Terrible Swift Sword (21 page)

They made constrained suggestions: flank
Joe Johnston out of Manassas, take the army down to York River to move on
Richmond direct, organize the troops into regular army corps for better ease of
movement, assemble a siege train, get water transportation lined up, and so on;
and the Quartermaster Corps was asked how long it would take to get the
steamboats ready. (Quartermaster General Montgomery Meigs reported that it
would take quite a time—four to six weeks, at the least.) Mr. Seward remarked
that the important thing was to win a victory, and a victory at Manassas would
be just as good as one on York River; and after this had gone on through three
meetings McClellan himself got wind of it, found that he was well enough to
attend conferences, and showed up at last, pale, still rather weak, full of
dignity and reserve, casting a spell on his subordinates. Mr. Lincoln said that
if the general-in-chief could function once more he himself would be glad to
let go of the controls, and when Secretary Chase applied pressure McClellan
said that he had a plan and a time schedule but that he would prefer not to
talk about them at a meeting as large and (though he did not say it quite this
way) as disorganized as this one. The business flickered out, finally, with
the President saying that he would adjourn the meeting. Everyone's feathers had
been ruffled and nothing much had been done, and the President went back to
letter-writing.

On
January 13, the final day of this unique series of conferences, Mr. Lincoln
wrote to Halleck and Buell, trying to tell them what his notions of strategy
were. He pointed out that he was giving no orders; these would come (no doubt)
from McClellan; he was just trying to show how his mind was working.

"I state my general idea of this
war to be that we have the
greater
numbers,
and the enemy has the
greater
facility
of concentrating forces upon points of collision," he wrote; "that we
must fail, unless we can find some way of making
our
advantage an overmatch for his; and that this
can only be done by menacing him with superior forces at
different
points, at the
same
time; so that we can safely attack, one, or
both, if he makes no change; and if he
weakens
one
to
strengthen
the
other, forbear to attack the strengthened one, but seize and hold the weakened
one, gaining so much."
⁹

What
the two generals thought of this is not on record, but the fact remains that Mr.
Lincoln had been doing his homework. He had got, after nine months of war, a
good grasp of the basic strategic principle that would have to guide him, and
although nobody in Richmond saw his letter it got a strange, corroborative echo
from that city in the very week that he wrote it.

There were anxious men in Richmond as
well as in Washington this winter, the cause of the anxiety being not so much
the inaction of generals as the strange conduct of state governors. Federal
operations along the exposed Atlantic coast had created much alarm, and
governors of seacoast states were demanding that weapons and men which had been
sent to the Virginia theater be returned at once so that the coast could be
defended. This impressed Jefferson Davis as a recipe for certain disaster, and
Attorney General Bragg wrote in his diary: "The President was much
irritated and declared if such was to be the course of the States toward the
Government the carrying on of the war was an impossibility—that we had better
make terms as soon as we could, and those of us who had halters around our
necks had better get out of the Country as speedily as possible." Mr.
Bragg added that the President seemed even gloomier now than he had been in
December, and he remarked wistfully: "I wish he was dictator."

It seemed to Mr. Bragg that the
Confederacy had been saved, so far, only because the Federal government did not
press its advantages—"we profit more from their blunders and want of
spirit to use the great advantages they have, than from our own feeble means
and good conduct"—but he did not think this was going to go on much
longer, and he confessed: "The plan of the enemy seems to be to attack us
at many points simultaneously and thus preventing our sending aid to any given
point, they outnumbering us at every point of attack. If they now fail, they
can hardly make another such effort—But will they fail? or if they partially
succeed now, what is to be the effect? It is vain to disguise the fact that we
are in imminent peril.
...
A few days
may
decide our
fate. God be with us and help us."
¹⁰

Like President Lincoln, Mr. Bragg lacked
a military education. But he did know what could defeat the Confederacy, and
he saw it precisely as Mr. Lincoln saw it. What he feared most was what Mr.
Lincoln was trying to get his generals to do, and if neither General Buell nor
General Hal-leck could quite get the President's point Mr. Bragg would have got
it perfectly. What Mr. Lincoln had said he had said, using slightly different
words.

