On this blog you are invited to read both volumes of The Awful Arithmetic.

Novels available at Kindle/Amazon, and Smashwords, by same author:



Allegheny Road
Amazon/Kindle
http://www.amazon.com/dpB005AHOIEM

Smashwords
http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/75796



The Marundi Affair
Amazon/Kindle

Smashwords
http//www.smashwords.com/books/view/7549



Alamo Square

Smashwords
http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/90006



El Chorrillo
Amazon/Kindle
http://www.amazon/dp/BOO5U81VKK

Smashwords
http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/95188

Note: On the companion blog to this one, Civil War Novel Allegheny Road http://allegheyrd.blogspot.com/, the complete novel Allegheny Road may be read.

Parts I and II

THE AWFUL ARITHMETIC VOLUME I

We lost fifty per cent more men than did the enemy, [in the battle of Fredericksburg] and yet there is sense in the awful arithmetic propounded by Mr. Lincoln. He says that if the same battle were to be fought over again, every day, through a week of days, with the same relative results, the army under Lee would be wiped out to its last man, the Army of the Potomac would still be a mighty host, the war would be over, the Confederacy gone, and peace would be won at a smaller cost of life than it will be if the week of lost battles must be dragged out through yet another year of camps and marches, and of deaths in hospitals rather than upon the field. No general yet found can face the arithmetic, but the end of the war will be at hand when he shall be discovered.

William O. Stoddard, secretary to President Lincoln

THE AWFUL ARITHMETIC: VOLUME 1

INTRODUCTION

No other period of American history invokes the passion that the Civil War continues to generate. Almost a hundred fifty years after the last surrender, the war has not yet begun to lose its allure for readers, students, historians, researchers, tourists, collectors, re-enactors, or audiences of visual media presentations.

Anthropologists still comb the sites of battles, sifting the very soil for any remnants of equipment or even bones that may still somehow be discovered; historical investigators still pore through the records of museums, private collections, and any other location where documents might be found which will lend new insights to the actions of warriors, generals, politicians, even presidents, in their conduct of the war; readers at every level of interest thirst for the latest output about the war, both non-fiction and fiction, and each generation inherits this infatuation from those that preceded.

How long can those enamored of the Civil War, at all levels of expertise, from casual to historian, expect to find new material, either to read and view or to write about and discover? This is a common question that looms over any human endeavor, from historical study to scientific research, and the answer is not as simple as might appear. The immediate urge is to say that when all facts have been uncovered, nothing new will emerge. In science, this is far from true because much of the work of scientists is to convert what is known into a deeper understanding of what is not known. Einstein, as an example, was not an experimenter. Most of the information he used and worked with involved observation of natural phenomena rather than data found through experimental actions, yet he discovered powerful natural principles by mathematical arrangement of data.

The point is that much of the advance of scientific fact does not come with the physical discovery of information but rather from the piecing together of what is known and the interpretation of what that collected and analyzed data informs the investigator, which in turn leads to new knowledge and understanding, which can then be employed by other investigators.

In the case of the physical sciences, long after the last information from a site is taken away and laid out in rooms and on tables, reconstructed where possible, further understanding of the subject will emerge; as more and more investigators obtain access to what may originally be a limited amount of evidence, even more understanding can emerge.

In the case of a historical investigation of such events as the Civil War, long after all the information, in the form of documentation, equipment from battle sites, photographs, letters, and so on that relate to the event have been uncovered, investigators will continue to interpret more about the war. From that, even more understanding can emerge.

The question asked above, of how long new material will be available for historians, writers, investigators concerning the Civil War should more properly be phrased: how long can new discoveries, interpretations, understandings, and facts about the Civil War be derived from the information already available and from information still hidden away, before the war will be known to the absolute most perfect degree that human beings are capable of achieving?

No one knows that answer because if it were known, the point would have already been reached when that best approximation of perfect knowledge had been achieved.

The simple conclusion to be drawn from this is that the Civil War remains and will continue to remain, for as far into the future as anyone knows, a viable subject of discussion, investigation, and study, with humans seeking what humans seek about all things: the closest approximation to the total truth that may ever be achieved.

Beyond understanding and interpreting everything possible about such things as battles and decisions, another part of the process of discovering all the knowable truths about the Civil War is the need to answer many key questions which still remain unanswered to complete satisfaction, or remain unanswered to any degree. Even as simple a question as that of why the South lost the war has not been resolved to the full satisfaction of most. Some contend that the industrial might of the North foreordained victory; others claim the failure of war planning by the Southern leadership doomed the Confederacy; others still blame the manner in which the commanders in the field conducted the war; and always, high on the list of reasons proposed for the victory by the North was the quantity of manpower available to the Union compared to the Confederacy.

No proof exists that any single one of those causes led to victory by the North/loss of the war by the South.

Some of those causes interlink, such as the fact that the way the South conducted the war hastened the exhaustion of their manpower.

Such is the case for numerous other key questions not yet satisfactorially answered about the Civil War.

The goal of current and future research, or current and future writing about the war, should point toward unraveling such questions and bringing the world as close to the complete truth about every aspect of the Civil War as humanly possible. The present volume is dedicated to that goal.

Part I: The Beginning of the War

Introduction to Part I

If a comprehensive account of the Civil War is to be written, decisions must be made by the author concerning the proper scope of the work. The war itself is such a grand event, so vast, so terrible, yet so compelling, that it commands volumes of its own. Works about the war that truly can be called comprehensive should not be diluted by the inclusion of issues outside the direct subject of the war.

While that is a simple enough statement, the difficulty immediately rises over what issues rightly deserve to be included in coverage of the singular subject of the war. A first agreement that should be universally acceptable is that whatever directly caused the war, as well as whatever directly brought about the onset of the war must be included as part of the war. Beyond that, what should or should not be included in a comprehensive work about the war may be debatable.

Many accounts of the war begin with a discourse on the issues that are often credited with causing and triggering the war. If one is to tighten focus on the war itself, one must consider those causes and determine whether or not they did in fact cause or trigger the war in a direct way. If they did not, they can be disqualified from a detailed account of the war as extraneous. On the other hand, if they can be demonstrated to have caused or to have triggered the war, they should be presented as part of a study of the war.

What is the generally accepted list of issues or subjects that are considered contributory factors in the cause and/or onset of the war?

Slavery is almost always part of such a list. Secession is certainly high on that list. A companion issue to secession is the notion that the war was fought to prevent the breaking of the Union or conversely, to put the Union back together after it was broken.

Other issues considered contributory were the election of Republicans to both Congress and the presidency, chief among those being Abraham; the imposition of taxes and duties upon Southern states that the denizens of those states considered onerous; and the schism in the political, cultural, and social fabric of the nation between the North and South.

One more issue is accepted almost universally as both the direct cause and the actual onset of the war: the attack by Confederate forces on the garrison of Fort Sumter in the harbor of Charleston, North Carolina.

There is yet one more issue, however, which is often omitted in lists of issues that might have contributed to or even caused and triggered the war; however, if one desires to consider all potential causes, this one must be included.

The Southern states, upon claiming to have seceded, seized several federal installations, many of which held weapons and ammunition that had been transferred out of northern federal armories by the Buchanan administration. In addition to those acts, Southern politicians and leaders declared that the new entity calling itself the Confederate States of America, being a separate country and outside the laws of the United States, would not honor taxes and duties owed to the federal government.

Those actions all constituted violations of federal law. They all occurred before Lincoln was elected president, or in modern parlance, they were not “on his watch.” Since his predecessor, Buchanan, had refused to act against the South for those transgressions, Lincoln was not only not obliged to do so upon accepting the office, he was in no position to do so for several reasons. More than that, he was not inclined to do so.

The issue emanating from those actions which must be debated as part of the cause of the war is that by definition, and by Lincoln’s determination, those acts were either insurrectional or revolutionary. Either case was rightly subject to federal action, either of a legal or military character. Lincoln could not deal with the first of those actions retroactively, but the moment he took the oath of office as president, he would be responsible for taking action against future acts of insurrection or rebellion.

Still, the form of action he might take did not yet have to be violent or of a military nature. The perpetrators of those acts could have been arrested or dealt with by law enforcement officials. Buchanan, as has been noted, chose to do nothing. It might be arguable that Lincoln could still have sent marshalls or other officials to arrest the perpetrators well after the fact, and could have likewise attempted to forcibly collect the monies due, but he attempted first, as will be seen, to mollify the rebels, to the point of essentially forgiving their transgressions, yet with the clear warning that future acts of insurrection or rebellion might not be ignored.

The attack on Fort Sumter occurred on Lincoln’s watch and was the most egregious act of rebellion in the entire sequence of events beginning with secession. Still, the United States was not able, physically, to begin war despite the fact that Lincoln described the attack as of such a nature that only an army could now put down the totality of the insurrectional actions of the South. The step he took was the first in making war possible, but did not cause or trigger it.

The reader will no doubt have noticed that out of all the potential causes and triggers for the Civil War that have been cited in this work, no conclusion has been presented as to which of them contributed to the beginning to such a degree that they must be included in the comprehensive study of the war. That is because based on what has been presented thus far, the answers to the question of what caused and what triggered the war have not yet been uncovered. It will be necessary to make that very question the first step in studying the war as a whole.

Chapter One

In determining, or coming to an understanding, of what did cause and what did trigger the war, a process of elimination must be carried out. That is to say, it is feasible to determine what did not cause the war and lead to its beginning, and proceed from there.

Rhetoric alone does not cause or trigger a war. What that means is that it makes no difference who utters such rhetoric, whether it is leaders of nations or common citizens—no amount of mere talk makes a war. Even declarations by the press and the population of a nation that war has begun, will begin, or should begin, do not make a war. Even declaration of intent by a government, meant to serve as a threat of war does not make a war. The most that all such talk usually achieves is to create a fertile climate for war.

All these things occurred in the period between the first claims by Southern states that they had seceded, until the war actually began. What did not occur was an official, legal, constitutional declaration of war by the one entity that had the power to do so, the Congress of the United States.

Even a declaration of war in and of itself does not make a war. It remains no more than a statement of intent until actual combat occurs, but seldom will a government declare war on another unless it has the physical ability to conduct war.

The government of the United States, at the moment that Abraham Lincoln took the oath of office as president, did not have the physical ability to conduct war. If for no other reason than that, all the rhetoric that might have issued forth from all the voices and pens of the nation could not have caused or initated the war at that time.

It would be possible to make a blanket statement, given that truth, to the effect that everything that transpired in the history of the nation up to that point can be eliminated as a cause of the war. To contradict that statement, it would be necessary to demonstrate that the existence of slavery, both in the seceding Southern states, as well as loyal Northern states could have caused war to begin. Or it would be necessary to demonstrate that secession, which began late in 1860, could cause war to begin in March of 1861, or later.

One by one, the other issues cited as causes of the war would have to be demonstrated to have done so in a delayed fashion.

The first subject to tackle in eliminating some of the issues is that of why the United States government could not have fought a war at the time of Lincoln’s arrival in Washington, and up to at least the time when he took the oath of office, on March 4, 1861.

Based on the US army’s historical record, at the time of Lincoln’s inauguration, the federal army consisted of only about 16,000 men. That was a peacetime force, a force down-sized since the Mexican War, because no serious threats to the United States existed that required a large standing army. Those 16,000 men were more than enough to quell what small troubles bothered the nation, such as local rebellions over laws or taxes, or disquiet caused by interactions between settlers and Native American tribes, and some unrest in California.

This army of 16,000 was not gathered together in one body, it was scattered all over the country, many of the men posted out in the west. This was still a few years before the Transcontinental Railroad would be completed, so the only way for troops on the West Coast to reach the East, where the war would begin, was either by movement across land, or by boat, usually down to Panama, where no canal yet existed and a perilous crossing to the Atlantic side must be made. Either way, troops could not be gathered into a single body for weeks after the first call for them was made.

As to the federal army, not only was it scattered, but it was dissipating, as men who sympathized with the South began crossing over, or in many cases, took over the units for the South, chasing away those in uniform who supported the Union.

Bottom line: Lincoln simply did not have an army with which to wage war at the moment he became commander in chief.

On its own merits, that fact eliminates all the issues that occurred up to his inauguration as either the cause or the source of the beginning of the war, since war itself was physically impossible until then. Argument might be made, however, that some of the earlier issues set up a chain of events leading to war, or that war might have occurred because of them without direct effect.

With that possibility still in play, it is important at this juncture to consider the opinion of the one man who had the power, from March 4, 1861 on, to either cause or initiate the Civil War. Without his cooperation, war could not be fought, whether the South desired war or not. That man, of course, is Lincoln, who, as commander-in-chief of the federal armed forces as of March 4, could launch or withhold the armies against the South, if, that is, such armies existed.

That being the case, his opinion as to what reasons he would have for starting a war are all-important.

Another argument could be made that had Congress declared war after March 4, Lincoln would have been the one who must execute it if it were to be fought, in his role as chief executive. Congress, however, never declared war on the South at any time, in part because constitutional issues with regard to declaring war on a section of the same country would have created a crisis. The issue of declaration of war can be set aside from this point on, and the discussion returns to Lincoln’s intention and opinion about the issue of war with the South.

Much of the evidence needed to ascertain Lincoln’s intention and opinion on this subject can be gleaned from his first inaugural address. Anything said before that must be relegated to the realm of hearsay, inadmissible in court. In fact, the inaugural address itself is not a binding document, but it is an official one, and must be accepted as a clear statement of a given president’s program. If a president’s actions of the future comport with the words of his inauguration, it may be accepted as an authoratative statement even in retrospect, and Lincoln’s acts did fit the words of his speech made that day in March.

(The full text of his inaugural address is available in this volume, as Appendix I.)

As for slavery as a cause for war, never mind a trigger, Lincoln dismissed the issue by pointing out, in the speech, that he had always “disavowed any intention to interfere with slavery where it already existed.” If he had no intention of interfering with slavery, then he would not fight a war over it. And his future actions, the Emancipation Proclamation notwithstanding, given its actual provisions, supported this declaration.

Furthermore, he dismissed secession as a cause of war by saying, “It follows from these views that no State, upon its own mere motion, can lawfully get out of the Union—that resolves and ordinances to that effect are legally void....” If states could not leave the Union, then Lincoln had concluded that none had in fact left the Union, and therefore, secession had not occurred, except in the minds of those Southerners who had issued the “resolves” and “ordinances,” which Lincoln set aside as legally void. If secession had not occurred, there was not only no reason to start a war over it, it would be impossible in fact to start a war over it.

That entirely disqualifies secession, per se, as a cause of the Civil War, much less as the event that started it. The next issue to be dealt with as a cause of war would be the breaking of the Union, or the need to force states back into it.

Lincoln specifically addressed this as well: “I therefore consider that in view of the Constitution and the laws, the Union is unbroken....”

If the Union was unbroken, war could not be fought to repair it, or fought in order to punish those who severed it. One more issue disqualified.

At that point, however, Lincoln began to delve into issues that did have bearing on the source of the war, because the rider he attached to the last statement above, read, “....and to the extent of my ability I shall take care, as the Constitution itself expressly enjoins upon me, that the laws of the Union be faithfully executed in all the States. Doing this I deem to be only a simple duty on my part; and I shall perform it, so far as practicable, unless my rightful masters, the American people, shall withhold the requisite means, or in some authoritative manner, direct the contrary. I trust this will not be regarded as a menace, but only as the declared purpose of the Union that will constitutionally defend and maintain itself.”

This was a powerful statement, with regard to a cause for war. It was not the ultimate statement but it pointed toward what would develop as a cause for at least the preparation of armed response. Rather than the breaking of the Union, Lincoln was concerned with the fact that several of the Southern states had egregiously violated federal law, and in fact, remained in a condition of lawlessness in that they were now refusing to pay monies owed to the government. That was not a shooting offense, any more than a modern day army would be sent to collect taxes of a corporation or individual refusing to pay.

As a further rider to that same statement, however, he added, “....and that acts of violence, within any State or States, against the authority of the United States, are insurrectionary or revolutionary, according to circumstances.”

This was a key point, no matter how subtly Lincoln slipped it in. He did not immediately elaborate on his reason for mentioning that fact, before carrying on, but he had finally broached the issue that would provide him the foundation, with a further push by the South, for re-arming the Union, the key step before war could be initiated.

Even having made these points, having laid the groundwork for future action, Lincoln did not threaten force yet. Instead, he declared that his intention to uphold the laws should not be regarded as a menace, in so doing, expressing his disinterest in using force even in the face of insurrection and egregious violation of federal law in months past.

This is another key point: if Lincoln was not willing to use force to punish, or rectify, lawbreaking that had already occurred, then those acts of insurrection and lawbreaking could also be added to the other issues that were now disqualified as causes of the Civil War. Only what transpired from the moment of his taking the oath of office (which in that era, occurred before, not after the swearing in of the president,) could be considered candidate events for causing the war.

Lincoln continued to nail down this point, that he was not ready to use force even after the South had conducted what he was prepared to call insurrectionary actions, saying, in referring to the execution of federal laws, “In doing this there needs to be no bloodshed or violence; and there shall be none, unless it be forced upon the national authority. The power confided to me will be used to hold, occupy, and possess the property and places belonging to the government, and to collect the duties and imposts; but beyond what may be necessary for these objects, there will be no invasion—no using of force against or among the people anywhere. Where hostility to the United States in any interior locality, shall be so great and so universal, as to prevent competent resident citizens from holding the Federal offices, there will be no attempt to force obnoxious strangers among the people for that object. While the strict legal right may exist in the government to enforce the exercise of these offices, the attempt to do so would be so irritating, and so nearly impracticable with all, that I deem it better to forego, for the time, the uses of such offices.”

There it was, he would not act in any way beyond upholding the laws, and if the South put up too much resistance, he would not press the issue by forcing outsiders upon them in the necessary offices, at least “for the time.”

With all that had transpired over, one could be inclusive and say the entire history of the United States, up to March 4, 1861, the date of the inauguration, and everything that had occurred as part of that history, must be disqualified as causes of the war; only what developed after that date can be considered as the cause.

On April 12, the guns of Charleston opened fire on a federal installation, forcing the garrison to surrender. This was the first such action, the taking of a “place” as Lincoln called it, during his watch. The world waited to see if he would allow it to happen without any kind of retaliation, and if he did, his effectiveness as a president would be destroyed. Yet he could not do too much. The army was still too small and too scattered to act in any meaningful way, to punish the Confederacy, yet something must be done or he would be a lame duck president from that time onward.

Lincoln, however, had foreseen such a possibility. He had known, on his way to Washington from Springfield, Illinois, in his journey to take up the presidency, that the situation with regard to Fort Sumter was volatile. In fact, the South had even fired on federal ships previously dispatched by Buchanan to rescue the garrison, and Lincoln had privately suggested that if he did nothing in retaliation, Buchanan himself ought to have been hanged for treason.

While Lincoln did not have an army with which to start war against the Confederacy over Sumter, he soon would. On his way, in that rail journey from Springfield, Lincoln had met with governors of Northern states and had arranged for them to begin building up their state militias with an eye to “federalizing” them, that is, converting them unit by unit into elements of a national army.

Lincoln’s response, therefore, to the attack on Fort Sumter, which occurred on April 12, was to make a call, on April 15, for 75,000 troops to be brought into federal service.

The proclamation, while not a direct military response, was the kind of response necessary if he was to maintain credibility as president. The call for 75,000 men stirred up the leadership of the South almost as much as would have happened if Lincoln had possessed such an army already and had sent it forward as an invasion force into the heart of the South. That rendered the proclamation a sufficient response to maintain Lincoln’s credibility as national leader, not a lame duck.

In fact, the South, and many people in the North, would describe the proclamation as a declaration of war. When one reads the phrasing of it, however, no such intent can be gleaned from it.

The text of the proclamation:

Whereas the laws of the United States have been for some time past, and now are opposed, and the execution thereof obstructed, in the States of South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Florida, Mississippi, Louisiana and Texas, by combinations too powerful to be suppressed by the ordinary course of judicial proceedings, or by the powers vested in the Marshals by law,

Now therefore, I, Abraham Lincoln, President of the United States, in virtue of the power in me vested by the Constitution, and the laws, have thought fit to call forth, and hereby do call forth, the militia of the several States of the Union, to the aggregate number of seventy-five thousand, in order to suppress said combinations, and to cause the laws to be duly executed. The details, for this object, will be immediately communicated to the State authorities through the War Department...

I deem it proper to say that the first service assigned to the forces hereby called forth will probably be to re-possess the forts, places, and property which have been seized from the Union; and in every event, the utmost care will be observed, consistently with the objects aforesaid, to avoid any devastation, any destruction of, or interference with, property, or any disturbance of peaceful citizens in any part of the country.

And I hereby command the persons composing the combinations aforesaid to disperse, and retire peaceably to their respective abodes within twenty days from this date.

