr. Davis took note of it. Great Britain, he said, was not really neutral at all. It was siding with the Yankees. It showed partiality "in favor of our enemies," and he explained what this meant:

"This Confederacy is either independent or it is a dependency of the United States: for no other earthly power claims the right to govern it. Without one historic fact on which the pretension can rest, without one word of treaty or covenant which can give color to title, the United States have asserted, and the British government has chosen to concede, that these sovereign States are dependencies of the Government which is administered at Washington. Great Britain has accordingly entertained with that Government the closest and most intimate relations, while refusing, on its demands, ordinary amicable intercourse with us, and has, under arrangements made with the other nations of Europe, not only denied our just claim of admission into the family of nations, but interposed a passive though effectual bar to the knowledge of our rights by other powers. ... I am well aware that we are unfortunately without adequate remedy for the injustice under which we have suffered at the hands of a powerful nation."
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5.
A Mad Irregular Battle

THE FINAL significance of the loss of the Laird rams could be analyzed at leisure, if the Confederacy ever found the time to draw up a proper balance sheet; in the late summer of 1863 Mr. Davis had something far more serious to worry about. The spasmodic Federal war machine, swinging from stolid inertia to furious energy, was at last starting to invade the heart of the South.

After maneuvering Bragg out of central Tennessee, General Rosecrans had gone into camp halfway between Murfreesboro and Chattanooga, staying there for six weeks while he repaired a railroad line, collected supplies and argued tirelessly with General Halleck about everything from high strategy to the cavalry's need for more horses. Now he was on the march again, coming southeast across the Cumberland Plateau with nearly twice Bragg's numbers, handling his sprawling columns so smartly that his adversary could never bring him to battle; if Old Rosey's superiors found it impossible to make him move before he felt entirely ready to move they could find no fault with him once he got under way. He came down to the Tennessee River at the end of August, crossed without opposition, and then pushed one army corps toward Chattanooga and moved two more farther south and sent them eastward across the mountains straight into Bragg's unprotected rear. Bragg would obviously have to evacuate Chattanooga without a struggle, and if this Yankee advance could not speedily be thrown back the Confederacy was likely to be split beyond repair.
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Here, in short, was the ultimate threat, and Mr. Davis resorted to the ultimate answer; that is, he took men from Lee's army and sent them west to help Bragg. What he would not do in June he did do in September; the war that could not be settled and must not be lost was exerting irresistible pressure, and for a time the President even thought of the unthinkable and considered sending Lee west in person. This he did not do, but on September 9 General James Longstreet and 12,000 of the best soldiers in Lee's army left their camp along the Rapidan and made their way to the railroad trains that would take them to a destination not marked on any timetable—the field of Chickamauga.
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