The two men knew what they were talking
about. The Federal government had at last reached the point where it could
apply an unendurable pressure. At Hampton Roads it had assembled a strong
amphibious expedition—15,000 soldiers on transports, with assorted gunboats to
lead the way —and just when General McClellan's subordinates were trying to
explain what might be done with the Army of the Potomac this expedition sailed
out past the Virginia Capes, bound for Hatteras Inlet. It would enter the North
Carolina sounds, break up Confederate installations there, occupy the mainland
and repeat the Port Royal thrust at a point much closer to the Confederate
capital. At the same time an even stronger expedition was being made ready to
attack New Orleans itself, largest city in all the South, and the foundries at
Pittsburgh were casting a score of big mortars and 30,000 shells to batter in
the forts which defended that place; and on January 20 a wiry, elderly naval
officer, Flag Officer David Glasgow Farragut, was given his orders for this
force. Finally, parts of the western armies were on the move at last. A
division of Buell's troops under General George Thomas was laboriously marching
along the muddy Kentucky roads, through cold rains, to attack Confederate
Zollicoffer's force which anchored the eastern end of Sidney Johnston's undermanned
defensive line. General Grant, at the same time, was moving south from Cairo to
menace the western end of that line, while Federal gunboats were prowling up
the Tennessee River to see whether Confederate defenses there were as strong as
they were supposed to be. (They would discover that they were not, and much
would come of the discovery.) Slowly but surely the war was getting off of dead
center.

As
a matter of fact, the Federal government had been losing less time than ardent
patriots supposed. What was being lost was more serious: understanding between
the civilians who were running the government and the professional soldiers
who were running the government's armies. The notion that the civilians should
leave military matters to military men was dissolving. With this there was the
beginning of a corrosive suspicion: might it not be that a general who moved
slowly or ineffectively was not so much incompetent as disloyal? The
professionals were being isolated and they were feeling their isolation; the
messages they got from Washington were beginning to look like outrageous
interference on the part of the politicians (who were responsible for all
failures), and it would presently be easy for generals in their turn to
question the motives of the men from whom their orders came. On January 20,
General Halleck spoke his mind in a letter to General McClellan.

Writing
as one professional to another, General Halleck said that the war so far had
been conducted "upon what may be called pepperbox strategy." As he
had tried to explain to President Lincoln, Federal forces were out on the rim
of a circle and the Confederates were inside the circle: "We cannot expect
to strike any great blow, for he can concentrate his forces on any one point
sooner than we can ours." And the general voiced his lament: "I take
it for granted, general, that what has heretofore been done has been the result
of political policy rather than military strategy, and that the want of success
on our part is attributable to the politicians rather than to the
generals."
¹¹

Like
everyone else General Halleck was feeling frustrated, which led him to see
things as they were not. The Federal government had lost certain battles, to be
sure, but it had won advantages that were of vast importance. Missouri and
western Virginia had been gained, the border was in hand, the southern seacoast
had been broken open and was about to be broken still further; and General Halleck
and General Buell, bedeviled by a politically minded President, were at last
being driven to begin the operations that would open the Mississippi Valley and
push the Confederate frontier down below the southern border of Tennessee. The
political policy which General Halleck was deriding was in fact justifying itself.
Out on the rim, the Federals were starting to do exactly what Mr. Bragg was
afraid they would do—put the heat on in so many places that the weaker power
could not successfully resist. Albert Sidney Johnston was viewing the Federal
war effort as a methodical preparation "to carry on the war against the
Confederacy with a purpose as inflexible as malignant," and he could see
no hope except to "convert our country into one vast camp of instruction
for the field of every man able to bear arms." Just before the end of the
year 1861 he had notified the Governor of Tennessee that to defend the vital
center of his line he could count on hardly more than 17,000 men.
¹²

As professionals, Mr. Lincoln's generals
were falling short in their own field of competence; they were failing to see
that they had gained a great advantage and that it was supremely important to
press the advantage while it still existed. On top of this they were quite
unable to realize that the political reasons for energetic action were
irresistible. General McClellan had been helped into his position as
general-in-chief by the very men who now were most insistent on action; he had
taken office, in short, on the implicit understanding that he would make things
happen quickly. In addition, the war

was not being fought
in a vacuum. There was Europe to think about.