This was clearly not a declaration of war, it was only a declaration of intent to suppress rebellion, and to do so with the least force necessary. Certainly, while for a federal army to “re-possess” positions the hostile “combinations” of the South had seized would not be as peaceful as a church social, it was absolutely within the rights and power of the president to call for without a declaration of war at any level. Let it be stated clearly that if Lincoln had been able to actually dispatch that army (which would almost certainly have been separated into several smaller forces and directed to each site of insurrection,) such an action might well have triggered, and could have been cited as the cause of the Civil War, whether Lincoln intended to start a war or not.

Just as clearly, it must be stated that no such thing occurred, and it could not occur. One reason is that by the time the states which would provide their militias to become this new army could do so, other events would develop that would completely divert the new army from the mission Lincoln suggested in the proclamation above.

A second reason Lincoln could not directly invade the South and “suppress” the insurrection is one that is almost never explained in most accounts of the Civil War, yet it is a tremendously important factor in explaining why the war finally did began, where it began, and the manner in which it and when it did begin. And in fact, this factor actually begins to point toward the real cause of the Civil War and the manner in which it was set in motion.

Therefore, to understand the cause of the war, it is necessary to investigate this issue.

The second reason that war was impossible for weeks, a reason virtually never cited in discussions of the war, is the fact that by April 12, only seven states had declared their independence and joined the Confederacy. Those states were South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Florida, and Texas. Notably missing were Virginia, North Carolina, Arkansas, Tennessee, and Kentucky, among slave states reckoned to be part of the South. On a map of the United States, the gap between Washington, D.C., and South Carolina is striking. Two large states fill the space, and as of April 12, both were undecided whether to secede or remain loyal to the Union. Had one or both remained in the Union, federal armies, had they existed, could have passed through those states on their way to punish South Carolina, and then to carry on against the other rebellious states claiming to form the Confederacy.

On the other hand, had Virginia and North Carolina already declared their independence, federal armies could have “invaded” them, fighting whatever resistance consisting of home-grown militias the states might have brought forward to contest the invasion, probably joined by forces from the rest of the Confederacy in support. In that way, the war might have begun in the southern reaches of Virginia or upper North Carolina.

Because the two states did not make a decision about their loyalties for some time after Sumter, neither the Union nor the Confederacy would cross their borders with armies out of fear of pushing the states into the enemy camp.

Those four states, in other words, formed no man lands. Why, the obvious question follows, could armies from either side not cross those states?

The answer is that had either side sent an army into one of those states, uninvited, the possibility existed that the act would push the given state into the opposite camp. In fact, this would be the case in Kentucky, when a very weak penetration of the state’s border by a small Confederate force caused the legislature of the state to declare for the Union.

By April 15, 1861, the date of Lincoln’s proclamation calling up the 75,000 man army, seven states had seceded, but the Confederacy desperately needed more members. Virginia and Tennessee were especially desired because of either their industrial capabilities, which were sorely lacking in the rest of the South, or their resources, especially Tennessee. Both sides, the North and South, feared that if their armies invaded one of these states, that state would join the other side. Neither side, Union or Confederacy, would take the risk by sending armies into those undeclared states until they made a clear decision, either to secede or stay loyal to the Union.

In his travels from Springfield to Washington, and even after arriving in Washington, Lincoln had attempted to negotiate with leaders in Virginia, to seek a compromise to keep that state from ever against the Union. At times, it seemed possible a deal could be struck, because a fairly significant part of the Virginia population actually opposed secession, a part of the population which did not own many slaves. In fact, such a large segment did oppose secession that by 1863, the entire section of the state that was previously nicknamed “western Virginia” would become a state of its own, as West Virginia, and remain loyal to the Union.

Furthermore, part of Lincoln’s negotiations over Fort Sumter, which will be covered later, involved those attempts to woo Virginia into staying loyal. Lincoln even offered to give up Fort Sumter if the Virginia leadership would promise never to secede, but they would not do so.

The point of this is that if Lincoln was willing to have given up Fort Sumter to save Virginia, he certainly would not send armies into Virginia in order to reach South Carolina (by way of North Carolina, which stood in the way and which had also not yet seceded,) if it meant Virginia would immediately secede in protest.

This factor, the four key states not yet seceded, and their position as a roadblock for Union troops to invade the rebellious South, is generally ignored as the second reason the war had not and could not have started any sooner than the time those states made their decisions as to loyalty.

(If one wonders why federal armies could not invade by ship, a simple reason stands as answer. Neither side had navies strong enough to face the shore batteries the other side could have used to repel invasion by sea. Or for that matter, invade by river, meaning, chiefly, the Mississippi and Ohio.)

It is impossible to over-emphasize how important this factor—the undecided states standing in the way—is in the history of the Civil War. Imagine, each side building armies but the armies could not come within visual range of each other, never mind shooting range. In simple terms, until the disposition of North Carolina, Virginia, Tennessee, and Kentucky was settled, the Civil War could not begin.

This is not to say that the cause of the Civil War was the ultimate determination of any pair of those states, but the actions of one of them would in fact trigger the war.

Chapter Two

The manner by which Virginia, not South Carolina, where the attack on Sumter occurred, became the center of the war is a story that is seldom covered in histories of the Civil War. The tendency is to mostly ignore the gap of time from April to July and carry on as if the war erupted immediately after Sumter.

Why, one ought to ask, was it Virginia where the war began, and where so much of the war was fought?

Before that is explored, another subtle, yet powerful issue that is also ignored in most accounts of the war will be uncovered.

This issue must be introduced by a proposal: imagine that Lincoln never invaded the South, never attempted to take back the facilities seized by Confederate forces, never collected the duties and taxes and the members of the Senate and Congress of the United States from the seceded states never returned to Washington to take up their duties again, yet otherwise, the nation tried to carry on as it had. Imagine there was no warfare, and Lincoln left the Southern states alone.

Lincoln had declared that secession could not occur because the constitution forbade it by not defining it. He declared that states could not “get out” of the Union, either by declaration or by physical action. Yet if one considers the condition of the United States, had the rebellious states been left in the position they had achieved by carrying out rebellious acts, withholding their Congressional and Senate delegations, violating all federal laws by ignoring them, and standing ready to arrest or do bodily harm to any emissaries from Washington who attempted to punish them for those violations, the situation would in effect render those states completely impervious to the authority of the United States government.

If that were the case, how then, would that situation differ from what it would have been if Lincoln had agreed to leave those states independent? In fact, if the federal government could not touch those states, and could not carry out its authority, that is if, as Lincoln put it, he as president could not equally exercise federal law in the South as he could in the North, those states would be de facto independent, physically, if not in title.

This was the supreme secret that Lincoln must hide. He could never admit that for any length of time, those states were outside the authority of the federal government. If they were, then they could be recognized by the rest of the world as independent, if Lincoln must leave them free without a fight.

In that case, Lincoln’s claim that the Union was unbroken would be false. To prevent that situation, Lincoln could never say or do anything that suggested that the states were outside the authority of the federal government. Yet he had so much as admitted and described that situation when he admitted it would require an army to face off against the “combinations” the defiant South had used against Fort Sumter. Skillfully, he avoided describing that scenario as one in which the Confederate states were actually already independent for practical purposes. If he were to admit the reality, and as a result, other nations recognized the Confederacy as sovereign, and he was to attack the South without direct provocation, he would have turned the United States into a rogue nation in the eyes of the world, and would in fact make the country liable for sanctions or even attack by other nations.

This was true before Fort Sumter.

Some thought is required to consider the dilemma presented by the Fort Sumter attack.

By April 12, the Confederacy had been able to get away with all its insurrectional actions long enough that their claim of independence was beginning to appear to be successful. Had other nations by that time recognized the Confederacy as a sovereign state, their argument that federal troops on their soil was tantamount to the presence of an invasion force might have been granted credibility in the larger world. In that case, their further argument that unless the garrison surrendered, it could be attacked would have been granted some validity by the international community. After all, one could wonder, how long would the United States, in 1861, have permitted a foreign nation with which it had ill relations to hold a military post on federal soil without demanding its surrender or attacking it if it did not?

That was the position the South claimed for itself with regard to the garrison at Sumter. In other words, by their reckoning, they had every right to demand that a foreign power remove its garrison, or they would eject it forcefully.

When the South did subsequently successfully eject the garrison and the president could do no more than call up troops, the claim of independence by the Confederacy took another step closer to validity for the world to see. That Lincoln did not have an army to send to immediately take re-establish federal authority in South Carolina meant that he either must send one when he had one, or he would have to attack the South long after it had gotten away with yet another provocation, another major case of flouting federal authority.

Even at that, however, as long as Lincoln could keep up the picture of a rogue section of the nation requiring suppression, he could still avoid admitting they were independent and would then be in the position of either having to let them go or having to fight a war to bring them back under federal control.

After all the discussions of what caused the Civil War, it was this need by Lincoln to suppress a rebellion that set the stage for the beginning, and thus served as the cause, of the Civil War.

With that question finally resolved, that of what caused the war, the remaining question to be answered before it is possible to carry on with an account of the war, is what started the actual fighting, in other words, how was the war triggered.

Once Lincoln’s army of 75,000 came into being, the problem of the two-state no man’s land would still remain, in theory. How then, did the history of the nation pass from that configuration, to one of full-scale war, a war which took place in a state which, as of April 15, and indeed later, was still a loyal member of the Union, not of the Confederacy?

To answer that, it is necessary to zero in on the state of Virginia, from April 15, 1861, to July 21, when the first actual battle that marked the beginning of the war occurred...only about twenty miles outside of Washington.

Chapter Three

To set the stage for the progression from April 15, to July 21, the first day of the actual shooting war, it is worthwhile to introduce a modicum of background story, in order to place in perspective the events that unfolded with Lincoln’s inaugural address, through the intense issues surrounding Fort Sumter, because the actions that started the war in Virginia are wrapped up in those background events.

When Lincoln set out on his passage from Springfield to Washington, he remained a private citizen. The position of president-elect is not a position at all and confers no powers or duties upon the future president until he takes the oath of office on the day appointed for the changing of administrations, which in 1861 would be March Fourth.

Lincoln knew by December 22 of 1860 that problems existed upon which he must make a beginning to resolve soon after arriving and taking up the office of president. Among those problems were threats to federal forts in the harbor at Charleston, South Carolina, and elsewhere, particularly in Florida, where federal troops were housed. The Confederacy intended to seize those forts and oust the troops, and if they did so, Lincoln would face, as president, a situation which would demonstrate whether he would fold up to Confederate demands, or confront them.

To the people, from the ordinary citizens across the land, to the already-elected, to the already serving personages of the government, and even to the press, Lincoln was a mystery. Worse, he was seen as a bumpkin, a naïve babe-in-the-woods who had no true conception of the mess, the nightmare, the fiasco he was about to inherit upon taking the oath of office. The fact that he lived farther away from the seat of government than any president before him only magnified concern that he was totally disconnected from the real world of national politics and issues.

That was the general attitude in the North. To the South, Lincoln was an onrushing monster, the enemy, the potential engine of destruction threatening their way of life, and they already opposed him before he uttered his first official word. Nothing he might say would appease them, and that fact was one of the concerns that worried the Northern people: that Lincoln did not realize he could not get through to the South, could not touch them, could not win them over by any means other than war. Fear existed that he would not face up to the fact that only independence would satisfy the South, or conversely, that upon realizing that, Lincoln would give in to them without a fight.

This same public was totally unaware that already this supposedly naïve president had initiated what would be today called “back channel” contact with elements of the Buchanan administration in its lame duck period.

Unlike modern government, no such thing as a “transition team” existed in the United States up to the 1860’s to interface with the government and outgoing administration in order that the incoming president would be completely prepared to handle the gravest issues affecting the nation the moment he swore the oath of office. In modern times, such a transition team normally sets up all the personnel and communication channels for the new administration and overall paves the way for just what the name implies—a smooth “transition” between administrations.

Furthermore, in current times, the outgoing administration presents the incoming one with everything it must know to function from day one, even from hour one, including detailed top secret intelligence files and global situation reports.

In contrast, an incoming president in 1861 had only what resources were in his hands to prepare him to take over at the moment of his inauguration. Only what friends and connections he already possessed or could develop on his own were available to him until he reached Washington.

In modern times, what the new president, on Day One may not personally have time to deal with, his staff will be in place to handle for him, until the rounds of parties and other social events of inaugural day are passed. That staff will have been in place and ready for weeks before the big day.

No such process existed in 1861.

One of Lincoln’s confidants was Congressman Elihu B. Washburne, of Illinois, and through Washburne, while still in Springfield, on December 22, 1860, Lincoln passed along a letter of introduction to Lieutenant General Winfield Scott, the highest uniformed military officer in the army. Scott held the post of General-in-Chief under President Buchanan, a position equivalent to the modern day Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Lincoln requested of Washburne, “Tell him confidentially, I shall be obliged to him to be as well prepared as he can, to either hold or retake the forts, as the case may require, at and after the inauguration.”

Speaking of President Buchanan, Lincoln had stated to his aides that if the forts in Charleston Harbor were allowed to be taken, Buchanan ought to be hanged.

What Lincoln also knew was that while he requested Scott to prepare what action he could, the general would be operating at the disadvantage already well described, the lack of an army to act in the manner Lincoln desired.

Had the Northern public known of this bit of foresight on Lincoln’s part, they might have begun to relax over the capabilities of their new president.

Due to the absence of an army, not only was Scott in no position to actually carry out Lincoln’s request, never mind punishing the South for previous outrages, such as siezing federal property, he lacked the power to oppose any new acts of belligerence by the South prior to Lincoln’s arrival in Washington.

In this period, from December 22, up to and through his journey to Washington, when placed in the position of having to make a speech, or to speak off the cuff to those who button-holed him, Lincoln, as the president-elect, said as little as he could get away with, and still remain civil and pleasant. He said no more to the public at large or the press, and certainly made no statements concerning his plans, or what he knew of the situation he was inheriting, or what he thought, or what he had already undertaken and would yet undertake as a private citizen prior to speaking the oath of office. For any other president, this would be accepted as prudent reticence, but for a nation shaking with uncertainty about its future, this mystery man was all they had to count upon, and what they saw and heard did not instill much confidence.

What must be realized is that whatever the public of the North, including the press, may have thought or felt about Lincoln in this period had no bearing on anything. He was the duly elected president, he would serve as president, and the nation had no choice but abide with their fears until he either demonstrated those fears were warranted or Lincoln acted to soothe them. Just as in present day, no mechanism existed for the public to take back its vote and prevent the man elected to take office, no matter what voters’ remorse might overtake the electorate.

Lincoln could not concern himself with the attitude of the public during that time. He must weigh all his options and make what plans he was able to in order to deal with the same national concerns that plagued the nation, North and South and do so in a veritable vacuum.

With regard to policy, Lincoln could do nothing, no matter his desires to act, until he was sworn in. The situation in the nation was fluid and volatile, thus it was impossible to know what exact scenario would exist when he reached Washington and took the oath of office. All he could do was prepare a list of options and write an inaugural address to outline what he knew of the situation and what he was prepared to do as a result.

That address could and must say much more, however. It must allay the fears of naïvete, of Lincoln’s innocence of the situation, and it must appeal to the South in the most careful and friendly way possible under the circumstances while at the same time, making clear that Lincoln would not be pushed around.

Otherwise, Lincoln could do no more of a political nature to prepare to take office.

In November of 1860, Lincoln had stated to his private secretary John Nicolay that the very existence of the government implied that it possessed the “legal power, right, and duty of maintaining its own integrity.” He added that it was the duty of a president to execute the laws and maintain the existing government. He did not add, “by any means,” but he did clearly imply force was one of the methods at the disposal of the president to save the nation. So much for the public’s fear of naïvete regarding his options, but of course those words and his attitude could not become public knowledge at that time, and thus could not inform the nation of his true opinion on the situation waiting for him.

In his thinking, planning, and the approach to the writing of the inaugural address, Lincoln did not regard the situation ahead of him as an issue of secession. He was not the only scholar in the nation who reckoned secession to be an impossible concept due to the fact that the Constitution did not provide a means for states to excuse themselves from the nation. While rhetoric across the land used the term secession as if it was a real and viable concept, and expected the president to cope with the separation of the seven states already claiming secession, Lincoln was able to effectively ignore those claims as having no legal merit and deal instead only with the actual actions undertaken by the states in the process of claiming to have seceded.

The key in his thinking fell out of his words to Nicolay, that it was the duty of a president to execute the laws and maintain the existing government. It was upon that concept that Lincoln would base his responses to the actions of the South. He would declare that the states claiming to have seceded, not in so claiming, but in seizing federal installations and weapons stockpiles, and in refusing to tender owed taxes and tariffs, had egregiously violated federal laws and in his capacity as chief executive of federal law, his job would be to put a stop to the lawlessness and to submit those states to federal authority. As has already been pointed out, this, not secession, slavery, or any other issue, was the true road to war, even if it was a war Lincoln did not want.

In eventually putting a stop to the lawlessness, the question which would face Lincoln, both in his deliberations and in his future actions, was that of how much force would be required from the federal authority to bring those Southern states back under control. This is an important distinction: the issue was not to bring the states back into the Union—because the constitution provided no mechanism for states to leave the Union, Lincoln determined—the issue was to bring the states back under the authority of the Union, by executing all the federal laws pertaining both to their rebellious actions and to daily business of states as components of the national body.

If the necessary execution of the laws could be carried out by legal officers, such as marshals, that would have been an option available to Lincoln. If actual force were required, more force than armed officers or posses could bring to bear, that would mean military options would be called upon. Such had happened before. The John Brown mini-rebellion had been put down by military force, but the force had been small in number, proportionate to the threat. The same kind of response could be brought to bear in the South, if the threat remained small enough.

Lincoln recognized that the threat might reach a size too large for any armed forces available when he became commander in chief to control, however.

It is the actions Lincoln undertook during his journey to Washington, to prepare for his use a military force large enough to match the potential threat of escalated violence by the South, a force he could hand off to Winfield Scott in order to carry out Lincoln’s instructions, which are overlooked in most discussions of the war. Had the Northern people even a hint of what Lincoln would do in that respect, they would have sighed with relief, to know they had a president who was everything they could have hoped for. And as history has recorded, despite some of his errors and shortcomings, much more than they had imagined.

Chapter Four

To illustrate Lincoln’s thinking on the issue of sending armies into the South, while in Indiana, he pondered aloud, “Would the marching of an army into South Carolina without the consent of her people, and with hostile intent toward them, be ‘invasion’? I certainly think it would; and it would be ‘coercion’ also if the South Carolinians were forced to submit. But if the United States should merely hold and retake its own forts and other property, and collect the duties on foreign importations, or even withhold the mails from places where they were habitually violated, would any or all of these things be ‘invasion’ or ‘coercion’?”

That suggested Lincoln’s view of what would constitute invasion and coercion. Not yet did he directly speak of the manner by which he believed the United States could carry out those missions, especially to “hold” and “retake” its property, or what could be done about the situation regarding the virtually useless federal army.

Lincoln also recognized that his definition of coercion would not be the key factor in determining whether war would erupt. What he must decide at some point was how far he would be able to go in attempting to force the South into compliance with federal law before they would respond with more force than marshals or the miniscule elements of a federal army he could immediately bring together could handle.

In anticipation that he would find need to undertake more than the South could stomach, no matter how much in the right he might be, when Lincoln reached Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, he conducted the second key act since alerting Winfield Scott to his wishes with regard to the forts in Charleston Harbor. In the Pennsylvania capital, Lincoln met with Governor Andrew Curtin, and reviewed with him several companies of Pennsylvania militia. Curtin informed the president-elect that his state’s militia would be ready soon as Lincoln needed it.

This is a groundbreaking agreement. The militias of the states were partially thought of as bulwarks against excessive federal intrusion, which was exactly how the Southern states were prepared to use their militias. Instead, Curtin was offering his state’s militia to Lincoln for use in lieu of a viable federal army! In fact, the Pennsylvania militia, and those of other states, would be federalized, that is, turned over to the government to the point that the federal government would be the paymaster for the soldiers, and federal military leaders would give the federalized militias their commands.

Thus, the governors would surrender their roles as commander-in-chief of the militias, turning them over to Lincoln. The ultimate result was that the militias thus federalized would be added to the existing, miniscule federal army in Lincoln’s hands. Such an arrangement was only by handshake agreement at the time it was made, given that Lincoln was then only president-elect and possessed no authority whatsoever, but nevertheless, the groundwork was laid for a time when and if Lincoln called for the federalization of state militias as president.

This embryonic army, this army in waiting, this secret army, could and would be joined by other armies, of the same kind—state militias—to be turned over to federal use when the time came, that is, to the use of the president. In this way, Lincoln would arrive at Washington in an appearance of powerlessness, of lacking any response to Southern aggression, and he would enhance this impression by refraining from revealing that preparations for the sudden and rapid buildup of an army were in the works.

While this was a good start at rebuilding the federal army, it was only a first step. The existence of a few men in arms serving as Pennsylvania militia did not mean an actual army yet existed. In peacetime, the militias of the Northern states served more as social clubs for the men who were enrolled than as actual military entities. Virtually no military training was carried out, and very little military equipment available. While companies of men could march for the president’s viewing on a parade ground, they were not prepared to fight. Still, they were a nucleus around which a viable army could be built, and when Lincoln needed them, they would prove to be ready. And in this, Pennsylvania was far from being alone.

In carrying out this stealth operation, acting without the slightest official authority, while the nation still trembled in fear that he would be humbled by the opposition, Lincoln had succeeded in stealing a march on that opposition, the South.

Another state that would offer its militia to Lincoln before the inauguration was Massachusetts, but other states already saw the need to potentially defend themselves and the nation and began gearing up their own militias and would eagerly hand them over to Lincoln when he needed them.

The first chance the nation would have to hear Lincoln’s take on the situation he inherited as president would be his inaugural address. The speech would be Lincoln’s first official act as president.

The address had to serve several purposes. It must tell the trembly Northerners, the president’s main constituents now, that he was on the job, knew the situation he faced, and had a plan. It must also buy time, because the militia army must fill out in numbers in its respective states, numbers sufficient to make it a match for the South’s legions.

He must also offer an olive branch if the South mended its ways, while making clear he would do something if they did not, and just as importantly, if they continued to act out. He did not have to say what he would do, he only had to show both the North and the South that he would not be pushed around.

So key and masterful was the speech that it must be somewhat dissected if a serious investigation of how the Civil War began is to be made. While the entire speech is presented in Appendix I, in this section, it will be enough to examine excerpts, in order to illustrate the major points. Already, of course, key parts of it have been employed to illustrate the president’s take on issues such as secession and the integrity of the Union, but more analysis is still required at this point.

The inaugural address had been crafted very carefully to achieve the president’s goals. Lincoln had personally and solely written the core of the speech, he had honed it, then had aired it out among political advisors, who suggested specific, key refinements. They counseled that some of his words, as originally penned, were too bellicose, and might offend too many people in the South. Other words were not strong enough.

A considerable number of people in the South still had sympathies with Lincoln and the North, including some slave owners. That does not even factor in the entire state of Virginia, still to be wooed in hopes of staying loyal. Lincoln and his advisors did not wish to alienate anyone who remained a potential ally or loyalist in any way, but threatening and ugly rhetoric directed toward their homeland might do so. When his advisors pointed this out, Lincoln agreed and modified the tone of his address to soothe the loyalty of these “unionists.”

Contrarily, however, in some areas of the speech, Lincoln’s advisors nudged him to take an even harder line than his original version had dared.

Carefully, then, the speech was tweaked and trimmed to near perfection, such that in its final form, as Lincoln read it to the world, it became a document for the ages.

In that speech, after laying out his opinion that no such concept as secession existed, Lincoln drove straight to the core of the issue,

“....It follows from these views that no State, upon its own mere motion, can lawfully get out of the Union—that resolves and ordinances to that effect are legally void, and that acts of violence, within any State or States, against the authority of the United States, are insurrectionary or revolutionary, according to circumstances....

“....I therefore consider that in view of the Constitution and the laws, the Union is unbroken; and to the extent of my ability I shall take care, as the Constitution itself expressly enjoins upon me, that the laws of the Union be faithfully executed in all the States. Doing this I deem to be only a simple duty on my part; and I shall perform it, so far as practicable, unless my rightful masters, the American people, shall withhold the requisite means, or in some authoritative manner, direct the contrary. I trust this will not be regarded as a menace, but only as the declared purpose of the Union that will constitutionally defend and maintain itself.

“In doing this there needs to be no bloodshed or violence; and there shall be none, unless it be forced upon the national authority. The power confided to me will be used to hold, occupy, and possess the property and places belonging to the government, and to collect the duties and imposts; but beyond what may be necessary for these objects, there will be no invasion―no using of force against or among the people anywhere....

“....In your hands, my dissatisfied fellow countrymen, and not in mine, is the momentous issue of civil war. The government will not assail you. You can have no conflict without being yourselves the aggressors. You have no oath registered in Heaven to destroy the government, while I shall have the most solemn one to ‘preserve, protect, and defend it.’”

Among the changes made to tone down any threatening elements in the speech had been the elimination of words to the effect that the government would not “assail” the South unless it initiated aggression. Additionally, the lukewarm terms “holding,” “occupying,” and “possessing” the property and places belonging to the government were substituted for “seizing” or “retaking,” which sounded far too threatening.

Additionally, no hint was uttered of how Lincoln believed the “duties” and “imposts” would be “collected” from unwilling states without use of military force. Certainly he did not mention that he had already asked the general in chief, Winfield Scott, to prepare to carry out those actions.

It is noteworthy that he did dare to use the word “invasion,” except only in the negative sense that he had no intentions of invading the South except to carry out the mandates he had described.

One could suggest that it was a hazardous gambit even to bring up the “issue of civil war.” Employing such words, however, made it clear Lincoln knew what stood at risk, even as he denied any interest in bringing it about. He had certainly avoided even hinting what he would do if war were forced upon him.

Having declared secession a non-existent concept, Lincoln was thus able to label the actions of the rebels as essentially treasonous attacks against their own country, without threatening any specific sanctions. He left it to be possibly interpreted that if the rebellious part of the nation undid the insurrectional actions it had undertaken, perhaps the whole situation would be set aside and the nation could go forward on better terms, toward better things.

Furthermore, in declaring that the union remained unbroken, Lincoln had negated the need for any large scale changes to be made in order to repair it. Up to that point, in other words, he was declaring that no need existed for “reconstruction,” which actually referred to the process of bringing states that had left the Union back within. If no states had left, no reconstruction would be needed, in fact, reconstruction, per se, would be a meaningless concept.

It might be assumed then, that from Lincoln’s perspective, once the federal installations that had been seized were turned back over to the government, the owed duties and other taxes were paid, and the members of the House and Senate who had resigned from the US Congress had returned to their seats, the whole problem would go away.

Obviously that had the appearance of wishful thinking, but in reality, Lincoln was presenting the best case scenario, the wisest course he believed the South could follow, and if they refused, he had made it clear he would not be responsible for what had to follow.

The point has been made previously in these pages that the reality of the situation Lincoln faced was that the Southern states were physically outside the control of the federal government. That was what could be called the “dirty little secret” that must not even be hinted. Instead, Lincoln must carry on the farce that the South was still part of the Union and that he would take action to correct the insurrectional nature of their activity. If he waited too long, the Confederacy would by default be accepted as a free nation in the world and all hope for the Union would be gone.

That being the true situation that faced Lincoln as he delivered the inaugural address, he must not only buy time to rebuild the army, he must buy time to keep the world from recognizing the fact that the Confederacy was in fact independent unless he could act to prove it was not. Lincoln must always carry on with the rhetoric that the states were not independent or separated from the Union, they were only in temporary rebellion. That was the key to everything he would do beginning on March 4, onward.

Lincoln was caught, and well knew it, in a tight corner, as he spoke the inaugural address, in that he could not initiate war without an army, he could not admit that the seven Southern states were already physically independent, and he could not admit any intentions to build an army, invade those states and force them back into the control of the government. He could do none of this until some egregious event occurred, on the part of the South, that would justify extreme actions on his part.

This is where his foreknowledge that the Confederacy would almost certainly use some level of force against forts still technically in the hands of the United States came into play.

It was unlikely that the situation regarding the South would remain at status quo for very long. Soon, the states that were on the cusp would declare their loyalty one way or another, opening up avenues for federal troops to enter the South if an invasion became necessary. And most likely, something would develop in the South that would in fact make invasion necessary.

Quiet actions remained open for Lincoln to undertake to try and push the situation to his advantage. He entered into intense negotiations with representatives of the state of Virginia who spoke for the unionists, asking them what concessions would be required to convince the leaders in favor of secession to change their minds, with the implication that up to a reasonable point, Lincoln would offer whatever it would take to win them away from the side of secession.

One of the important points about Virginia was the fact that if the state did not join the Confederacy, a strong possibility existed that the Southern states, those already part of the Confederacy, would realize they could not survive on their own and might come crawling back. They needed Virginia and to a slightly lesser extent, needed Tennessee, which had also not yet gone over, and to yet lesser extents, they needed North Carolina and Arkansas. Maryland and Delaware were not reckoned likely to leave the Union despite their status as slave states. Missouri and Kentucky were both also on the cusp.

Once officially in office, despite the threat of war, of claimed or actual secession, of the continuation of slavery, the president of the United States had other work he could not ignore.

In the days that followed his ascension to the presidency, Abraham Lincoln was flooded with requests by people seeking the great treasure trove of government jobs that erupted in the wake of a new administration. The process of filling the positions was almost miraculously simpler than it is today, with the president far more directly involved than is even possible in the current era. That meant, however, that the process took up almost all of Lincoln’s waking hours in that period, and the time he had bought with his inaugural address was spent in large part by his absorption in the morass of appointments into which he must wade in the early days of his presidency.

For the world to see, the issue of possible war with the South, as well as that section’s response to his inaugural address was set on a back burner.

Chapter Five

While Lincoln had been aware of the issue of the forts in Charleston Harbor and the near-certainty the Confederacy would act against them eventually, he had hoped and expected to have much more time for his armies to grow first. Instead, he learned that the time would be far less than his worst assumptions.

Most of the installations seized by the South had been manned by small contingents, sometimes only a single officer or enlisted man who oversaw stockpiles of weapons and ammunition. This was the normal case for most federal armories around the nation during peacetime in the middle of the Nineteenth Century.

Little force had actually been required to take over the facilities in the South. In most cases, those stewards of the armories accepted the fact that they were in no position to defend themselves and agreed to vacate the premises. More than a few, being Southern sympathizers themselves, willingly turned over their positions and joined the rebellion.

Forts Pickens and Sumter were more than mere armories, and they were not manned by such powerless contingents. Among the 16,000 federal soldiers splayed out across the entire country were garrisons in place at the two fortresses, one in Florida, the other in Charleston Harbor of South Carolina.

In January of 1861, Lt. Adam Slemmens commanded about eighty men at Fort Barancas in Pensacola Harbor, Florida. Nearby was Fort Pickens and under threat by local personnel desiring to seize the installation, as other federal bases had been taken, Slemmer abandoned Barancas in favor of Pickens, which he deemed more defensible than Barancas.

In December of 1860, Major Richard Anderson had made a similar move of 127 men from nearby Fort Moultree, on solid land in Charleston Harbor, to Fort Sumter, situated on an artificial island.

Having two fortresses garrisoned with “foreign” troops inside of the territory they had claimed as independent deeply frustrated the Southern leaders. Ignoring the legality or lack thereof regarding the letter of the constitution concerning secession, the Southerners reckoned their states to be separate sovereign entities and therefore armed representatives of the federal government of the United States were unwanted occupiers of their new national body.

The moves by Anderson and Slemmons had occurred after Lincoln was elected but before he took office. Buchanan had tolerated the acts of insurrection, the taking of federal facilities, and it is not surprising because many men in his administration would join the Confederacy when Lincoln reached Washington. And worse, members of his administration had arranged to have as many guns and as much ammunition as possible removed from federal armories in the North and sent to the South, and therefore, the taking of those armories by the South only completed the act of both disarming the North and arming the South. The dispersal of the 16,000 man federal army as far from Lincoln’s reach as possible fit directly into this overall scenario.

It would have created an awkward situation if the Southern states had openly attacked serving US troops while a sympathetic president remained in office. Their fight was not with Buchanan, it was with Lincoln, but Buchanan had to at least act like a president for a few more weeks.

Rather than openly attack the installations, the Southerners closed in, with the prospect of starving the federal forces out. If Buchanan was seen to permit this to succeed, it would be little less distasteful to a nation that had elected Lincoln than if he countenanced an actual assault that killed or chased out the garrisons.

Thus in late January of 1861, the Buchanan government negotiated an arrangement by which supplies would be landed, if the Southern leadership refrained from attacking the garrisons. As a result, the situation with Pickens would remain a standoff, but not so for Fort Sumter.

What Buchanan had not been prepared to do was reinforce the garrisons that were under siege. While not authorized to initiate hostilities himself, Anderson was under orders to defend his position if he must. At that time, he still occupied Fort Moultree. He later judged Sumter the better position from which to hold out and transferred his garrison to the island on December Twenty-Sixth.

South Carolina had the audacity to declare Anderson’s defensive move to be a hostile act. They demanded that Buchanan order Anderson back to Moultree but he refused. South Carolina then took over all the federal installations in the region except Sumter itself. Allowing this all to play out was one of the points over which Lincoln suggested Buchanan ought to be hanged as a traitor, himself.

After the formality of secession, the leadership of South Carolina attempted to negotiate a transfer of the bases that existed in the area of Charleston Harbor, including Sumter.

Some actual tension developed between the Buchanan and the South Carolinians when the president permitted a ship, Star of the West to be chartered and dispatched to Fort Sumter with the mission of reinforcing and re-supplying the garrison. On January 9, the ship reached Charleston Harbor; shore batteries fired upon it and the ship withdrew without success.

The implications in this action, especially in light of what would develop a month after Lincoln assumed office, must be carefully considered. A federally mandated expedition, to bring succor to a federal installation and federal soldiers, was attacked by the authorities of a state, a clear act of treason by any reckoning. Given that a similar act in future months would be regarded as the first shots of war, it is curious that no such declaration occurred now. If firing on ships dispatched as a federal expedition did not constitute war in January, how could firing upon the federal facility itself, in April, be otherwise declared? The claim by most accounts of the Civil War that the firing upon Fort Sumter in April was the beginning of the war makes no sense, in that the president, Lincoln in that latter case, also did not declare that war had begun with the attack on Sumter. Claiming that war began in April is no more valid than if one claimed it had actually begun in January, on Buchanan’s watch.

In the January instance, Star of the West withdrew under fire and the garrison remained in place on the island.

For a period of time after the incident, while remaining constantly within range of the rogue state’s land-based artillery, the men of Fort Sumter were actually permitted to receive visitors and replenish supplies on shore. Clearly, the South, and its developing national entity, the Confederate States of America, were content in having set up the situation, to let it simmer until Lincoln replaced Buchanan in the White House.

If nothing had changed with regard to forts Pickens and Sumter as of Lincoln’s assumption of office, he would have been able to extend the window with which he had to operate, waiting for Virginia and North Carolina to declare their loyalties, and for the militias to build up to readiness behind him.

As long as visitors, including federal representatives were free to come and go among the garrison at Sumter, and as long as those in place were permitted to obtain supplies, the situation could remain static until the issue of Virginia and North Carolina’s allegiance could be resolved, allowing one way or another, federal armies to converge on Charleston and neutralize the situation.

Clearly, the South had the option of either allowing Lincoln to wait by doing nothing more with regard to forts Pickens and especially Sumter, or by forcing his hand.

Instead, the South took a new step, ratcheting the situation one notch higher toward crisis. The South Carolinians put a stop to the local acquisition of supplies for Fort Sumter’s men, the first stage of starving Anderson and his men into surrender.

After delivering his inaugural address, Lincoln received word that unless the garrison at Fort Sumter were re-supplied, Anderson would have to surrender in a short time. This news set the crisis at a boil. Far sooner than he had imagined upon arriving in Washington, Lincoln faced a severe trial. He had vowed to retake the “places” seized by the rebels, so if it occurred on his watch that they should seize yet another place and he not only did not retake it but stood by while they did so, his credibility would be severely jeopardized.

In truth, however, Lincoln was no more in a position to support Anderson militarily than he was to undertake any other action against the South. His options included ordering Anderson to surrender the fort, but that would be worse than taking no action at all, which in turn would result in causing Anderson to surrender out of desperation when his men were starved.

Aside from some form of attack against those threatening Fort Sumter, or doing nothing, the middle ground for Lincoln’s government was an option to complete the job Buchanan had attempted using Star of the West, that is, re-supplying the garrison so it could remain indefinitely at Sumter. That option could include attempting to both re-supply the garrison and reinforce it with more men. The first could be done as a peaceful measure, the second would surely be taken by the South Carolinians as a small form of “invasion,” which would push the South toward a more powerful response which Lincoln could not answer at the time.

In fact, Lincoln had prepared another possible option to solve the dilemma of Fort Sumter.

After arriving in Washington, but prior to the inauguration, Lincoln met with, among others, a certain William C. Rives, from Virginia, a former Minister to France. Present also in this meeting was a Charles S. Moorehead, formerly a governor of Kentucky.

On the subject of response by the new administration to the actions of the South, Moorehead stated that if Lincoln resorted to coercion to bring the states back into control, the history of his administration would be written in blood.

In response, Lincoln asked Moorehead, “What would you do? Do you mean by coercion the collecting of revenue and the taking back of the forts which belong to the United States?”

According to Moorhead, indeed those were Lincoln’s only choices of actions based on the constitution. And he implored Lincoln not to carry them out and trigger war.

Now, concerning Sumter, Rives entered the discussion and said that if Lincoln did resort to “coercion,” Virginia would secede.

The meaning of this was that even without involving Virginia in any way, without any threat against the state, without marching troops into and through the state, Virginia would regard coercion by the federal government against the rebellious states as cause to join with them.

According to Moorehead’s version of the dialogue, to this assertion, Lincoln animatedly responded that if Virginia would stay in the Union, he would withdraw the troops from Fort Sumter!

Rives answered, “Mr. President, I have no authority to speak for Virginia...but if you do that it will be one of the wisest things you have ever done. Give us guarantees and I can only promise you that whatever influence I possess shall be exerted to restore the Union to what it was.”

One of the others present reported Lincoln as summing up the situation by saying, “I can’t understand it at all; Virginia wants to remain in the Union, and yet wants me to let South Carolina go out and the Union be dissolved, in order that Virginia may stay in.”

On March 2, Lincoln conducted a conversation with the Minister from the Hanseatic Republic in Germany, Rudolf Schleiden, who afterward wrote to his government that when Lincoln was requested by representatives of “Border states” to remove the garrison from Fort Sumter, he had replied, “Why not? If you will guarantee me the State of Virginia, I shall remove the troops. A State for a fort is no bad business.”

Lincoln would go on to press the offer to those representing unionist interests in Virginia, on the basis that if they would break up the conference in Richmond that was to decide on secession, he would evacuate Fort Sumter, but those Virginians would not promise.

The point of this is that Lincoln was willing to sacrifice the issue of Fort Sumter if he could keep Virginia within the Union, despite the damage it would do to his stance expressed by his declaration that he would act to reverse the seizure of federal installations. If he allowed yet another fort to be taken by the South on his watch, he would appear to be ineffectual, yet he was willing to risk that to keep Virginia within the Union.

All this must be tempered by the fact that the Confederacy needed Virginia so desperately that it could conceivably fall apart if it did not bring the state into the fold. Winning Virginia in exchange for Fort Sumter might have been a magnificent coup for Lincoln.

Senator Stephen Douglas, the man Lincoln had debated so famously for the senate long before, met with Lincoln and came away with the understanding that beyond the issue of Virginia, Lincoln was willing to remove the garrison from Sumter in order to allow the entire situation with the South to calm down; in this, he was treating the existence of Sumter as an irritant that could be removed before serious negotiations with the South began. However to Douglas, Lincoln added, “What I want is to get done what the people desire to have done, and the question for me is how to find that out exactly.”

None of this suggests that Lincoln intended to employ the issue of Fort Sumter as a way to maneuver the South into handing him the provocation he needed to react with coercion. By what has been presented so far, the assumption must be made that until the last minute, Lincoln wished to maneuver the South not into war, but away from it, even willing to use the situation at Sumter as a carrot, and only as a stick in the last resort.

On the other hand, based on what did develop when negotiations failed, Lincoln was willing to make the best use of the Sumter situation, if he were left with no choice except to prepare for war. This is a key distinction, compared to assertions that he set the South up to start the war themselves!

In the process of dealing with the Sumter situation, seeking the best solution, on March 9, Lincoln called a cabinet meeting, to air out opinions of his official advisors on the impending crisis.

He made clear the options available, which included sending ships to Sumter, carrying either reinforcements and supplies, or supplies only, with the purpose of allowing the garrison to remain in place rather than being starved into surrender. Balanced against those possibilities was that of doing nothing at all, or leaving Anderson and the garrison to surrender, or to directly order Anderson to surrender.

The question revolved around the responses that could be expected from the South in each of the options. Lincoln had already explored the benefits of doing nothing, which mainly related to Virginia, and had received little that was positive. Any other action in which ships were dispatched, no matter what cargo they carried, would likely trigger a military response by the South, and what followed that was more than the cabinet was expected to consider yet.

After laying out the situation, Lincoln sent the cabinet members off to pen what amounted to their individual position papers pertaining to the options at hand. They were to return on March 16 with their recommendations.