The
administration right now was being warned that British intervention—so
narrowly averted by the settlement of the Trent affair—was highly probable
unless the North began to win decisive victories.

From
London, Mr. Adams had written early in January that "one clear victory at
home might save us a foreign war," and on January 24 he amplified the warning
in a letter to Secretary Seward: "I will venture to say that the course of
events in America during the next six weeks must in great measure determine the
future of the Government of the United States. For it is they and they only
which can control the manner in which foreign nations will make up their minds
hereafter to consider them. And in this sense the absence of action will be
almost equally decisive." From far-off St. Petersburg, Minister Cassius
Clay wrote that Prince Gortcha-koff had warned him that a decisive reverse
would quickly lead England to make common cause with the South, and he said:
"Nothing but quick and effective success will save us from foreign
enemies." Washington, Mr. Clay concluded, ought to prepare for war with
England "as an inevitable result of any reverses which would prevent a
subjection of the South before the 1st of April next."
¹³

That these diplomats may have been
taking too dark a view is beside the point. This was the advice Mr. Lincoln was
getting, and if he was impatient with generals reluctant to strike hard and
quickly there was reason for it. Back of his clumsy White House conferences and
his almost frantic messages to the generals in the west lay the conviction
that time was running out. The government could win the war if it struck
immediately. If it did not, the future was all but unimaginable.

CHAPTER
THREE

The
Military
Paradox

1.
Decision in Kentucky

A
year later
the
march could have been made in half the time, with a third of the equipment. Now
the soldiers were learning their trade, and they gained wisdom by doing things
the hard way. When General Thomas marched his division out of its camp at
Lebanon, Kentucky, to go down to the Cumberland River and attack General
Zollicoffer's Confederates, he had nearly one hundred miles to go; the way
went roundabout through the hills, and as the cold January rains continued the
roads grew very bad indeed so that the little army moved at a crawl. General
Thomas had some 5000 men in his column, each regiment had thirteen baggage
wagons, the mud was axle-deep, and the niarch went on for more than two
weeks—it took eight days to cover the last forty miles. Boys who had not yet been
hardened to march and sleep in the winter rain fell sick, many of them died,
many more were sent home with medical discharges; an officer in the 2nd
Minnesota estimated after the war that this march cost the army 20 per cent of
its numbers.
¹
But the men who were not sick kept on going, and,
shortly after the middle of January, Thomas had his troops in camp near Logan's
Cross Roads, ready for battle.

Zollicoffer's
Confederates were camped on the north side of the Cumberland, six or eight miles
away, in a bad spot— a swollen river at their backs and the enemy in their
front, no room to maneuver, no good way to retreat if things went badly. More
than a month earlier General Zollicoffer, who had been guarding Cumberland Gap
seventy miles to the southeast, had moved up to the town of Mill Springs,
safely south of the river, so that he could keep an eye on the Federals, whom
he suspected of planning to march into eastern Tennessee. Being both zealous
and inexperienced he had ignored General Johnston's warning and had come north
of the river, and when Richmond, worried by this move, sent Major General
George B. Crittenden down to take top command Zollicoffer talked him into
holding the exposed position now threatened by the Federals.

Crittenden
was a West Pointer, who had fought for Texas in the days of the Lone Star
Republic, had served in the Mexican War and had campaigned against the Indians
on the frontier; a good man who had made a good record but who did not, in this
month of January, have any luck at all. He was son of the famous John J.
Crittenden, who had tried to work out a compromise to avert war just a year
ago, and his younger brother, Thomas Crittenden, was now a brigadier general in
the Union Army; the divided sentiments which tore Kentucky apart had split the
compromiser's own family. As the Federals neared Logan's Cross Roads,
Crittenden planned to stay where he was and await attack, but the unending
rains led him to change his mind. A Union division under Brigadier General
Albin Schoepf was known to be posted at no great distance from Logan's Cross
Roads, on the far side of a stream known as Fishing Creek, and it seemed likely
that the rains would have made this stream impassable, so Crittenden concluded
to move out and smash General Thomas while Schoepf was immobilized. In the
pre-mid-night blackness of the night of January 18 he and Zollicoffer got their
men into column and moved forward to make a surprise attack at dawn.