In their responses, Secretary of State William Seward wrote that the time for force against the South over Sumter had not come; Treasury Secretary Salmon Chase was in favor of attempting to bring supplies if doing so could somehow lead to peace, but was against it if doing so meant war; Secretary of War Cameron felt no practical benefit would result to the country in attempting to bring supplies; Secretary of the Navy Welles said he entertained doubts, while Caleb B. Smith, Secretary of the Interior spoke against the attempt to re-supply Sumter. While giving up the fort would cause “surprise and complaint,” it could be “explained and understood.”

Attorney General Edward Bates said, “I am willing to evacuate Fort Sumter,” but against all this, Postmaster General Montgomery Blair was in favor of the attempt to re-supply and said Buchanan had hesitated and failed.

He added that provisioning the fort would “vindicate the hardy courage of the North, and the administration of the people and their President to maintain the authority of the Government.”

On that same day, March 16, commissioners from the Confederacy present in Washington sent a report back to Montgomery that “the impression prevails in Administration circles that Fort Sumter will be evacuated in ten days.”

One of the men locked up at Fort Sumter was Abner Doubleday; Lincoln called upon his wife, who happened to be in Washington, requesting to read letters from her husband in order to obtain insight into conditions in the fort.

Lincoln had reached the point of deciding to give up Fort Sumter. In disgust Montgomery Blair, who had been the lone holdout in favor of sending supplies wrote his resignation. Blair’s influential father visited Lincoln and according to Welles, “aroused and electrified the president” to such an extent that Lincoln changed his mind and decided to send supplies and attempt to sustain Major Anderson on the island.

The fact that Lincoln had decided not to act in a way that would inflame the South in the Sumter situation puts an end to any idea that he had intended to maneuver the South into providing the provocation he needed to trigger war.

One more comment must be inserted, relative to Lincoln’s decision about re-supplying the fort, which comes from the account of his two personal secretaries, Hay and Nicolay, who wrote a definitive biography on the president:

“The idea of the evacuation and abandonment of the fort was so repugnant, that Mr. Lincoln could hardly bring himself to entertain it.” They indicated that Lincoln believed abandoning the fort would embolden the South and lead to recognition abroad, of the Confederacy as a viable nation, and that it would “be our national destruction consummated. This could not be allowed.”

This being so, it can be imagined that he did not take much prodding from the Blairs to finally decide his course with regard to Fort Sumter.

Once the decision was made to re-supply Sumter, a way to do it had to be cobbled together. Previously, Winfield Scott had approached a former naval officer, Gustavus Fox, asking him to put together plans by which Fort Sumter might be held against Southern attack, as if it were a naval rather than army problem. This had occurred during the waning days of the Buchanan administration, a result of Scott’s cooperation with Lincoln from afar, but in February, Buchanan had refused to entertain such an idea. Now, Fox returned and presented the plan to the new administration. The plan was more than just a re-supply operation, however, it was designed to “throw in” troops to reinforce Anderson’s garrison at Sumter, if that contingency were desired.

Interestingly, Scott had disagreed with Fox, that the re-supply option could be carried out. On March 21, Fox succeeded in obtaining from Confederate authorities permission to meet face to face with Anderson at the fort. When Fox reported back, he told Lincoln the supply plan was still workable but had to be speeded up because Anderson estimated his men would be absolutely out of food on April 15.

A Lincoln representative who visited the governor of South Carolina returned with a warning that any attempt to reinforce Sumter would lead directly to war.

There it was, impossible to ignore any more: when Lincoln next met with this cabinet, the assumption must be made by those attending that any action to succor Sumter, any action other than removing the garrison in defeat, would trigger war.

Having done all he could to salvage the Sumter issue short of war, but having also resolved that he would not surrender the post if he could avoid it, unless doing so would guarantee that Virginia would not secede, Lincoln issued an order putting the re-supply mission planned by Fox into action, to begin April Sixth.

Before leaving this issue for the moment, a comment must be made about the threats of war from the South. Again, rhetoric describing or threatening war did not make war. It is intriguing to imagine what the South would have done if the federal government had in fact reinforced Sumter. The South faced the same problems as the North, that of not having much of an army, yet, and not wanting to force the undecided states into the Union camp.

Eventually, when Virginia and North Carolina joined the Confederacy, the Confederate armies pushed all the way up to just outside the doors of Washington, however not with the intent to attack the North, but rather to try and block the invasion of the South by meeting federal armies as they emerged. It is likely that had Lincoln attempted to reinforce Fort Sumter, the Confederates would have fought them at that spot, and although a battle would have erupted, which could have been called the beginning of the Civil War, it would not have been a large battle.

In that case, if victorious, the South might have fully declared itself victorious, and just independent.

What would have followed would likely have been that Virginia and North Carolina would have seceded sooner, freeing up the new federal army to enter Virginia, and the Confederate army to rush forces to the North. But neither could have happened much sooner than the Battle of Bull Run occurred, so the actual process of the war would probably have been similar, but just a little earlier than history records.

Chapter Six

The Fort Sumter episode is a key element of any account of the Civil War. While much more remains to be covered on that subject, it is imperative to step back and add perspective by seeking an understanding of why the South pinned so much upon the situation, so much so that the leadership allowed themselves to be maneuvered into carrying out the very thing which they accused President Lincoln of planning—starting a war—because doing so seems at first glance counter to what was in their best interests.

If Lincoln did not resolve the Sumter dilemma, if he allowed the fortress itself and the garrison of federal soldiers to fall into the hands of the insurrectional government of South Carolina without managing any physical response, his vow of retaking the “places” that had been seized by the rebellious elements in the South would be rendered toothless. In that case, the claims by the then so-called Confederacy would appear to be valid: that the proto-nation was in fact independent and out of all reach and authority of the United States and its government.

The South need do nothing except maintain the status quo, by isolating the garrison at Sumter until the men surrendered and allowed themselves to be ousted from the state by rail, or by ship, or by marching the long way back to the North. Even arresting the Union men would be too pro-active, perhaps. Simply causing them to beg to be allowed off the island that would have become a prison would be enough.

In that scenario, in which no shots were fired but Sumter was taken over by the Confederacy, South Carolina would stand out clearly to the world as a sovereign state, in the sense of nation-state, of its own, a state no longer under the authority of its former government. The Confederacy to which it belonged would rise to the level of an independent nation.

Why, then, did the South give up this opportunity that was already in their hands, to destroy the effectiveness of the Lincoln administration without giving it a solid cause to undertake retaliatory military action?

It is not as simple to answer this as it would appear. While on one hand representatives of the Confederacy in Washington were led to believe and so informed the leadership that Lincoln would do nothing if the Sumter garrison were starved out, other signs hinted that he might act. If the Confederacy permitted Lincoln to carry out even the most weak attempt at a response, by sending supplies to the garrison, the Southern case that the federal government had no means of enforcing its mandates would be weakened. If the federal authority reached into Charleston Harbor, and either fed or reinforced the garrison, Lincoln could claim the United States still maintained its authority to act in South Carolina.

It was possible to go so far, in the thinking of the Southern leadership, as to imagine that Lincoln might even allow the garrison to be starved out, and then take action when the issue seemed to be over. Once he did, even if it were days or weeks later, the Southern claim of independence would be repudiated. Until the world declared the Confederacy to be an independent nation, the federal government could still send forces, could still invade, and it would not be a violation of international law.

That was one point in favor of forcing military confrontation over Sumter in the near future.

The key issue for the South was the same one that was key for the North. Virginia. Both sides were wooing the commonwealth and while Lincoln must wait to take direct military action, he might succeed in fact in trading Sumter for Virginia. Seeing the surrender and evacuation of the fortress by its tiny garrison would appear to be a victory for the Confederacy, yet achieving that victory at the expense of losing Virginia would be devastating, very analogous to winning a battle and losing the war.

Other evidence existed that the Confederate leaders feared that if Virginia remained on the federal side, the entire movement, the Confederacy itself, might all apart if something of a concrete military nature did occur soon.

What is the evidence for this fear, that the Confederacy might fall apart if action were not taken and the bordering states did not declare for the South? Although written after the fact, Nicolay and Hay, President Lincoln’s private secretaries, who were privy, collectively and separately, to the great deliberations taking place in the White House during the Civil War, noted:

“....At this point, the Confederate authorities at Montgomery found themselves face to face with the fatal alternative either to begin war or to allow their rebellion to collapse. Their claim to independence was denied, their commissioners were refused a hearing; yet not an angry word, provoking threat, nor harmful act had come from President Lincoln. He had promised them peace, protection, freedom from irritation; had offered them the benefit of the mails...

“But the rebellion was organized by ambitious men with desperate intentions. A member of the Alabama legislature, present at Montgomery, said to Jefferson Davis and three members of his cabinet: ‘Gentlemen, unless you sprinkle blood in the face of the people of Alabama, they will be back in the old Union in less than ten days.’”

(A Short Life of Abraham Lincoln, Condensed from Nicolay and Hay’s Abraham Lincoln: A History by John George Nicolay, 1902, [The Century Company], Chapter XIII, p.189)

There it was, at least in one view: perhaps the spirit of the people in favor of independence was not yet strong enough to survive inaction. That was hardly the only consideration, however. Still, it was powerful stuff on its own, this assertion that the longer the South failed to make a decisive move either to force war or force Lincoln to start it himself, the more likely were the states that were still sitting on the fence—key among which was Virginia—to fall the Union way, or worse, existing Confederate states to return to Union loyalty.

These points informed the decision by the Southern leadership to attack Sumter at some key point and force the issue toward war.

With the decision by Lincoln to re-supply Sumter by sea, and the concomitant understanding it could lead to at least a severe reaction by the South, on April 8, waiting for the expedition to begin, Lincoln contacted Governor Curtin of Pennsylvania, with regard to the possible need for militias: “I think the necessity of being ready increases. Look to it.”

If the Confederacy took action that ignited war, it would give up much of its sympathy support from the world at large. Convincing Virginia to join, and likewise convincing the states already within the Confederacy to stay, was deemed important enough to risk that international support.

What then was so important about Virginia?

The South was not a powerhouse in the field of industry, much by its own choice. Agrarian in the main, the Southern states bought most of what they needed of modern and high-technology devices and components for infrastructure from the highly industrialized North. Few foundries existed in the South. The Tredegar Iron Works, located on the banks of the James River, blocks from the statehouse in Richmond, Virginia, was the largest factory which could produce heavy weapons in the South. In the event of war, having Tredegar available to the Confederacy seemed essential.

Additionally, so much of the land of the South was tied up in non-edible products, in the form of tobacco and cotton, that those areas where grains were produced were also highly valued. One of the lushest food-baskets in the sphere of the slave states was the beautiful Shenandoah Valley, also in Virginia.

Hopefully, from the Southern point of view, the same actions that would win Virginia into the Confederate camp would succeed with three more states that offered inviting resources—Tennessee, Arkansas, and North Carolina. In addition, Missouri and Kentucky were still fruits which might be picked, but what they offered in resources was not as rich as the prime four.

Maryland and Delaware were distant hopes, and could add little to the viability of the Confederacy, so it was primarily in the chase for the four or five most inviting candidates that the situation in Sumter came into focus for the leadership in Montgomery.

All in all, if Sumter ended in any way other than violently, no matter who started the violence, the South, the Confederacy, would be the loser, immediately or in the long run. Everything that could conceivably be gained by inaction was a gamble. Even recognition by the rest of the world would not be guaranteed, if the Confederacy demonstrated its de facto independence by standing off Lincoln without a shot fired.

And worse, if Lincoln did succeed in taking any action at all to the benefit of the Sumter garrison, he won in a minor or a lesser way, and the de facto independence of the Confederacy would be put off and must be won by waiting even longer, time in which the states already “in” might begin to leave, and those not yet in might never join.

From the point of view of the Confederate leadership, of Jefferson Davis in particular, the ideal scenario stemming from the standoff over Fort Sumter would have been for Lincoln to send in what naval force he could scrape together and bombard the defenses around Charleston Harbor. This would carry with it the potential for collateral damage in the city, which would have stirred the blood of any remaining pacifistic Southerner, almost certainly would have caused the so-far uncommitted States to go out, and would have made the South the victim of Lincoln’s aggression.

When Lincoln made clear he would not be using force, that hope was lost to Davis, but the clock was ticking, he needed hostilities to begin soon, and reluctantly, in the end, he must force the issue of Lincoln would not.

Judge Louis T. Wigfall, of Texas, proposed an immediate attack on Sumter so Virginia would join the Confederacy. Ruffin, of Virginia, said, “The shedding of blood will serve to change many voters in the hesitating states, from the submission or procrastinating ranks, to the zealous for immediate secession.”

Knowing time was running out, with the operation to supply Sumter zeroing in, on April 9, Davis held a cabinet meeting in which his order was endorsed to reduce Sumter by force before the fleet arrived. That is the scenario that was in place, from the point of view of the two sides, when ships of the Fox flotilla steamed toward Charleston Harbor in April of 1861.

A certain affection, at least at a professional level, seemed to exist between US Army Major Richard Anderson, commanding at Fort Sumter, and General Pierre G.T. Beauregard, Confederate Army, commanding on shore in Charleston Harbor. Anderson had served as Beauregard’s artillery instructor at West Point, and afterward, Beauregard remained as Anderson’s assistant and now the former professor found himself positioned on the wrong side of Beauregard’s guns in Charleston.

While not unique in human history, it was an unusual situation when the future enemies of a coming war were all from the same nation, spoke the same language, and the leaders of whom almost universally knew each other personally. Much of the latter case emerged from the fact that the leaders of both sides were largely graduates of the same institution for military training, West Point. All this presented in many cases intriguing protocols between the two sides and the commanders thereof.

Beauregard has come down through history as a scoundrel to those supporting the North. That is especially true with regard to his part in the Fort Sumter episode. He is seen as a bloodthirsty rebel eager to attack a US garrison and trigger war. For the most part, what is told of his part in the attack on Sumter are the results, that he commanded the bombardment that drove the garrison away.

The reality is different and something less dramatic. Bearing in mind the inflammatory rhetoric by many in the South during this time and throughout the war, the restrained manner in which Beauregard approached his duty may be seen in the following dispatch from Beauregard to his superiors:

HEADQUARTERS PROVISIONAL ARMY, Charleston, S.C., April 27, 1861.

Brig. Gen. COOPER

Adjutant-General, C. S. A.

SIR: I have the honor to submit the following detailed report of the bombardment and surrender of Fort Sumter and the incidents connected therewith: Having completed my channel defenses and batteries in the harbor necessary for the reduction of Fort Sumter, I dispatched two of my aides at 2.20 p.m., on Thursday, the 11th of April, with a communication to Major Anderson, in command of the fortification, demanding its evacuation. I offered to transport himself and command to any port in the United States he might elect, to allow him to move out of the fort with company arms and property and all private property, and to salute his flag in lowering it. He refused to accede to the demand. As my aides were about leaving Major Anderson remarked that if we did not batter him to pieces he would be starved out in a few days, or words to that effect. This being reported to me by my aides on their return with his refusal, at 5.10 p.m., I deemed it proper to telegraph the purport of his remark to the Secretary of War. In reply I received by telegraph the following instructions at 9.10 p.m.: “Do not desire needlessly to bombard Fort Sumter. If Major Anderson will state the time at which, as indicated by him, he will evacuate, and agree that in the mean time he will not use his guns against us unless ours should be employed against Fort Sumter, you are authorized thus to avoid effusion of blood. If this, or its equivalent, be refused, reduce the fort as your judgment decides to be most practicable.” At 11 p.m. I sent my aides with a communication to Major Anderson based on the foregoing instructions. It was placed in his hands at 12.45 a.m. 12th instant. He expressed his willingness to evacuate the fort on Monday at noon if provided with the necessary means of transportation, and if he should not receive contradictory instructions from his Government or additional supplies, but he declined to agree not to open his guns upon us in the event of any hostile demonstrations on our part against his flag. This reply, which was opened and shown to my aides, plainly indicated that if instructions should be received contrary to his purpose to evacuate, or if he should receive his supplies, or if the Confederate troops should fire on hostile troops of the United States, or upon transports bearing the United States flag, containing men, munitions, and supplies designed for hostile operations against us, he would still feel himself bound to fire upon us, and to hold possession of the fort. As, in consequence of a communication from the President of the United States to the governor of South Carolina, we were in momentary expectation of an attempt to re-enforce Fort Sumter, or of a descent upon our coast to that end from the United States fleet then lying at the entrance of the harbor, it was manifestly an imperative necessity to reduce the fort as speedily as possible, and not to wait until the ships and the fort should unite in a combined attack upon us. Accordingly my aides, carrying out my instructions, promptly refused to accede to the terms proposed by Major Anderson, and notified him in writing that our batteries would open upon Fort Sumter in one hour. This notification was given at 3.20 a.m. of Friday, the 12th instant. The signal shell was fired from Fort Johnson at 4.30 a.m. At about 5 o’clock the fire from our batteries became general....

From this communication, a number of intriguing, and significant points emerge.

Do not desire needlessly to bombard Fort Sumter. If Major Anderson will state the time at which, as indicated by him, he will evacuate, and agree that in the mean time he will not use his guns against us unless ours should be employed against Fort Sumter, you are authorized thus to avoid effusion of blood. If this, or its equivalent, be refused, reduce the fort as your judgment decides to be most practicable.

Thus in spite of decisions at the highest levels of the Confederacy, to open hostilities with the United States at Fort Sumter, those at military levels were operating at least with cool heads. Obviously, if the humiliation of the federal government could be achieved by forcing the garrison into surrender and even an honorable one at that, the Confederate Secretary of War was willing to avoid killing anyone.

The second point was that once he considered himself and his men starved out, and if he received no contradictory orders, or support of a physical nature from the federal government, Anderson agreed to surrender. On the other hand, if the ships which by the time of the communique between Anderson and Beauregard were waiting beyond the sand bar of the harbor managed to re-supply him, or if the Southern forces should open fire on Sumter, Anderson was saying in effect that all bets were off.

Third, Beauregard, having been made aware that ships were on their way to support Anderson, was under orders not to allow the re-supply mission to succeed. When and how he put a stop to it was left to him. (As Beauregard reported, Lincoln had in fact taken the precaution of transmitting a message to the governor of South Carolina unambiguously announcing his intention of re-supplying the fort by unarmed ships, with the implication that any shots fired would be charged to the Confederacy and not the federal government.)

Farther along in his April 27 report to Montgomery, Beauregard revealed additional telling facts involved in the events in Charleston Harbor:

“During the whole of Friday night our mortar batteries continued to throw shells, but, in obedience to orders, at longer intervals. The night was rainy and dark, and as it was almost confidently expected that the United States fleet would attempt to land troops upon the islands or to throw men into Fort Sumter by means of boats, the greatest vigilance was observed at all our channel batteries, and by our troops on both Morris and Sullivan’s Islands.

“Early on Saturday morning all of our batteries reopened upon Fort Sumter, which responded vigorously for a time, directing its fire specially against Fort Moultrie. About 8 o’clock a.m. smoke was seen issuing from the quarters of Fort Sumter. Upon this the fire of our batteries was increased, as a matter of course, for the purpose of bringing the enemy to terms as speedily as possibly, inasmuch as his flag was still floating defiantly above him. Fort Sumter continued to fire from time to time, but at long and irregular intervals, amid the dense smoke, flying shot, and bursting shells. Our brave troops, carried away by their natural generous impulses, mounted the different batteries, and at every discharge from the fort cheered the garrison for its pluck and gallantry, and hooted the fleet lying inactive just outside the bar.”

This was an expression of the “gallantry” that still lived, before bitterness between the two sides ran amok. Given what the Civil War would degenerate into, it is amazing and touching that even as they attempted to bombard the garrison at Fort Sumter into submission, the gunners on the Confederate side were affected by the courage of Anderson’s men in defying all the odds and putting up the best fight they were able. Even more intriguing was the attitude of the victorious Southerners in their disgust at the failure of the enemy fleet to brave the guns and do the job they had been sent to do, and with that the implied sympathy for Anderson’s men in being abandoned by their own side.

The final acts in the Sumter story are also best reported by the man on the scene, Beauregard:

“On the morning of the 13th the action was prosecuted with renewed vigor, and about 7 o’clock it was discovered our shells had set fire to the barracks in the fort. Speedily volumes of smoke indicated an extensive conflagration, and apprehending some terrible calamity to the garrison I immediately dispatched an offer of assistance to Major Anderson, which, however, with grateful acknowledgments, he declined. Meanwhile, being informed about 2 o’clock that a white flag was displayed from Sumter I dispatched two of my aides to Major Anderson with terms of evacuation. In recognition of the gallantry exhibited by the garrison I cheerfully agreed that on surrendering the fort the commanding officer might salute his flag.

“By 8 o’clock the terms of evacuation were definitely accepted. Major Anderson having expressed a desire to communicate with the United States vessels lying off the harbor, with a view to arrange for the transportation of his command to some port in the United States, one of his officers, accompanied by Captain Hartstene and three of my aides, was permitted to visit the officer in command of the squadron to make provision for that object. Because of an unavoidable delay the formal transfer of the fort to our possession did not take place until 4 o’clock in the afternoon of the 14th instant. At that hour, the place having been evacuated by the United States garrison, our troops occupied it, and the Confederate flag was hoisted on the ramparts of Sumter with a salute from the various batteries.

“The steamer Isabel having been placed at the service of Major Anderson, he and his command were transferred to the United States vessels off the harbor.”

Thus the Fort Sumter affair came and went. What shines through clearly is the fact that Beauregard, having agreed to serve in the Confederate army, had a job to do and carried it out with little relish and no desire whatsoever to hurt or kill anyone of the garrison.

While these facts have no bearing on the war in general, they are small truths which deserve to be kept alive in the history of the war. Despite the existence of such documents as Beauregard’s report, they are generally kept outside the body of historical annals of the war, confined to specific accounts of the Sumter event as a separate subject.

The inclusion of this document here is not intended to mitigate the treasonous and egregious quality of the Confederate action as a whole. It is intended to demonstrate the flavor of relationships, one could say the contradictions and strains on some in the Confederate camp at this stage, and the willingness to go against the civilian government’s orders and avoid bombarding the fort if a solution between old comrades could be achieved. Beauregard will be castigated in these pages for other reasons, and will not always be seen acting with such restraint, but in this case, he comes off as an honorable man, aside from having chosen to join the army of a rebellious section of the country.

Granted that the fortress Sumter was bombarded until the garrison was forced to evacuate, from this point on, careful attention to the order of events must be maintained so as to gain a complete understanding of how war developed from that point, when contrasted with the conventional history of the Civil War which holds that with the firing of the guns at Sumter, a state of war immediately existed.

The explanations earlier in this work of the fact that war did not and could begin with the firing on Fort Sumter need not be repeated here. Suffice it to say, physically, the possibility of war was still nonexistent as of April 12, 1861, for the reasons previously cited. Additionally, opportunities were still wide open for the prevention of war even after this clearly treasonous act. The fact that no serious attempt would henceforth be conducted to pursue a peaceful solution, the truth cannot be ignored that war was far from inevitable for more than three months after the forced surrender of Sumter.

The question of why this is important, whether war existed, literally or figuratively, during this period, is valid.

The answer is that had war been possible immediately, the character of that war would have been vastly different from what form it finally took. With so few soldiers yet available on either side, one or two fairly small battles, skirmishes, actually, would have decided everything. If the Confederate army were defeated and federal troops occupied the key positions, as Lincoln had claimed to be his aim, had a few key rebel leaders been arrested, and the governments of the South force to bow to federal authority, the Civil War would never have been mentioned. Absent a horrific four year war which killed and maimed many tens of thousands, devastating many cities across the South, and creating animosity that has not yet gone away, the history of the United States would be vastly different than it is. Different in what ways is beyond the scope of this work to analyze.

It is sufficient to point to this fact alone to explain why it is important to acknowledge that the war did not begin with Fort Sumter. Other reasons exist, however.

Among those reasons for arguing the point over the war’s actual beginning is the fact that many key actions occurred in the long interim between Fort Sumter and the and Bull Run, on the Twenty-First of July. The character of the war was deeply affected by those events, most of which are also ignored in chronicles of the war. Without the chain of events that passed between April 12 and July 21, the Civil War might well have been fought primarily in the Gulf States, not Virginia. Had the number of federal troops eventually available to Lincoln’s armies all been brought to bear in the same general area, the war could not have lasted much over two years if that long. It was the existence of two entirely separate theaters of combat, one in which federal troops advanced fairly smoothly from west to east, the other in which both sides remained tied up for the most part within a hundred miles of the starting point, that resulted in the prolongation of the war.

Virginia was obviously not involved in the events that led to secession and ultimately to war. No good reason existed for anyone to imagine that federal forces would become tied up in that state, which had not triggered the series of illegal seizures of federal positions, a state which still remained technically loyal for weeks after Fort Sumter, over the course of the entire war.

Virginia had the power to ignore the war, to permit federal troops to pass through, to watch from the sidelines, but chose to inject itself into the picture even before its people had agreed to claim secession. Virginia’s actions, while small and subdued during the period from April to July, nevertheless insured that the federal military would become tied up in that state rather than pass through and assault the states which had created the crisis. The Virginia forces, acting unilaterally, would buy time for Confederate forces to come within feet of the border of the North, at the Potomac River, and that situation changed the entire complexion of the war before it began. And it was primarily Virginia forces that set up the beginning of the war at Bull Run, and not somewhere in the Carolinas, or Alabama, or Georgia, and so on.

The Confederacy did not start the war in Virginia, it only dispatched its armies there after the state of Virginia carried out the ground work that guaranteed the war would be fought on its own soil.

Chapter Seven

The effects of the firing on Fort Sumter had changed the political landscape in the United States, if in a predictable way. When the fort was bombarded, despite the fact that no lives were lost, (not counting the man who died by accident,) the Northern public went mad with rage. The flag had been fired upon, and vengeance against the enemy who fired upon it must be had. Across the loyal North, meetings broke out over the issue of war and Union rallies took control of the streets.

Senator Douglas proclaimed now, “There are only two sides to the question. Every man must be for the United States or against it. There can be no neutrals in this war, only patriots—or traitors.”

Of course, no war yet existed, but the population of the North clamored for it and the rhetoric of saber- rattling erupted in both sections.

Lincoln had vowed to take back the places which had been seized by the South. By doing so, (that is, making the vow,) he bought time to develop a means to carry out the promise, by allowing the militias to gear up toward becoming armies. Before Sumter, he would have bided his time before acting, out of a desire to avoid appearing to invade or coerce the South into war.

He had needed a provocation for sending a punitive expedition into the South, but Sumter had come too soon. Lincoln had needed Virginia and North Carolina out of the way, either as Confederate states or ultimately loyal states, and he needed the armies to be ready.

Now, with the South having taken it upon itself to carry out what so many construed as an act of war, Lincoln faced a difficult situation. If he allowed another “place” to be taken on his watch, he would appear ineffectual, and the South would seem able to flout federal authority with impunity. The choices seemed for Lincoln to be those of doing nothing or pushing the incident to war by his own action. Given that the people standing behind him now called for war, doing nothing would be the most damaging choice he could make. Yet he was not yet physically able to do anything tangible, again, until Virginia and North Carolina were cleared as avenues of invasion.

He needed a response, but it could only be one of words. Those words must be as perfectly sculpted as those of his inaugural address in order to demonstrate his options, without threatening more than he intended to do or more than he could foresee doing at the moment.

Thus on April 15, after a short cooling off period following the Sumter surrender, Lincoln made that perfect response, in the form of the proclamation calling up the militias to the tune of 75,000 men.

The call was on for the armies to finish up their preparations and begin moving into position.

The actual creation of a 75,000 man army was an experiment on the part of the president. Despite the fact that states, such as Massachusetts and Pennsylvania had offered to dispatch their militias into Lincoln’s hands, no certainty existed that so many men would make themselves available in those states.

The actual order enacted after Lincoln’s proclamation assigned quotas of men for each state to fulfill, to bring up the total of 75,000 among them. Whether any single state would even reach its own quota could not be known until the process moved along, which was the core of the experiment.

Logic and arithmetic directed that it would require at least three states of 25,000 men each, or two of 37,500, or just one offering the entire 75,000, to produce the army Lincoln called for.

In fact, some states, entirely on their own initiative, before Lincoln ever set out for Washington and his inauguration, had begun revitalizing their existing militias, to the extent that in some cases, they surpassed Pennsylvania in preparedness. Men had gathered into local volunteer outfits then presented themselves to state authorities, eager to join the militias as already whole units. In truth, therefore, the prospects had always been good, since the ripple of secessions began, that the experiment of calling up 75,000 men would succeed.

In actual fact, far more men ultimately volunteered than could be housed, uniformed, armed, and trained immediately.

Creating a federal army and wielding it were two separate issues. In the beginning, only Lincoln’s vague statement of intent, to take back the “places” and bring the insurrection to an end in separate locations defined the mission of the new army. The mere creation, initially on paper, of this giant army did nothing to clear up the roadblocks, primarily the existence of the still-neutral states between the North and the rebellious South.

No location was indicated, to which the militias were to proceed and muster into federal control, and from which they would be dispatched into action.

If the 75,000 man army were broken into three lesser armies of 25,000 each, for instance, and could they have been dispatched immediately and directly to the key locations of trouble in the South, it is possible to imagine that they could have swept from “place” to place and cleaned up the rebellion inside their ninety-day enlistment period.

In reality, it would not have been so simple. Upon falling under federal authority, those armies yet had to be clothed, armed, and most of all, trained for their mission, and that would take time. Then they must be transported, or transport themselves on foot, the several hundred miles from the North to the points of impact in the South.

The fact that they were only available for ninety days would become a major problem and limiting factor if it became impossible to enter the South inside that ninety days. Theoretically, the army would come into existence, wait around for ninety days, then muster out and either a new army must be created or Lincoln would be back to having no army.

That was part of the reason for labeling the initial 75,000 man call-up an experiment. If the nation responded well, Lincoln could then create a much longer-term army, and in, fact he would, again and again.

As for the initial 75,000, if they were able to enter the South, defeat the rebel forces, and restore order, they must garrison the hot spots for some time until the Lincoln administration figured out how to keep the rebellion suppressed. If that occurred and they were left to garrison in the South, the next call-up of longer duration armies would have to replace all those of the initial 75,000 who refused to “re-up.”

In fact, Lincoln soon called up more soldiers, this time for three years, but they could not have been assembled, trained, and dispatched deep into the South before the initial ninety days had run out.

The sequence of events described above, the massed army of 75,000, either in one body or divided into more manageable elements, must be considered the best case scenario if Virginia and North Carolina had been cleared out of the way somehow.

In a worst case, the South would have its own army waiting and rather than a police action to suppress a rebellion, the situation would have fallen into a bloody war immediately. Still, if the federal troops had been able to pass through Virginia and North Carolina, the war would have begun deep in the South, and once it began, the federal government could train more and more units and pump them into the middle of the caldron and the war would go on until the South was subdued or the federal forces were totally defeated and the South was left to its independence.

As expressed in the best and worst case scenarios that could have been imagined on April 15, 1861, the war would have been fought on the soil of the states which had initiated the trouble in the first place, ranging from Louisiana to South Carolina. With only that much territory from which a united Confederate Army could draw men, and in such an essentially confined space, the advantage would be heavily in favor of the Union armies that could continue to flow into the region against the Confederate forces.

Indeed, those federal armies could enter from two directions, once the issue of the undeclared states was cleared up. The second direction would have been the stretch of land west of the Appalachian Mountains, through Kentucky and Tennessee, or down the Mississippi River directly into Mississippi.

That dream was not reality, however. Virginia and the other states did continue to hold out, declaring in neither direction for weeks. If they held out long enough, Lincoln’s first set of volunteers would be ready. If they held too long, the South could start describing itself as independent.

The reason the war proceeded in the manner history records is precisely due to the manner and the timing by which Virginia entered the war, between April and July of 1861.

Most discussions of the Civil War ignore the sequence of events involving Virginia in the time frame between Fort Sumter and Bull Run. They tend to jump to the fact that suddenly, Virginia was in the Confederacy and war came right to the doors of Washington without explaining how that state, which was on the outside of the Confederacy when Fort Sumter was attacked, suddenly became the focal point of the war, threatening the very doors of government in Washington.

What led to that pass, Virginia’s emergence as a vital center of the war, so rapidly, is seldom told in accounts of the war. It is not Virginia’s secession that placed enemy armies outside Washington, it was unilateral action of a few men on their own while secession was still being debated who changed the character of the war even before it began. It was unquestionably Virginia’s doing that caused one whole half of the war to be fought in that state over the entire four years it lasted. One might wonder of those leaders would have willingly placed their state in such a situation that its citizens were subjected to such a horror for so long if they had been able to know so much of the war would park itself right in their own state.

Whether they would have chosen that situation or not, it is not possible to fully comprehend the reason the war bogged down in Virginia without being aware of the preparations Virginians made to cause that to happen.

The events which occurred in the upper segment of Virginia and extending into what would soon be the State of West Virginia, (but in 1861 remained an area nicknamed Western Virginia,) are generally treated in historical accounts as mere backwaters of the real war. And when they are mentioned, it is usually only because some of those events led to the rise of General McClellan to the position of overall leader of the Union army within a few months.

As for the reason the war began in Virginia rather than the Carolinas, most accounts simply encourage the assumption, without explanation of how or why, that it was logical for the war to have begun in a state where none of the original insurrection against the federal authority, nor firing on the flag of the United States occurred.

Ironically, the men who actually set Virginia on its course to war had no intentions of starting or fighting the war in the state. To the contrary, they intended to prevent war by taking action to keep federal armies from “invading” Virginia, and in so doing, further barring the way by federal armies into the then-heart of the Confederacy, whether Virginia joined it or not.

The issue of secession and Virginia’s progression into that condition began back on April 4, 1861, more than a week before the Sumter incident flared into open fire. At that time, Virginia’s committee on the subject of secession had voted down the issue, but had not adjourned, leaving the question of secession open.

As has been seen, Lincoln tried to negotiate a permanent termination of the committee, which would have put Virginia secession off the table indefinitely, but of course he had found the effort fruitless. Thus, the possibility of eventual secession constantly simmered on the back burner in Virginia, awaiting new developments which might ultimately push the committee in one direction or the other.

In this time, both sides, North and South, of course carefully kept their armies outside Virginia’s borders.

Still, even after the firing on Sumter, Lincoln had again contacted people in Virginia, making his case, urging the state leaders to recognize that he had not caused the onset of hostilities by his own actions. In short, he continued wooing the state in hopes of preventing secession, despite the fact that no one could possibly have ever promised the state would never secede.

Contrary to Confederate expectations, the slight spilling of blood at Sumter did not push Virginia immediately onto the side of the aggressors.

In fact, a majority of the population within entire sections of Virginia actually opposed secession at all times.

Even Robert E. Lee, and other future Confederate generals in Virginia, opposed secession. The key regions where interest in secession was low were the vast coal-rich section extending from the Appalachian Mountains to the Ohio River, Western Virginia, and the fertile Shenandoah Valley, which connected to Western Virginia in the area of Harpers Ferry, which was itself directly adjacent to Western Virginia, and also Maryland, just across the Potomac River.

When Lincoln issued his call for federalized state militias, each state had been issued a quota of men to provide from among volunteers. When Virginia was asked for 8,000 men, the governor, John Letcher, absolutely refused to comply, declaring on his own that the president’s actions were unconstitutional.

At that time, nothing of a physical nature resulting from the declaration of independence by the Confederate states directly threatened the Union. That was true for the same reason federal armies could not touch a hair on the head of Southern citizens because of the two-state no-man’s-land.

Washington, the city, lies of course on the Potomac River, with Maryland on three sides and Virginia across the river. If Virginia was not willing to provide its militia to the use of the federal army, and if Virginia was not a part of the Confederacy, during its time of debate over secession, its militia ought to have been as inactive. That would have been the assumption of anyone giving thought to the subject at all. If the militia was not to be turned over to the president, but the state was not declared loyal to the South, the militia should have had no mission, any more than any of the Northern militias had had before the war loomed, back in mid-or-late 1860.

In this period, soon after April 15, with no direct threat visible, the militias of the Northern states were beginning to form up and prepare in what manner they were able, to be forwarded wherever Lincoln called for them.

No militia forces from Northern states had arrived in Washington, and no set location had been named for the gathering of Lincoln’s army, in the form of those militias, but Washington was a reasonable focal point, given that the army that resulted would have to pass through Virginia in any case if it were to act in the Carolinas.

No reason existed for loyal American citizens, or the government, including Congress, to feel nervous or threatened inside of Washington, despite the fact that Abraham Lincoln had passed through Baltimore in disguise, at the behest of his security people—the Pinkerton detective agency—who believed an assassination threat existed in the pro-secessionist city. (Maryland showed no stirrings of its militia, either to support Lincoln or threaten him.)

This was the scenario when Lincoln issued his call for an army of 75,000 to form up and support his punitive action against the South.

Enter that handful of Virginia leaders-without-portfolio.

Chapter Eight

If the governor of Virginia refused to send the militia into federal service, what part would that militia play? As with most states, before the war, the Virginia militia was initially a social function in which a few men engaged for the comeraderie of it. The Virginia militia was no more up to speed, ready to fight, than any other across the nation.

Thus at the moment Lincoln put out his call, that militia lay dormant, inactive and neutral, with no official mission of any kind. Virginia had no enemies, domestic or external, the only perceived threat being the constant fear of slave uprising, and the men of Virginia could have sat out the war and those few men who were already officers of the force could have done the same, until the issue of secession was decided one way or another.

Into this vacuum, entered two men, former Virginia governor Henry A. Wise, and a militia captain named John D. Imboden. Imboden was later to write the following, describing his role in the events that followed:

“I had been one of the candidates for a seat in that convention [to debate secession] from Augusta county, but had been overwhelmingly defeated by the ‘Union’ candidates, because I favored secession as the only ‘peace measure’ Virginia could then adopt, our aim being to put the State in an independent position to negotiate between the United States and the seceded Gulf and Cotton States for a new Union, to be formed on a compromise of the slavery question by a convention to be held for that purpose.”

(John D. Imboden, “Jackson at Harper’s Ferry in 1861,” Battles and Leaders of the Civil War, Volume I, 1887.)

On April 16, Wise met with Imboden and proposed that the state’s militia should capture the federal armory and weapons manufacturing plant at Harpers Ferry before the federal government could lock it down with a substantial number of troops.

The facility at Harpers Ferry had been the target of John Brown’s notorious raid in 1859.

For a seceding state to seize yet another federal would be to fit perfectly in line with the insurrectional behavior of the other Southern states which had so perturbed Lincoln in the past. The major difference in this case was the fact that rather than being a “place” far distant from Washington, Harpers Ferry was only fifty miles away, in the very neighborhood of the national capital. Once enemy forces began moving anywhere in that area, the entire mindset of the federal government would transform overnight. Suddenly, the interest and concern of the government would not be righting wrongs of states four hundred miles away, or even protecting more “places” in yet another state. Instead, the interest and concern of the government would turn instantly to its own survival, upon learning that an enemy army was on the move in a hostile manner in a state adjacent to the capital. That rapidly, the situation became defense of the North, not punishment of the South. Not only was Virginia hard against Washington City, it was equally close to a long border with Maryland, and west of the mountains, lay across the Ohio from the state of that same name. Virginia armies could march right into the North and wreak havoc at any time. That was what the government, and the population of the North, must assume until they knew otherwise.

The states along the Ohio River would react in panic through their own militias, and while Maryland would do nothing, Pennsylvania, which in places was only miles from Western Virginia across the shortest “neck” of Maryland, would respond to the threat as well.

Most alarming was the possibility that the Virginia militia would move directly on Washington, into its streets, and either capture or chase the government, including Lincoln, away.

At the moment that the leaders in Virginia began to set their plan into motion, only a paltry force of weakly armed troops existed inside Washington to protect it, and no body of soldiers were present in Maryland.

From the moment federal authorities realized that Virginia’s militia was on the move, all plans as far as how the federalized army might be employed were turned on their heads. Immediately, it became clear that rather than preparing to invade the South, all available militia units rising to Lincoln’s call must converge on Washington to defend the government. Evidently, long before the new federal army could approach the seat of insurrection in South Carolina, it would have to first defeat the Virginia militia, and perhaps before that was carried out, the Confederate army would emerge from the Carolinas to join in with Virginia. By this time, the question of whether Virginia formally declared its allegiance with the Confederacy or not would be moot, because by attacking federal forces, the state would be in a condition of full scale insurrection, like the rest of the Confederacy.

The intentions and plans of the ringleaders in Virginia were quite different from the panicked assumptions made in Washington about the target of their actions. They had no interest either in triggering war or capturing Washington. Their total concentration was fixed on defense of their home state against the threat of federal invasion in the event that Virginia did in fact secede.

Knowing the federal government was building an army and that it would assemble on the borders of Virginia, these men saw the first strike of Lincoln’s army as inevitably falling on their home state.

In the very beginning, the cabal planning the operation was small, made up of some members, like Imboden, who were already active in the state’s militia, some who were not. The leaders of this conspiracy did happen to be well-placed individuals, however, in that they had access to even more important persons in the state government, not to mention militia officers other than Imboden himself, people who wielded the power to abet the treasonous plan and actually implement it.

Wise, the former governor, shortly broached the idea of the raid on Harpers Ferry to Letcher, the current governor, the man who had denied the militia to Lincoln’s use.

Letcher encouraged the plan.

With that hurdle crossed, Wise did not keep the project under wraps for long; he made a fiery speech before the Virginia committee debating secession, describing the plans he was developing for the employment of the militia. In so doing, Wise succeeded in pushing the committee the rest of the way into rebellion.