It
was a bad night to march with inexperienced troops. The roads were almost
impossible, the artillery got hopelessly mired down, and the infantry
floundered inexpertly along in the downpour, moving with nightmare slowness. It
was daylight before the advance guard stumbled up to the Yankee picket line,
and only two Confederate regiments were on hand, the rest being far behind. No
surprise was possible; the advance regiments got into line of battle as best
they could (while the Federal drums beat Thomas's sleeping men out of their
bivouacs) and the battle began.

Right at first, the Federals gave
ground. But Thomas was able to get his men into position quickly, and a great
many of the Confederates were armed with old-fashioned flintlock muskets which
could not be fired in the rain; and just as the battle became general,
Zollicoffer was killed. (Pathetically nearsighted, he had ridden up to a Union
regiment under the impression that it was one of his own, and he was shot dead
before he could get away.) News of his death demoralized the Confederates,
whose spirits had been badly dampened anyway by the miserable night march, and
just then Thomas struck with a massive counterattack. The Confederates resisted
briefly, then broke and ran for it, with the Federals in full pursuit. By
midday, Crittenden's army simply dissolved. Most of the fugitives managed to
get back across the river, but they had to abandon their artillery, their
wounded, their camp with all of its supplies, their wagon train, and the body
of the lamented Zollicoffer. For the immediate future this army was out of
existence, and when the depressing news reached Tennessee the unhappy
Crittenden found that he was being blamed for everything. It was charged that
he had been drunk, which was not true at all, and his reputation, like his
army, evaporated.
²

It had been a small
battle, as such things went—each side probably brought about 4000 men to the
field—but it was of much importance. The right end of Albert Sidney Johnston's
line had been destroyed, once and for all; the actual casualty list had not
been excessive, but for the time being at least he had lost 4000 men whom he
could by no means afford to lose, and as a Tennessee patriot wrote to Mr.
Davis, "there is now no impediment whatever but bad roads and natural
obstacles to prevent the enemy from entering East Tennessee and destroying the
railroads and putting East Tennesssee in a flame of revolution."
³
For future reference, too, it might have been noted that General George Thomas,
who looked so ponderous, could strike swiftly and powerfully once battle had
been joined. His whole campaign, as a matter of fact, had been well handled,
despite the wastage of the hard march down from Lebanon. Far from Washington,
the Union Army had come up with one very solid soldier.

So
the North had something to cheer about, and from the War Department there came
a formal note of congratulation, issued, "by order of the
President," by the Secretary of War, praising the troops for their courage
and fidelity and going on to underline the moral: "The purpose of the war
is to attack, pursue and destroy a rebellious enemy, and to deliver the country
from danger menaced by traitors. Alacrity, daring, courageous spirit and
patriotic zeal on all occasions, and under every circumstance, are expected
from the Army of the United States."
⁴
This of course was
routine. What made the bulletin notable was the name signed at the bottom:
Edwin M. Stanton, Secretary of War.

Mr.
Lincoln had made the first change in his cabinet. Simon Cameron was out:
Cameron, with the unhappy reputation and the face of a sad, rather sensitive
fox, who had pressured his way into the cabinet and now was pressured out by
the intolerable demands of war. His departure surprised no one and apparently
pleased everybody except Cameron himself. Richard Henry Dana, Jr., wrote that
"the relief of getting rid of Cameron is unspeakable," and predicted
that the stock market would go up. Thaddeus Stevens, who had feuded with
Cameron for years and had a low opinion of the man's integrity, grunted
sardonically when he learned that Cameron was to be the new Minister to Russia,
and remarked: "Send word to the Czar to bring in his things of
nights."
⁶

Cameron's trouble was much like the
trouble that had befallen General Fremont in Missouri. He had been responsible
for the spending of enormous sums of money, under circumstances which made it
inevitable that there would be a good deal of graft, and he had neither the
administrative ability to run the business efficiently nor the personal
standing that would induce people to overlook the inevitable wastage and
corruption. As a matter of fact the huge new armies were by now fairly well
supplied and armed, and the flagrant abuses in purchasing (which Congress had
already started to look into) apparently never enriched Cameron personally; but
it had been obvious for some time that if the government proposed to win the
war it had better get a new head for the War Department, and Cameron's
last-minute attempt to win abolitionist support by urging the use of Negro
troops had done no more than harden Mr. Lincoln's determination to replace him.
⁶
Now Stanton was in his place, his appointment confirmed by the Senate on
January 15.