Indeed, Imboden had been defeated by his neighbors from the Shenandoah Valley in his bid to bring about secession earlier. For that matter, John Letcher, the governor, who was also from the valley, was a minority in his home town of Lexington, on the issue of secession.

An entire section of the state, Western Virginia, was so opposed to secession that a committee was already meeting in the panhandle town of Wheeling to debate secession—from Virginia. Indeed, by 1863, this would lead to the region becoming a loyal Union State under the name of West Virginia.

While clearly secession was not an easy sell in Virginia, the ultimate decision should actually have seemed inevitable. The “tidewater” and piedmont regions, that is, the flat lands away from the mountains, where slaveholders abounded, held the most population and that class had the most interest in siding with the Confederacy. And indeed, little by little, leading up to Wise’s speech before the committee, sentiment in the state was drifting toward support for secession.

Before the pressures of secession and potential war had begun to build, Richmond and Washington had long been linked by social ties. Indeed, Washington itself was reckoned to be a “southern” town. People commonly traveled back and forth between the two cities on business as well as political activities of many kinds. Due to the lay of the land, with the Potomac making a wide turn through the direct space between Richmond and Washington, presenting a considerable physical barrier, rail lines did not run in a straight line between Washington and Richmond, but they did link up by way of junctions to the west, closer to the Blue Ridge Mountains, making passage between the two cities nearly seamless and as comfortable and safe as rail travel in the 1860’s allowed. Nearly as useful, carriage roads ran between the two cities a bit more directly than the train lines.

In short, during the period under consideration, nothing impeded the free travel of citizens back and forth between the cities. No passes were required, any more than would be required for travel between Philadelphia and Boston, (that is, if one where white,) and as a result, espionage was a cottage industry, even before hostilities opened. Spies worked both sides, informing their respective allies of anything that occurred openly enough in the two governmental centers.

Indeed, the open passage of critical information was not stifled even after the war began. In the heat of the worst fighting to come, information important to the Confederate army which was supposedly the equivalent of modern day Top Secrecy was often reported by word of mouth on the streets and even in Richmond newspapers the same day. Consequently, it was inevitable that whatever emerged in the secession committee in Richmond soon reached the ears of anyone interested, in Washington.

By that means, the fact that Wise proposed to mobilize the Virginia militia as a hostile force against United States interests became known almost instantly in the national capital, which led to the panicked state of mind.

As a result, it was in a flash that all grand notions of marching the federal army to the Carolinas, to take back the “places” and end both the insurrection and the Confederate bid for independence, were turned upside down. Suddenly, the most pressing, dire mission for the new federal army would be defending the borders of the loyal states, and most importantly, the national capital itself. And not one militia soldier had arrived to save the government from potential capture.

By the original planning, before Virginia’s militia reared its head, many, but not all of the new army would be dispatched toward Washington. Prior to the arrival of elements of the 75,000 man army, due to assassination threats that had been intercepted, directed against the president, the best possible military precautions that could have been carried out by the existing federal soldiers already in the capital had been set in place by Winfield Scott.

Washington had already been deemed the most sensible point of collection for at least the majority of the militia units that would form the 75,000 man army Lincoln had summoned on April 15. Washington was as close to the projected seat of action in South Carolina as any Northern city, assuming soldiers would be transported directly through Virginia into the South. If on the other hand, Virginia did secede, it made even more sense that federal troops should gather in Washington to face the new enemy, a Confederate Virginia.

In any event, the point seemed obvious to Wise and Imboden, the federal troops would enter Virginia first.

During the events leading up to the Fort Sumter attack, Lincoln had advised Governor Curtin, Pennsylvania, with regard to his offer of militia at some future time, “I think the necessity of being ready increases. Look to it.”

The actual orders issued to the state governors to carry out the purpose of the April 15 proclamation took the following form:

WAR DEPARTMENT, WASHINGTON, April 15, 1861.

SIR,—Under the Act of Congress ‘for calling forth the militia to execute the laws of the Union, suppress insurrections; repel invasions,’ etc., approved February 28, 1795, I have the honor to request your Excellency to cause to be immediately detached from the militia of your State the quota designated in the table below, to serve as infantry or riflemen for the period of three months, unless sooner discharged.

Following the order was a list of the states and their requested numbers of men to be forwarded into federal service. Governor John Andrew, Massachusetts, had been another governor who had made clear to Lincoln that if war began to loom on the horizon, his state would do just as he now offered, send its militia to whatever position Lincoln designated. Upon receiving his copy of the quota list, Andrew sent a wire to Lincoln saying, “Dispatch received. By what route shall we send.”

Based on the orders sent in response to that message, while most of the militia forces were directed toward Washington, some of the Massachusetts units made available by Andrew were dispatched by ship to a federal base actually in Virginia, called Fortress Monroe, set at the end of the Virginia Peninsula, a long body of land formed by the York River on the north and the James to the south. This occurred at a time when Virginia was still debating secession but could be treated as a loyal state, so sending a federal force there at that time was not a major issue.

To follow the actions of other militias, it is instructive to go back to the period of time between Lincoln’s election and his inauguration, even earlier than the beginning of his journey to Washington.

The nation as a whole clearly recognized the fact that the wave of secessions, whether that was a valid legal concept or not, had signaled the onset of events that might well lead to war. It would have been easy to predict that war would result, although what form that war would take would have seemed sketchy.

With this in mind, men in states from both North and South began the process of transforming the small, intimate militia companies that already existed, from social clubs to actual military units. Much of this was done locally and spontaneously, with no prodding from the state governments, but soon, the governors caught the war fever and as with Curtin and Andrews, pushed their military leaders to step up the process of setting militias on a war footing.

Spontaneously, other social or even business groups began forming their own militia companies. Fire brigades were high on this list, and by the time Lincoln was calling for federalization of militia, but still fretted over how well the nation would respond, militias were gathering throughout the North, eager to participate.

Once the state authorities began to officially respond, those volunteer squads could be pulled together into larger and larger groupings, from squads to companies, companies to brigades, brigades to regiments, and although no single state militia came to much of a force, no more than two or three thousand at the beginning, once the militias of neighboring states agreed to cooperate, a fairly handsome little army existed, awaiting orders. But also awaiting arms and training.

While it is true that the federal armories in the North had been emptied out in the Buchanan administration and the contents sent into the South, the state armories belonging to the militias were not included. Some of those states possessed sufficient supplies to support the raising of the militias and others did not.

As an example of the foregoing process, the units that had been offered to and then supplied by Governor Curtin of Pennsylvania can be traced back to at least January of 1861. In that month, companies of volunteers had fallen in, forming “regular” elements of the Pennsylvania militia, which Lincoln would subsequently review in Harrisburg, on his journey to Washington for inauguration.

Unfortunately, as a general rule for the newly forming militias, mobs of eager men in the hundreds or thousands, standing about in fields, lacking arms, uniforms, or a scintilla of training, did not a viable army make. While those units that were in some degree prepared to fight were on their way to Washington, others had to scramble to collect arms, undergo some semblance of training, and wait for orders from Washington before knowing where they were most needed.

Out of the roughly 16,000 federal soldiers on the rolls at the time of Fort Sumter, precious few were stationed at Washington. Until the onset of serious difficulties between the North and South centering on the election of 1860, little cause existed for troops to be quartered in Washington.

That situation changed in January of 1861, as recorded by Hay and Nicolay:

While Mr. Lincoln was yet at Philadelphia, he was met by Mr. Frederick W. Seward, son of Senator Seward, who brought him an important communication from his father and General Scott at Washington. About the beginning of the year serious apprehension had been felt lest a sudden uprising of the secessionists in Virginia and Maryland might endeavor to gain possession of the national capital. An investigation by a committee of Congress found no active military preparation to exist for such a purpose, but considerable traces of disaffection and local conspiracy in Baltimore; and, to guard against such an outbreak, President Buchanan had permitted his Secretary of War, Mr. Holt, to call General Scott to Washington and charge him with the safety of the city, not only at that moment, but also during the counting of the presidential returns in February, and the coming inauguration of Mr. Lincoln. For this purpose General Scott had concentrated at Washington a few companies from the regular army, and also, in addition, had organized and armed about nine hundred men of the militia of the District of Columbia.

(Nicolay, Chapter XXII)

To combat the low-level threats, the army adjutant general who was in charge of the military presence that still existed in Washington, small as it was, a colonel named Charles P. Stone, created a plan to use that irregular militia described above, in the form of what amounted to a police force, protecting those key areas in the capital that were most important and most vulnerable.

Neither the few companies of regulars nor those nine hundred irregulars would be sufficient force to fully protect the government from a concerted attack by any larger or more well armed militia from Virginia or elsewhere, but they only must hold the line a short time after April 15, given the fact that thousands of new federalized militia men were on their way.

As long as the Virginia militia remained dormant, the preparations already made seemed sufficient, and general-in-chief Winfield Scott concurred with that assessment. Once the news that the Virginia militia was on the move reached Washington, suddenly those paltry regular and irregular forces hanging around Washington appeared woefully inadequate for the defense of the government.

On the other side of the Potomac, the movements of the Virginia militia carried forward.

Henry Wise had connections that allowed him to tap into the secessionist spy network that was active in Washington. Those contacts reported both facts and rumor that circulated through the capital city, and among those rumors was one that indicated a thousand man unit of Massachusetts militia under a politician turned general by the name of Benjamin Butler was being directed to Harpers Ferry to protect it from exactly the kind of operation Wise was leading. This was the kind of news to light a fire under the Virginia militia leadership, who had anticipated facing only forty-five lightly armed federal officers holding the armory.

The rumor, however, was false. The Massachusetts unit in question was the unit which had been diverted from Washington, down to Fortress Monroe, on the Virginia Peninsula; it would not be approaching within a couple hundred miles of Harpers Ferry.

Despite believing the rumor, Wise did not call off the attack on Harpers Ferry. Instead, he warned Imboden that in hopes of avoiding a serious battle, the operation must be carried out before the Massachusetts forces arrived. If the Virginia militia could oust the forty-five federals and seize Harpers Ferry, they could probably hold off an incoming force even of a thousand with defensive measures, because of the comfortable and easily defended situation the little town occupied. If Virginia artillery could be set up on the hills overlooking town, the Massachusetts militia would be hard pressed to take it back.

In order to seize one federal armory, that of Harpers Ferry, the cabal would need weapons from another. The armory in Richmond was under the command of a federal army captain named Charles Dimmock, a Southern sympathizer. Approached for access to the armory, Dimmock was quite cooperative, and indeed, soon became a key actor first in the Virginia militia, then in the Confederate army, rising to the rank of general and later erecting formidable defensive works outside of Richmond that would be known as the Dimmock Line.

Harpers Ferry would not be the only target of the Virginia militia. Pro-secessionists on the scene asked that Wise direct men to seize the Gosport federal shipyards at Norfolk, and he complied, sending a militia force in that direction as well. This would, unknowingly, place that force within the venue of the same Massachusetts unit at Fortress Monroe whose imminent presence was anticipated instead at Harpers Ferry. No response would be made by the Fortress Monroe contingent, however.

It must be emphasized that all the movements by the Virginia militia up to and for some time after the taking of Harpers Ferry and the Gosport Yards were undertaken with no support or cooperation of the Confederacy. Not until secession was fully validated, by the laws devised by the state of Virginia, would the Confederacy insinuate itself into the picture in Virginia. Yet it must also be made clear that they were well aware of what was going on and encouraged it. Confederate representatives circulated freely among the Virginians in the capital, advising and staying advised of the fluid situation, both with regard to the military operations and the process of secession.

The government in Washington could not assume the leaders of the Virginia militia activity did not have designs on capturing Washington. They must protect the city and government first, then find out the truth of the Virginian intentions when the city was safe. All reasonable prudence on the part of the Lincoln government would demand that the capital should be defended as if it were under imminent threat.

Of the ironies of Wise’s plan was the obvious fact that by conducting military action designed to defend and protect Virginia, he was in fact pushing the federal government to zero in on Virginia as a direct target of immediate interest the moment it was in position to conduct offensive rather than defensive operations.

Having put out his call on April 15, Lincoln could not expect the first militia forces to arrive for a couple of days. April 16, Wise made known his plan to seize Harpers Ferry, but since at that point, no known militia movement had begun, as far as the leadership in Washington knew, they had at least a day or two before Virginia forces could threaten the capital, if in fact such a threat were to materialize.

Whether any of the men being dispatched by the Northern states could reach Washington sooner than the Virginia militia would be able to do was an unknown but if the militia formed up in Richmond, it could arrive in a day or two, if Washington was indeed its target. The small defensive forces available already in Washington would not be enough if the Virginia force was of any significant size. Panic gripped the city, fear that at any moment, Virginia soldiers might appear on the bridges crossing the Potomac and would be able to seize the federal government with little to stop them.

Ignoring whatever it might have heard about the defenseless nature of Washington and the panic growing there, the militia under Wise carried forward with its own agenda that did not include a threat to the capital.

In the Norfolk operation, despite the fact that elements of the US Navy attempted to destroy the ship yard rather than stand in and defend it, the Gosport facilities did fall into Virginian hands, as did Harpers Ferry, both luckily without undue violence. Similarly to the case of the ship yard at Norfolk, federal officers in Harpers Ferry attempted to destroy the armory rather than let it fall into enemy hands but they were not totally successful.

The takeover of Harpers Ferry was completed on April 19, 1861, a mere seven days after the attack on Fort Sumter. It must be noted that the governor of Virginia, John Letcher, in sanctioning the raids on Harpers Ferry and Norfolk, had firmly stipulated that the actual attacks must not be carried out until it was clear beyond doubt that Virginia would secede. It seemed an odd distinction to make, his reasoning being that if such clearly treasonous actions as seizing federal facilities were carried while the host state was still part of the Union, the perpetrators could be prosecuted and hanged, yet if carried out as an act of rebellion by a state claiming to no longer belong to the United States, the perpetrators would be safe because they would be on the other side of war.

Only at some future time when that war, whether a long one or a short one, was over, might the perpetrators have to face the wrath of the federal government, and if the secessionists lost the war, there would be far more to worry about than their taking of Harpers Ferry at the outset.

Secession would not be official, by Virginia’s own reckoning, until a popular vote, but Letcher would not wait for that. He was satisfied to demand that the conspirators wait until the committee in Richmond had passed secession. This is a difficult position to explain. Lincoln had already made it clear that he did not recognize secession as a valid concept no matter what steps it passed through. He would not have given the claim of secession any more legal standing if the governor simply declared the state had seceded than if the state carried out some drawn out process involving a committee which itself had no legal standing under the federal government. Yet before he would authorize the final act of seizing the federal properties, Letcher insisted that the committee’s vote in favor of secession was carried out. Still, without the popular vote, secession would not be in force in Virginia, so why Letcher made that particular stipulation is understandable only if he thought the taking of Harpers Ferry could not wait that long.

In any case, once the committee passed secession, the operation had the green light.

Chapter Nine

Until handed over to the authority of the federal government, the state militias acted under the command of their governors and those military leaders selected thereby. Militias on the move toward Washington, or whatever points selected by the War Department, remained under state command until the process of federalization was carried out, even after the proclamation of April 15. In some cases, the federal handovers occurred at the point of origin for the militias, other cases, at some other location.

Long before Lincoln’s proclamation, the governors of the states bordering potential enemy states had seen the need to put up defenses against possible “secessionist” attacks. Like those in charge of defenses and those feeling threatened inside Washington by the activation of the Virginia militias, the governors of states adjacent to Virginia’s borders could not simply assume the enemy forces had no designs on invasion.

The two Southern states that shared borders with Northern states in the Ohio River Valley were Virginia itself, and Kentucky. Far less concern revolved around the latter state, however, because its legislature was pro-Union, and while its governor was secessionist in sympathy, he indicated no interest in raising the militia against the Union. That situation of calm regarding Kentucky would not last long but in April and early May of 1861, that state was not a threat to serve as a conduit for secessionist attacks on the North.

Despite the overwhelming “Unionist” feeling of the people in Western Virginia, nothing prevented the militia of the parent state from operating there in April of 1861.

Fear of Virginia’s militia, even before secession was announced, spurred the governors and military commanders of the militias of the Ohio River Valley states, principally Ohio itself, and Indiana, to push forward with preparations to activate their militias, and in the beginning, it did not matter whether they would be federalized to cooperate with Lincoln, or would be held to defend their own borders. Only when they were in military fitness to act against an enemy could more advanced decisions about their disposition be made.

As a result of the panic stirred by the quickening of the Virginia militia, some of the militias of the Ohio Valley states would never reach Washington before they became embroiled in action in Western Virginia. Such was the havoc caused by Wise’s plan to wield the Virginia militia of his home state, that simply by activating his small forces, he guaranteed the Civil War would be bogged down for four years, with whole armies tangled up in Virginia for most of that period.

Not all the credit for this nightmare scenario that would grip the nation was due to Wise, however. He only set the ball into motion. His main achievement would prove to be that of freezing Lincoln’s army for some time within the confines of Washington and north of the borders which Wise had in fact set out to defend. In that he succeeded well.

The next step involving the Virginia militia in tying down the federal armies in the east for the duration of the war cannot be told until another Virginian is introduced. First, it is important to understand the effects of the panic upon Washington and the responses of the incoming militias in the capital’s defense.

While new companies were gathered into armies, starting from scratch in Pennsylvania, the earliest units that had formed up armed themselves as much as possible and had begun training and drilling, and were able by April 18 to set forth for Washington. This was of course two days after Wise had announced plans for the activation of the Virginia militia before the secession committee.

The initial Pennsylvania unit that began its short journey to Washington consisted of 475 militia volunteers and fifty regular army soldiers, the latter part of the 16,000 scattered across the nation. Those fifty regulars, under command of a Lieutenant Pemberton, were bound not for Washington but for Fort McHenry, in Baltimore. (Pemberton would soon leave federal service and become a key major general in the Confederate army.)

To reach Washington, this unit, as Lincoln had done, would pass through Baltimore, a city which resented Lincoln and his plans to use military against the secessionist South, a city in which Lincoln’s Pinkerton protectors had feared an ambush and assassination attempt.

The militia men were virtually unarmed, having been denied weapons from their state armory for bureaucratic reasons, promised instead to be armed when they reached Washington.

Arriving by train in Baltimore, these five hundred-plus men ran into an unanticipated meat-grinder, which made clear that Washington, accessible mainly through Baltimore, was almost cut off from the rest of the friendly North.

The situation with regard to Baltimore did not materialize out of thin air. The fears of assassination that might take place in the city made clear Baltimore was not friendly to the Lincoln administration.

At a time before the election, someone at a meeting asked, “Do you believe, Mr. Lincoln, that if the Republicans should elect a president, they would be able to inaugurate him?”

To this he had replied, “I reckon, friend, that if there are enough votes to elect a Republican president, there’ll be men enough to put him in.”

By the time Lincoln had in fact become that Republican who was elected, so great was the concern for his life in Washington that Winfield Scott had brought in what forces he could muster to protect him, part of the precautions called for by Buchanan as described earlier. For the inauguration itself, sharpshooters were posted around the entire area of the capital.

Before Lincoln even approached Washington, however, Alan Pinkerton, head of a railroad detective agency, and who would continue to figure heavily in the early conduct of the war, warned Lincoln of what he claimed was a specific, extant plot to assassinate the president-elect in Baltimore.

His advisors urged Lincoln to pass through Baltimore incognito and while he hated the idea, he cooperated, slipping secretly into and out of the city without incident.

The secessionist elements in the city were enraged at missing their opportunity to at least harass Lincoln, if not to actually kill him. They were therefore in no mood to pleasantly welcome military forces on their way to defend Washington, or worse, to potentially initiate the “invasion” of the South.

By April, when the first soldiers—those five hundred plus from Pennsylvania—entered the city on their way to form the beginnings of an army to oppose secession, they were greeted by belligerent mobs who meant to stop their passage through.

It was the peculiarity of rail travel in the city of Baltimore that had made Lincoln, and now the militia men vulnerable to local trouble makers. While train tracks ran through the city from rail lines outside, such as the Baltimore and Ohio, continuing on to Washington, engines were not allowed to operate inside the city. That meant that train cars must be pulled though town by horses, leaving passengers the option of remaining aboard or riding carriages or other conveyances to the next engine-powered rail lines that could continue on to Washington.

This exposed travelers through the city to the direct attention of hostile crowds, whether those travelers were ordinary people, presidents-elect, or soldiers on their way to defend the nation’s capital.

In their crossing, the Pennsylvania outfit was harassed and threatened by mobs of city people, including some disloyal police, who attempted to prevent the troops from ever reaching the steam powered trains that would carry on to Washington. Despite their paucity of arms, the militia men succeeded in bluffing their way out of disaster and reached the next segment of engine powered transport to Washington.

Once in Washington, after the fifty regular men had separated out for their disposition at Fort McHenry, the remaining Pennsylvania militia men met with Brigadier General Irwin McDowell, recently promoted from major, who would pull together the incoming federalized militias into a fighting force. For the time being, McDowell quartered the Pennsylvania men in the capitol building and arranged for them to receive weapons.