Stanton
brought to the War Department everything Cameron lacked—executive ability of a
high order, much driving energy, a hound dog's nose for tracking down
irregularities and a furious insistence on removing them when they had been
found. He was rude, dictatorial, abusive, a man who could be outrageously blunt
and incomprehensibly devious at the same time. When he chose to be (which was
not often) he could be charming. Fanny Seward felt that he had a cheery manner,
a merry twinkle in his eye and an air of hearty warmth, and Charles A. Dana,
the newspaper editor who later would become an assistant Secretary of War, wrote
that "Stanton had the loveliest smile I ever saw on a human face" and
felt that he was most companionable.
⁷
Not many people saw him this
way, and before the winter was out there would be many who felt that they had
been profoundly deceived by him.

Among these would be
General McClellan. When Stanton took office McClellan considered him one of his
best friends. Stanton went around to see McClellan the day his appointment as
Secretary of War was announced, saying that if he took the job it would be
solely on McClellan's account: Did McClellan want him to take it? McClellan
assured him that he did, writing to his friend S. L. M. Barlow that
"Stanton's appointment was a most unexpected piece of good fortune,"
and Barlow in turn assured Stanton that "nothing since the war began with
the exception of your appointment & that of General McClellan has seemed to
me to be
right."
⁸
During
the fall, when the struggle to replace Scott was going on, McClellan had found
Stanton his most trusted counselor. Once, when President Lincoln was more than
usually a burden to him, McClellan wrote that he had taken refuge in Stanton's
house "to dodge all enemies in the shape of 'browsing' Presidents,
etc." At that time the general felt that the most unfortunate thing about
Stanton was "the extreme virulence with which he abused the
President"; he never spoke of him, McClellan said, except as "the
original gorilla."

In
other words, Stanton was typed as a good conservative Democrat, taking office
at a time when the abolitionists badly needed curbing. In December, Barlow had
written to him, predicting that "the whole abolition pack" would soon
be snapping at McClellan's heels and remarking that this might be just as well;
sooner or later the Democrats, the reasonable and responsible men who could
fight for the Union without running a fever over slavery, would have to take
control of the government's war policy, and the more rapidly the abolitionists
discredited themselves, the better off everyone would be. Ward Hill Lamon, the
good friend whom Lincoln had made marshal of the District of Columbia, feared
that the anti-slavery faction would presently be attacking the President, and
to a friend back home he was writing dolefully: "I wish you and some
other honest men from Illinois would come here and go with me away down on the
banks of the old Potomac and there sit down on a moss covered log and help me
God Damn these Abolitionists—for if they ever get hold of the reins of this
Govt the Govt is gone to Hell by a very large majority."
⁹

What Stanton might have done if he had
entered the war at
a
quieter time is an open question. He did come
in, however, just when the hinges were turning. His temper fitted the
requirements of the moment: he would be a dynamic Secretary of War, and he
would begin by setting a new pace for his old friend General McClellan.

Journalist Donn Piatt, an intimate of
Stanton, asserted after the war that he talked with the new Secretary at the
time of the appointment and asked
him
what
he was going to do in his new job. "Do?" cried Stanton. "I
intend to accomplish three things. I will make Abe Lincoln President of the
United States. I will force this man McClellan to fight or throw up; and last
but not least I will pick Lorenzo Thomas up with
a
pair of tongs and
drop him from the nearest window." (Lorenzo Thomas was Adjutant General
of the Army, a crusty old paper-shuffler who was widely considered a
substantial handicap to the war effort. Oddly enough, he turned out to be
Stanton-proof; he never was removed, serving in his high position to the end of
the war and beyond.) Piatt's understanding of the declaration, "I will
make Abe Lincoln President" was that the new Secretary intended to teach
all generals that they were subject to the orders of the civil authorities. The
President was commander-in-chief: this, the Army must understand, was a
statement to be taken literally.
¹⁰