Their first assignment was to guard the government buildings against saboteurs and assassins.

They were very soon joined by more incoming troops.

On April 19, the first contingent of Massachusetts federalized troops arrived at Baltimore.

Having been foiled once, the Baltimore crowds were not to be bluffed through again. No longer content to merely harass the Massachusetts troops, the mobs attacked them, and in the melee, panicked soldiers, who unlike their predecessors, were armed with live ammunition, fired into the crowd, killing twelve civilians. Four soldiers were also killed and many were injured on both sides, and only with support from friendly members of the otherwise hostile police force was greater damage averted and the unit allowed continue on to Washington.

Determined to make this the last delivery of soldiers through their city, secessionists sympathizers now sent out agents to cut telegraph wires, tear up tracks, and blow up bridges, which they intended would put an end to further reinforcements of Washington.

Despite the problems in transit, between the initial Pennsylvania and Massachusetts units, by April 19 a combined force of around fifteen hundred men were present in Washington. More were coming, but for awhile, fear of attack by a much larger Virginia force kept the nerves of government personnel in the city on edge, and the sabotage conducted in Maryland, which knocked out all communications from the outside world did nothing to improve morale in the capital.

To comprehend the feeling inside of Washington in this time, all the way up to April 22, one only need to read the comments of Jacob Hay, John Nicolay’s assistant as private secretary for Lincoln:

“All these hostile occurrences put the national capital in the greatest danger. For three days it was entirely cut off from communication with the North by either telegraph or mail. Under the orders of General Scott, the city was hastily prepared for a possible siege. The flour at the mills, and other stores of provisions were taken possession of. The Capitol and other public buildings were barricaded, and detachments of troops stationed in them. Business was suspended by a common impulse; streets were almost deserted except by squads of military patrol; shutters of stores, and even many residences, remained unopened throughout the day. The signs were none too reassuring. In addition to the public rumors whispered about by serious faces on the streets, General Scott reported in writing to President Lincoln on the evening of April 22:

‘Of rumors, the following are probable, viz.: First, that from fifteen hundred to two thousand troops are at the White House (four miles below Mount Vernon, a narrow point in the Potomac), engaged in erecting a battery; Second, that an equal force is collected or in progress of assemblage on the two sides of the river to attack Fort Washington; and Third, that extra cars went up yesterday to bring down from Harper’s Ferry about two thousand other troops to join in a general attack on this capital—that is, on many of its fronts at once. I feel confident that with our present forces we can defend the Capitol, the Arsenal, and all the executive buildings (seven) against ten thousand troops not better than our District volunteers.’”

(Nicolay, Chapter XIV, pp 194-195)

This was the state of things in the capital up to April 22, 1861. To reckon with the next series of events which had profound effect upon the war, it is necessary to harken back to April 18.

Chapter Ten

In 1859, John Brown had famously attempted to seize the US arsenal at Harpers Ferry and in order to put down the insurrection, the US army sent a squadron under the command of a regular army colonel, a West Point trained army engineer named Robert E. Lee, who happened to be in Washington at the time and thus was available to take charge of the small operation against Brown.

Lee had served superbly in the Mexican War under Lincoln’s general-in-chief, Winfield Scott. Both men were Virginians, and like several other ranking officers, Scott remained loyal to the Union. Now, in 1861, when Scott gave thought to who would be his top choice as military commander in the field, one name came to mind: Robert E. Lee. Lee was acknowledged by many as the finest officer in the US Army. (One exception to this rule was the future president of the Confederacy, who held another man in even higher regard.)

Lee had grown bitter at not being elevated to the rank of general over the decades he served in the army. In peace time, only so many generals were permitted and a slot never opened for Lee in the time from the Mexican War to April of 1861. Suddenly, with the threat of war, not just colonels but captains and majors, such as Irwin McDowell, were being jumped to the rank Lee desired. Many of these men had left the army, to take up civilian positions, and returned to defend the country, and were instantly bumped to higher ranks than they had held upon leaving the service.

Having served as a combat engineer to a fare-the-well in Mexico, Lee spent much of the interim between wars acting as a civil engineer, running projects in the United States, such as dredging operations around St. Louis, on the Mississippi River. Little of his service had involved commanding troops in the field, but that was what Scott wanted him to do, with war of some sort clearly in the offing.

At last, then, Lee was offered the promotion to general he had coveted so long, but to accept, he would have to pay a price: he must command armies that would pass through his home state of Virginia, and he might very well be required to lead the federal army directly against his fellow Virginians.

Ironically, Robert Lee was on record as opposing secession. He considered such action to be both rebellion and anarchic and disagreed with it in principal.

At the time that Texas seceded, Lee had commanded a detail of soldiers in the state, part of the scattered federal army of 16,000; when most of those federal men declared for Texas and seized the government’s weapons, Lee had the choice of joining the rebellion or leaving the South. Seeing that the outcome of this situation was bound to be war, and still being loyal to the Union at the time, Lee returned to Washington, where he met on April 18 with Francis Preston Blair, father of Montgomery Blair, Lincoln’s postmaster and an advisor to presidents, as well as with Winfield Scott. Both worthies, Scott and Blair, used all their art to try and convince Lee to take field command of the army.

Lee now faced an agonizing bout of soul-searching, with loyalties torn between the nation whose uniform he had worn so long, and the “country” to which his deepest patriotism was devoted: Virginia. And while Lee did not support secession, he could not live with the notion of leading an army into his state against its will. By that time, it was known that the committee in Richmond had adopted secession and that only the popular referendum remained before Virginia would “go out,” and furthermore, that the Virginia militia was on the move and about to take Harpers Ferry. Given those facts, Lee would have known, when he met with Scott and Blair, that among the first military targets of the federal army he would lead, if he accepted the federal offer, would be his own state and its militia.

Lee could not accept that possibility. That left him two options: either resign from the federal army and refrain from joining with the secessionist forces and ride out the war as a planter in Virginia, as unaffected, or affected, as any other non-serving planter in his neighborhood; or resign and volunteer with Virginia and when the time came, the Confederacy.

Lee reluctantly cut ties with the federal army and traveled to Richmond, arriving April 22, where he offered his services to Governor Letcher. The governor immediately requested the Virginia assembly to vote an ordinance naming Lee commander of the state militia and his request was granted.

With that decision, Virginia’s military situation became Lee’s problem, which meant he had inherited the aftermath of the successful operations against Harpers Ferry and the Norfolk naval yards. He set forth to make great use of that advantage.

Lee was well aware that Lincoln had issued a twenty day grace period, during which time the federal government would take no action against the rebels. By the calendar, that period would end May 5 and at that time, Lee must assume that the federal army, newly constructed of the federalized militias, would move forward and invade Virginia.

Lee could not assume Lincoln was bluffing, nor could he dare guess that Lincoln might for any reason delay the forward movement of federal troops into Virginia past that date. Lee made it his mission to do all he was able to prevent that invasion, whenever it should come, wherever it should come, in whatever form it should take.

The two means to repel or block invasions available to Lee would be the massing of soldiers at points through which the enemy might enter the state, or through constructing physical barriers to the entry of enemy armies into Virginia. Chance had handed Lee two tremendous specimens of the latter, in the form of the Potomac River, which could only be crossed where bridges were built, or where it was shallow enough to be forded, or over dams in the upper stretches, which were as good as bridges, and the system of mountains that ran through Virginia all the way into Pennsylvania.

The Potomac was Lee’s grandest asset because the river extended from the sea far into Western Virginia. Between the sea and Washington, the river was more of an estuary, with the only bridges at the capital. If federal armies tried to cross on boats elsewhere, artillery would serve to hold them off.

Thus Lee must concern himself with the bridges, dams, and the fording places, over the extent in which the Potomac was the border with Northern states. In the gap where it was not, it passed through mountains, his second great defensive asset, which could themselves only be crossed in passes, locally called “gaps” that could be defended by the massing of soldiers.

Knowing this layout, Lee began erecting a defensive line designed to protect the entire border of Virginia up to the Alleghenies, and to some extent, beyond, into Western Virginia.

The distance that must be covered from end to end spanned more than five hundred miles, and it would have been hopeless to attempt covering that much ground entirely by armies, under any circumstances. Instead, every possible physical element of the land and of engineering creation must be used to best advantage to block the potential avenues by which federal armies might enter Virginia. Only where such physical protections did not exist must Lee find a way to arrange for men to intercept enemy forces. This primarily meant the gaps in the mountain large enough for armies to pass, and the fording places where enemies could splash across the Potomac without bridges or dams.

Lee approached the problem with the mindset of a combat engineer, whose job on a battlefield was not just to build physical barriers to protect his men, but also to study the “ground” where fighting might occur and advise commanders on how to defend it. The commander whom he, as Engineer Lee would be advising in this case was General Lee, the leader of the Virginia militia.

This project, building a defensive line over those five hundred miles of Virginia border, is one of the most significant and powerful developments to take place in the time frame between April 15 and July 21, yet it is never recognized for the impact it had.

In fact, few discussions of the Civil War attempt to explain the two key efforts of Southern generals to protect the borders of the Confederacy, resorting instead to merely describing the clashes between armies of the opposing sides that occurred when those borders were either penetrated or defended, without placing the defensive lines into perspective.

It is important to recognize Lee’s effort because the governors of the Confederate states demanded that Jefferson Davis erect a “cordon defense” around the entire Confederacy and lock out the federal armies, and only Lee’s defensive line in Virginia even approached success in that endeavor. And what is all the more remarkable is that Lee was engaged in creating this barrier before Virginia actually entered the Confederacy and become host to the capital.

Of further significance is the fact this defensive layout would bend but never snap, and it would be another key reason the war in Virginia bogged down within a hundred miles of Washington for virtually the entire four years.

Even Lee, however, at the beginning of his project in April and May, had no way of realizing just how significant this work would prove, and few have given him the credit he deserves for this particular project. Certainly he has received more than his share of credit for his leadership as Commander Lee so that his legacy has survived without the added recognition he deserved for his defensive line.

Why would the erection of a seemingly tenuous defensive line prove so important?

Over the course of the war, Lee would use elements of this line to carry out the very purpose for which it was designed, to block out the encroachment of federal forces deep into Virginia.

It requires care to explain the full extent of this line. Although originally built to follow for the most part, the Potomac River, a secondary element allowed those defending the line to sag back, south, to the Rappahannock and its tributary, the Rapidan, in order to protect Richmond, further south.

Again and again, Lee’s army would in fact hold the line at those two rivers, with much of the fighting in the war occurring between those rivers and the Potomac, except for two instances, one in 1862 and the other in 1864-65. Thus it is reasonable to describe the line as bending, from the Potomac to the Rappahannock/Rapidan, yet springing back as federal armies were forced to return to Washington again and again.

While federal armies would on occasion prior to the end of the war reach within miles of Richmond, they never succeeded in passing the capital city and penetrating deeper into Virginia and on into the Carolinas. If they had, given the fact that federal armies operating on the other side of the Confederacy succeeded in sweeping entirely across to the Carolinas from the other direction, the war would have been far shorter and far less devastating and the history of the United States would almost certainly be much different as a result.

More than that, Lee directed two raids into the North, in 1862 and 1863, because he controlled the area he was now setting up in his defensive line. Even when his armies were temporarily chased back from the line, they returned again and again to the region his defensive line protected.

The most important use of that line would come almost immediately after it was established, in keeping the Pennsylvania militia, under Patterson, from joining with Union forces at Bull Run, a situation which could have easily ended the war in defeat for the Confederacy by late summer of 1861.

As for the term “defensive line,” two meanings could be taken. A combat engineer, such as Lee, might have his men build physical barriers to the invasion of enemy forces, barriers such as trenches, a variety of movable fences, land-filled walls, and so on, behind which the defending forces could wait and fire en masse at the enemy if they attempted to pass. The lay of the land, and natural barriers such as rivers, mountains, and forests could be employed as part of the physical definition of a defensive line. Certainly, Lee employed all these elements in his line.

The second meaning of a defensive line, however, is the massing of forces, large or small, that can at least try to repel by standard combat methods the attacks of an enemy force over a wide area.

That definition can also refer to the massing of men in a given battle to hold off attacks by an opposition in near proximity.

The defensive line that Lee erected across the upper tier of Virginia of course employed all three definitions, from the use of physical barriers to the massing of men in areas where the barriers were missing.

To augment the use of men as part of such a defensive line, Lee was able to employ a technique that was readily available to him called “interior lines.”

If the area that a defending army was assigned had the right kind of natural protections, the region could be set up such that the defenders remained on the concave or inner side of a curving line, and the enemy on the outside. It was necessary in such a case that the enemy could not simply cross the imaginary line, and that required something physical to serve as a tangible barrier. When that situation was set up, the defenders could move readily on the inside of the curve but the attackers must move only around the outer curve. Thus the defenders could cross directly from point to point on the curve in essentially straight lines. Thus wherever the attackers attempted a breakthrough and were blocked, they must move a greater distance to find another attack point, while the defenders could, if they detected the new attack point, move faster to defend the point.

For Lee in upper Virginia, the curved line was provided by nature, in the flow of the Potomac, which could only be crossed in certain places, which the defenders well knew. Thus they could move from one potential attack/crossing point to another faster than the enemy could shift along the far side of the river to a new crossing point.

It is axiomatic that to expect success, a force attacking a defended position ought to have at least three times as many men as the defenders. That accounts for both this system of interior lines and the fact that defensive objects such as walls and other works will protect the defenders far more than it will the attackers, who will generally be much more exposed trying to get “inside” the defenses. Defensive lines, in other words, tend to multiply the effective strength of a defending force.

Attackers in such cases can only apply force to those who show themselves behind defenses and those they may be able to hit with artillery lobbed inside the defenses, until they can batter down or overrun the weakest section of a physical barrier, such as breastworks.

All these concepts would be well illustrated over the course of the Civil War.

An obvious question about such arrangements over a wide area is that of why could not attackers find places to penetrate and use the same interior lines, and hit the defenders from behind? The answer is that if they could do so, they would already have broken the defensive line so badly that it would no longer deserve to be called a defensive line. Only while the defenders could keep the enemy from penetrating within reach of their own interior lines would the defensive line still stand up.

In the case of Lee’s line in Virginia, the very idea was to keep federal forces from such penetration in order to use the same interior lines as the defenders. And at times, the federal armies did succeed in crossing the defensive line that was defined by the Potomac, but the defenders still skillfully employed the mountains and other barriers to contain the invaders in the northern section of the Shenandoah Valley, as will be seen.

All this was set up by Lee’s efforts building the defensive line.

Along the Potomac, from the town of Leesburg, to Harpers Ferry, mobile forces could use the defensive lines to contest any attempt at a federal crossing. From Harpers Ferry on, masses of men would patrol, ready to “slide” from opening to opening in the mountains, or crossing to crossing, and where the river no longer flowed in the necessary direction, smaller masses of men would be expected to defend the gaps in Western Virginia.

When the line petered out in the stretch of Western Virginia from the mountains to the Ohio River, penetration by federal armies would occur, but Lee’s mandate was to keep those armies away from the Shenandoah Valley and beyond, down to Richmond, and the line served almost perfectly well for that job.

Lee’s defensive line literally prevented the war from beginning and ending, to the favor of the Union, in only a few months. Key Union armies were tied up in the area and never reached the site of the first real battle of the war, Bull Run; if they had, it is virtually certain the Union would have won that battle, and at that point, so early in the war, the Union winning Bull Run would likely have ended the Confederacy as a viable institution. All of this will be explored in pages to come.

When the fall-back level of the line is considered to be the Rappahannock River, the river and its forested southern shores, combined with Lee’s men, kept the Union at bay and unable to pass Richmond to join up in the Carolinas, for the entire war. In that way, the line paid for itself in full.

As to the specifics of the line as Lee initially created it, the anchor was Harpers Ferry, both because of its location somewhat centralized along the line, but also because it was a post at which, at first, the Virginia militia had set up a base, and Lee took advantage of that.

The westernmost position Lee intended to establish was at the town of Grafton, in the edge of the mountains, a nexus of roads and the key Baltimore and Ohio rail line. There, he hoped a small force could hold the nearby gaps through the mountains, and the railroad itself.

This region, however, was far from being the only points where federal troops might invade, and the most likely position, elsewhere along the Potomac, was around Washington, itself. Lee knew very well that a buildup of federal forces was proceeding apace at the capital. What he arranged in order to defend against that threat will be covered a little later.

Along the lower Potomac, heading toward the sea, in addition to artillery to protect against ship-borne troop movements by the Union to cross the river, Lee bunched more forces farther to the south as a back-up, at points along the Rappahannock River, which, as has been indicated above, would serve as a secondary protection of Richmond if the Union somehow passed his first line.

Virginia’s land masses consisted, along the sea, of several major peninsulas, separated by river estuaries, and these areas might be tempting locations for the Union to try and land forces by ship, so Lee combined small massed forces with artillery on the Virginia Peninsula, below the York River, and up the coast from Fortress Monroe, the most likely site of a federal attempt; this would prove an excellent decision.

Lee made no attempt to protect the entire vulnerable border of Western Virginia. Had he felt the need to defend all borders of Western Virginia, he would have faced an impossible mission. The distance was too great for the number of men he could ever accumulate, and the land became more and more easily entered beyond the mountains. The Ohio River formed the entire upper border of Western Virginia and could be crossed on boats in more places than Lee could defend with artillery or men.

Technically, therefore, Lee could not protect all of Virginia’s border with the North. Because the entire section of Virginia west of the Appalachian/Allegheny Mountains was supportive of the Union, however, Lee could write off most of it as a hopeless cause and concentrate on only defending the key openings in the mountains that passed diagonally through. He needed to worry only about those areas through which, once inside Western Virginia, federal troops could access the passes to reach the heart of the state. Block those approaches, be prepared to fall back and defend the passes, and Lee could be satisfied he had all of Western Virginia covered that he must.

That task would be difficult enough as it was because the area of Virginia/Western Virginia from about the area where the village of Grafton lay, to the Potomac River, was broken by several roads that could be used by an army, and worse, of course the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad passed through the entire region. Of all the avenues by which an army might enter Virginia, the B & O rail line was most crucial to block, because of the potential for trains to bring huge numbers of soldiers right into lower terminus of the Shenandoah Valley.

Thus was the defensive line that Lee created. More will follow on the actual makeup of forces used in manning the line, but first, it is important to consider the federal and militia forces being arrayed against this line by the Union.

Chapter Eleven

On April 23, another general of future note took command of a state’s militia. The general was former captain, former railroad president, former military engineer George B. McClellan, and the militia force he took over was in Ohio.

First, McClellan saw to the arming of his men, then to their training at a camp outside of Cincinnati. From that start, it would take some time for his militia to gear up and contribute to Lincoln’s new army and by the time he had them in the field, the most direct, obvious threat to Washington had already come and gone. It would be militias of other states, that had less immediate threats of their own to worry about, that would reach Washington in the crisis period of the Virginia militia’s potential threat.

Indeed, even before it would be released to federal service, the Ohio militia would become engaged in other activities that would tie it up in the region of Western Virginia until its ninety days of federal service ran out.

The most important advent of the operations conducted by the Ohio militia under McClellan was the rise of McClellan himself, who would, with little effort and no risk to his person, achieve the status of “hero,” resulting in his being named commander of all federal forces after Bull Run. And that would not be a positive development. McClellan would have a profound impact on the first two years of the war, and in so doing, would be the third major cause of the Union army remaining bogged down in Virginia for most of the four years the war lasted, by failing to overcome the defensive line Robert E. Lee had established.

By April 25, units from New York, then Rhode Island, and finally, more from Massachusetts had arrived in Washington, using a route that avoided Baltimore in favor of Annapolis. Even there, however, Marylanders had sabotaged rail lines and engines, but the incoming militias had employed their own engineers to repair the damage enough to keep the new route open.

Due to the influx of federalized militias, by the end of April, an army assembled in Washington of around 10,000 men and it continued to grow toward an eventual high of about 40,000. The remaining 35,000, of the 75,000 called up on April 15, would have other missions in the area, and about those forces, including McClellan’s, much remains to be detailed, leading to the war’s first true battle, July 21 at Bull Run.

Pennsylvania, as its governor had promised, had provided the first outside force for the protection of Washington. Thereafter, those five hundred men would be known as the “First Defenders.” Of the original three month 75,000 man army, those five hundred would be the only significant contributions by Pennsylvania to the army that grew to 40,000 inside the confines of Washington, which formed the core of the first army in a major battle.

The additional elements of the Pennsylvania contingent of the three months federalized force would be diverted to other operations outside of Washington. They would form the core of the second major division of the federal army in that period.

The overall military commander of the Pennsylvania militia was a general named Robert Patterson, who had been born in Ireland. As has been intimated earlier, due to bureaucratic issues in the state itself, Patterson had been denied entry to the state arsenal, which was outside the system of federal arsenals that had been ransacked by the Buchanan administration. It was due to this bureaucratic issue that the first five hundred Pennsylvanians who passed through Baltimore were virtually unarmed.

Winfield Scott, the federal General in Chief, was a personal friend of Patterson’s, and although grateful for the initial five hundred man complement, he had asked Patterson for more to be sent into Washington, but Patterson was unwilling to send any additional unarmed men into harm’s way.

One cannot fault Patterson on this issue. Patterson ached to support the federal defense, but his conscience would not permit him to dispatch men unarmed into a meat-grinder. In fact, the supply situation for his men in the beginning was worse than merely a lack of weapons and ammunition. They also lacked adequate clothing to protect them from the elements while in the field. Until those shortcomings could be rectified, Patterson declined to send his men into Washington.

The time waiting for gear was not wasted for these troops, however. They would undergo what training was possible without weapons, and when they were finally armed, they would be involved in key operations in the upper Shenandoah Valley but due to failures of their commander, they would not be permitted to serve with distinction.

In fact, the failure of this Pennsylvania contingent would have grave impact on the first battle of the war, that of Bull Run. Much more will emerge on this subject in pages to come.

A man named Lew Wallace, who would become more famous for his writing, especially the novel Ben Hur, than his fighting, had been appointed Adjutant General of Indiana. He organized the first six militia regiments for Indiana and was commissioned colonel of the 11th regiment of Indiana Volunteer Infantry which was mustered in April 25, 1861.

Although the 11th initially conducting picket duty around Evansville, keeping an eye on the threat of secessionists from Virginia, across the Ohio River, it was soon dispatched to Cumberland, Maryland on the same mission, in a cooperative operation with the Pennsylvania militia under Patterson. In a similar way, other Indiana units cooperated with the Ohio militia.

Why the states across the Ohio should become nervous about first the Virginia militia, then the Confederate army, most forces of which were referred to collectively as “secessionist” forces, the dynamics of the political situation in Western Virginia must be understood.

The movement of the Northern militia forces in the area where Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Virginia converged must be considered in the context of political activities in Virginia in that region.

As has been described, a convention was meeting in the town of Wheeling, which is on the Ohio River in the “panhandle” section of Western Virginia between segments of Ohio and Pennsylvania.

It has been intimated that the Unionists of the region not only opposed secession of Virginia, they made the decision to carry out their own secession from the mother state. The convention in Wheeling was called to carve Western Virginia out of the Virginia proper and create the new state, the Union state, of West Virginia.

Although Wheeling was well out of the mainstream of Lee’s activities in creating his defensive line, it was reasonable that those of the committee would fear Lee might dispatch a force to disrupt their activities and end the threat of Western Virginia’s defection. How unlikely that was to happen will emerge shortly but those nervous people at Wheeling could not know that.

In fact, Lee had his hands full just trying to create the line and defend the rest of Virginia without trying to also hold the vast expanses of Western Virginia, which were in the main pro-Union. In other words, that entire region might as well be written off instead of defended with the paltry military resources Lee possessed at the time.

As for the convention, he did not have the men to spare to travel so far north to interrupt a meeting, but of course those at the convention neither knew that nor could assume it.

Neither could the governors and the militia commanders of the states north of Virginia ignore the threat Lee appeared to pose for the convention. Knowing that Lee and the Virginia militia was operating in the area, they saw the need to take steps against him.

It is almost comedic to consider that each side was frantically preparing actions in defense against the other, yet neither side was thinking offensively in that period and that region.

Beyond the danger to the convention, in fact, from the point of view of the Northern states, if Virginia militia moved up to Wheeling, it would be in a position to carry out its own invasion, into Ohio, into Pennsylvania, or if it dared, both states in opposite directions, by turning east and west from the panhandle. These issues—the convention and the threat of wider invasion by “secessionist” forces, meaning Lee—are the reason those Northern militias of the region never reached Washington to join up with McDowell’s army in the time before Bull Run. It must be remembered that they, too, were ninety day recruits and could easily spend their entire enlistment tangled up in the comedy of errors developing around Lee’s operations in Western Virginia.

In a real way, in responding to what was in fact a very weak threat at most by Lee’s militia, the militias of Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Indiana, would create what amounted to a defensive line of their own, by spreading their forces along the area that mirrored Lee’s operations, trying to repel an invasion that Lee had no intentions or capability of attempting.

In the process, however, it would be the Union forces that actually invaded Virginia, by crossing both the Ohio and Potomac Rivers in pursuit of Lee’s forces. Even in so doing, however, those operations were still intended as preventative and somewhat pre-emptive, to contain Lee, not to conduct a forward thrusting invasion of Virginia proper, the very thing Lee feared most.

It is for these reasons that the activities of the various militias in the region essentially led to nothing of note. Yet because McClellan’s army did enter the region and win a few skirmishes, he would be reckoned the great hero of the first actions that were to become the Civil War. The only significant activities involving the militias of the area would take place after Virginia had officially seceded and Confederate army units began to enter the picture.

The layout of the defensive line made up of the Northern militias, the Pennsylvania militia under Patterson, over at Chambersburg, would defend the area of Maryland and Pennsylvania east of the Alleghenies, up to the Potomac River. In time, the segment of the Baltimore and Ohio Rail Line from the mountains around Harpers Ferry, to the crossing of the line into Maryland at Harpers Ferry, would fall into their purview, once they were permitted to begin entering Virginia. In this mission, some of the Indiana militia would participate, while the rest cooperated with McClellan and his Ohio militia.

When Wheeling was declared safe from Virginia militia, that Ohio militia would be tasked with securing the Baltimore and Ohio from where it began at the town of Parkersburg, Virginia, to the point where the Pennsylvania militia under Patterson took over. All this waited for Virginia to officially secede.

Into this, however, a new militia came into being, one that was already on Virginia soil, because it was a Virginia militia, made up of local loyalists. This creation of this little force was a way for those citizens to snub their collective noses at Virginia governor John Letcher, who had refused to contribute state militia to Lincoln’s 75,000. This Virginia unit would act in concert with McClellan’s army when it did cross overtly into Virginia.

A sixteen thousand man peacetime army had not needed much in the way of organization, from a paperwork standpoint. An unprecedented US army of 75,000-plus, however, certainly did. With the militias of the Northern states being transferred into federal hands, it became the problem of the government to monitor their movements, pay them, arm them, and so on, taking all that out of the hands of the state governors.

As a result of the movements of those militias operating along the defensive line opposite Lee, as well as the other units converging on Washington and elsewhere, four separate armies had sprung into existence. As a whole, they were McDowell’s at Washington, McClellan’s in Ohio, Patterson’s in Pennsylvania, and Butler’s at Fortress Monroe.

With four armies, most larger than the original pre-war 16,000 man force spread across the country, the time had come to re-organize the federal military structure. Soon, more armies would arise, on the other side of the Allegheny Mountains and they must be folded into the new organization.

On April 27, while Virginia still moved toward but had not reached the condition of technical secession, that reorganization was made official, with the grand unit of choice being the Military Department.

Once armies were federalized they received their pay and their orders from Washington. Those not yet federalized remained under the chain of command from their own state. Theoretically, this could have led to a mess, with state militias acting unilaterally in the same area where federalized forces were operating, but given that the same goals were sought by all, no major problems developed before the militias passed into federal command.

In some cases, the orders under which the yet-to-be-federalized militias operated, as generated by their own commanders and/or governors, were more productive than those issued from Washington. This is probably true because the governors and their field representatives, the generals in command of the militias, saw more directly what was needed down at the local field level of looming combat than commanders could see, like Scott, who were locked up incommunicado in Washington for some days during the initial Virginia militia crisis. The militias could “feel” the presence of hostile forces and act accordingly, and as has been described, their first goals were to block the avenues by which the feared “secessionists” might attack their states. As soon as he was able to obtain a picture of the strategic situation, general-in-chief Scott began trying to coordinate the operations of the four armies in a coherent way.

With the scenario in the region from the federal point of view set, it is important to view the same period from the Virginia side of the picture.

The key army unit and position in Lee’s defensive line, for some time, remained at Harpers Ferry, due to the buildup there that had resulted from the initial capture of the armory in that city. Major General Kenton Harper of the Virginia militia was senior officer and thus commander in the early days of the occupation of Harpers Ferry.

Corresponding with the arrival of Lee in command of the militia came an order greatly reducing the number of officers above the rank of captain. On April 27, an officer from the prestigious Virginia Military Institute, commonly known as VMI, located at Lexington, in the southern part of the Shenandoah Valley was brought into the militia and given the rank of colonel, then sent to Harpers Ferry to replace, temporarily, General Harper.

This new arrival was an instructor at VMI, and his name was Thomas Jonathan Jackson. By the end of July, the world would come to know him as Stonewall Jackson.

The militia force that had occupied Harpers Ferry was primarily made up of ordinary local men who had been armed and were willing to undertake military action in the protection of their “country,” Virginia. They had no military training to speak of and they had been lucky that the 45 men holding Harpers Ferry had not put up a fight, and even luckier that the Union men at the armory had not been in fact augmented by the 1,000 men from Massachusetts that Wise had been led to believe were on the way.

Major Jackson was sent to whip this pack of civilians into a viable fighting force. Jackson brought with him some of his students from VMI, who as part of their curriculum, schooled extensively in military arts. While totally without experience in fighting, these young men were far more well trained in tactics and the mass movement of troops than the rabble that formed the militia. In fact, since most officers were elected from among that same rabble, those officers were no more well prepared to lead soldiers than the soldiers were prepared to be led. If anyone needed the help of Jackson’s VMI youngsters, it was his officers.

To be an officer in the armies of the 1860’s required that one must organize and control the mass movements of the soldiers, which were intricate, because formations were a key part of tactics at the outset of the Civil War. The VMI students Jackson had brought with him had the requisite knowledge to speed up the process of training for the developing army.

Personally, at VMI, Jackson had presented a blend of tough yet loving devotion to the training of men, and he carried on in the same manner in the field, although now, instead of preparing men for war in principle and theory, he was now doing so for the purpose of actual fighting.

So well did Jackson’s method of dealing with men succeed that this outfit quickly transformed from rabble into a top-notch army, lacking, for the time being, only actual combat experience to be a formidable force. Soon, that lack would be addressed, and overall, this unit, augmented by more and more reinforcements, would form the core of what would be known through the rest of the war as the Jackson Brigade, one of the most feared and respected outfits on either side in the war to come.

With the situation on either side of the border between the North and Virginia building toward war, but still at a simmer, it is practical to explore the moves Lee was also making on the other sections of his line, as part of the definition of his defensive line.

Two main concerns regarding possible federal attacks dictated Lee’s preparations. On first glance it might seem ludicrous to pay so much attention to the area west of Harpers Ferry, as far as federal attack was concerned. One might tend to think that there was little to gain by the Union to act in that region other than to neutralize pesky secessionist forces.

Two key arteries, however, crossed that region. The first was the Baltimore and Ohio Rail Line, by which soldiers could transfer from the Ohio River Valley directly to Baltimore and from there to Washington. The other was the Shenandoah Valley.

Lee could imagine federal troops rushing by train to Harpers Ferry directly from Ohio, disembarking and forming up, first routing Virginia militia forces, then moving forward into the heart of his state. Just by position at Harpers Ferry, they would already hold the head of the valley. And if they drove straight up the valley, (southward, following the flow of the Shenandoah River,) they would reach a position to command rail lines directly to Richmond. And if other federal troops marched out of Washington and seized rail lines at nearby Manassas Junction, outside the valley, those forces could soon join up with armies coming down the Shenandoah, forming a “combination” that might be unstoppable, a force that might drive to Richmond, seize it, and just continue on through Virginia into the heart of the Confederacy.

Thus the two key arteries could be used to drive a piercing blow into the interior of Virginia: the rail line and the valley. Instead of existing as a backwater of the region, the presence of those two avenues turned the area from Harpers Ferry to Parkersburg, where the B and O rail line originated south of the Ohio River, into the hottest property in the Confederacy, even before it fell into Confederate hands.

With that being true, it was perfectly reasonable that Lee should place such a high priority on a defensive line over that stretch.

Let it be said now, that the Shenandoah Valley would continue to be key terrain, for more than one reason, over the entire course of the war. The Baltimore and Ohio rail line...in modern parlance “not so much.” The reason it fell out of significance will develop a little later.

Manassas Junction, not much more than rail sheds and platforms, was only important because of what its name implied, its service as a connection of rail lines. Control the junction and those rail lines could be “cut” in military terminology, that is, their use could be denied to the enemy by blocking movement of trains past the point held in control. The other way of expressing the situation was to say the controlling army was “astride” the lines at the crucial point.

The Orange and Alexandria line met up with the Manassas Gap line at Manassas Junction, forming a Y-shaped linkage. The Manassas Gap railroad cut through the Blue Ridge Mountains via the pass that gave name to the line, on into the Shenandoah Valley. The Orange and Alexandria connected the town of Alexandria, across the river from Washington, to the town of Orange, where lines diverged again, leading on to Richmond in one direction, and Lynchburg another.

From Alexandria, a line stretched up to Leesburg, and thus by all those various connections, Manassas Junction was a significant coming-together of critical railroads for whatever side could control that point, affecting all of Northern Virginia.

In the area, already, a scratch Virginia outfit of about three hundred local men, known as the Potomac Department, had formed up at Alexandria under the leadership of Colonel St. George Cocke.

It is an ironic fact that at the time when Washington was gripped in panic over the presence of Virginia militia threatening the capital, the only force within fifty miles was this little squad of 300 or so men. Virtually unarmed and untrained, this little unit was even less well prepared for a fight than the first five hundred men who had arrived from Pennsylvania, yet for some days, this was the only military force that could conceivably be reckoned a head-on threat to Washington. Even the small local militia that Colonel Stone had brought into play in Washington could have matched this threat. The simple truth is that the federal side, at Washington always outnumbered the nearest Virginia forces that had the city paralyzed in fear.

The only real purpose of this three hundred man outfit at Alexandria was in a word: espionage. Their only viable mission was to snoop around and keep an eye on the buildup of troops in Washington. When Lee came into command, he had new orders for Cocke: “You are desired to post at Manassas Gap junction a force sufficient to defend that point against an attack likely to be made against it by troops from Washington.” Where Cocke was to get a force substantial enough to carry out the mission was not specified by Lee.

Because the army in Washington grew rapidly as militia after militia was federalized and marched into the city the importance of Lee’s orders was not what Cocke’s men could do but rather the fact that Lee already saw Manassas as the place around which to build an army of his own to counter Lincoln’s, across the Potomac. Thus Cocke’s little force was a place-holding outfit around which a more useful army must be accumulated. It was there, at Manassas, that Lee meant for the Virginia militia to make a stand against the gravest threat from the Union, rapidly expanding in Washington.

Unsurprisingly, but ironically, this holding force would continue to be regarded in Washington as a threat, and in fact, its presence, coupled with the significance of the rail junction, would be at the core of the reason the Battle of Bull Run was fought.

To obtain a sense of the growing tensions in the upper reaches of Virginia, far from Washington in this time period it is only necessary to view the following letter of April 27.

CONVENTION OF VIRGINIA,

Gen. LEE:

Richmond,

April 27, 1861.

DEAR SIR:

Will you permit us to ask your attention to a state of things which we regard as of great and urgent moment to our part of the State-the northern portion of the Valley of Shenandoah? A large camp of Northern troops is now in concentration at Chambersburg, in Pennsylvania, just against and very near that part of our border. The papers inform us that one or more brigades are now there, and several others marching to join them. The object stated is to invade Virginia upon the first indication of movement on the part of our force. From the position chosen and the rich and defenseless character of our northern Valley counties, we believe that first blow will fall upon our people. We are entirely without cannon, although appropriated to us by act of assembly, and urgently claimed by some of us for months past. Artillery companies at Winchester are ready to service and use them.

Very respectfully,

ROB. Y. CONRAD,

JAS. MARSHALL,

Frederick County.

EDMUND PENDLETON,

Berkeley County.

HUGH M. NELSON,

Clarke County.

ALFRED M. BARBOR,

Jefferson County.

Objectively, from the point of view of the Virginians, this was a logical attitude. Yes, what they now considered hostile military forces were assembling nearby, although they overstated the case. Chambersburg is hardly up against the Virginia border, given that another state—Maryland—fits in between Pennsylvania and Virginia, and furthermore, Chambersburg itself was not snug against the Pennsylvania-Maryland border but some miles to the north.

It is interesting that these men complained that the Pennsylvania militia was in place to invade “upon the first indication of movement on the part of our force.” That can be interpreted to mean that they were essentially admitting that the Pennsylvanians were holding back, conducting the mission of protecting Union borders from aggression from the Virginia side. Furthermore, the writers were hinting that they anticipated some action on the part of their own militia that might be construed by the states to the north as offensive in character. Otherwise, one would might think, they would have instead bemoaned the fact that it was Pennsylvanians who threatened to attack first.

And this interpretation proved correct, because it would in fact develop that it was Virginians who carried out the first violation of the border from Virginia into Maryland, offering the Pennsylvanians an open reason, a provocation, to counter-attack at their discretion.

Chapter Twelve

That provocation developed as the placement of artillery across the Potomac River on May 7, atop a point called Maryland Heights. Given that the Virginians were eager to label any movement of the slightest degree by federal armies onto their won soil as an invasion, by their own definition, they had in fact invaded Maryland.

As small as this action might be, undertaken in an isolated area, away from any Maryland towns, it had the potential of changing the entire landscape of the nascent war because it could have triggered full-scale offensive activity by the Union, had the capacity, at that point, to carry it out been available.

Jackson wrote to Robert E. Lee describing the transfer of artillery over the Potomac as a totally defensive measure. Jackson expressed his cognizance of the danger that Maryland might take offense but believed it was important enough to hold the position anyway.

The reaction by the nearest federal troops came in a letter by Patterson on May 11, in which he noted, “I am aware that Maryland had been invaded from Virginia at Harpers Ferry, but in the present condition of my command am powerless.

“I make the above statement that the Gen.-in-Chief may not rely at present upon these regiments in his plan of attack upon Harper’s Ferry.”

Although in command of the Pennsylvania militia, Robert Patterson would not personally arrive at Chambersburg where they were gathering, for nearly a month. In an earlier letter, of May 1, Patterson had described the situation of his forces:

Lieut. Col. E. D. TOWNSEND,
Asst. Adjt. Gen., Hdqrs. of the Army, Washington City:

PHILADELPHIA, PA.,

May 1, 1861.

SIR:

I have the honor to acknowledge the receipt from the Gen.-in-Chief of two communications, dated April 28 and 29, relating to moving troops upon Baltimore via York and Havre de Grace.

Anticipating the wishes of the Gen.-in-Chief, I have, since the withdrawal by the President of troops placed at Cockeysville, given attention to the demonstrations designed, and have posted unequipped regiments in camps of instruction at points from which they can be easily withdrawn and distributed on these lines of communication, viz: At York, 6 regiments; Chambersburg, 2; Lancaster, 6; Harrisburg, number unknown, but probably 6; and in this vicinity, 6.

The impoverished condition of the quartermaster’s department here in regard to tents, canteens, and other camp and garrison equipage and the depleted arsenals, will prevent the execution at an early day of any plan of operations. The troops are not fully armed, and are very incompletely equipped, having but few cartridge-boxes, no canteens, tents, or cooking utensils. Articles ordered for troops in advance will exhaust the supply for the next three days. I have directed these commands to be drilled and made efficient, and by the time they are equipped I hope to be able to move on Baltimore with an effective force of six thousand men via York and six thousand via Havre de Grace, and have sufficient to guard the road as they advance.

To effect this I request my requisitions may be filled as rapidly as forwarded, or the depot quartermaster here and the arsenal at Frankfort be directed to fill them direct from me. I will keep you informed of my progress and my probable advance in time for concerted action. I shall lose no time, but for success take care not to be too fast.

I have authority to draw good volunteers from this State, but I desire, if regular artillery companies are en route to Washington City, to obtain one to serve as artillery with the column from York.

The railroad companies here, and also via York to Baltimore, are now ready to repair their roads, but the troops cannot advance. As soon as the men are equipped they will be thrown to the front, and in a few days the lines will be in working order. Col. Andrew Porter has gone to York to hasten the organization of that column.

Maj. Porter, governed by the prospect of being able to use for our purposes the bridges on the Baltimore and Ohio Road, deferred arranging for their destruction, and sent parties to examine the bridges and a portion of the road. He is informed that the large bridges are each guarded by about two hundred men, and so carefully that they cannot be injured. The road, however, will, under his plans, be rendered impassable for our opponents as soon as desired, and he will act when convinced that the present hopes of submission in Maryland prove delusive.

I am, sir, very respectfully, your obedient servant,

R. PATTERSON,

Maj.-Gen., Commanding.

For nearly a month, the Pennsylvania militia would not move, concentrating on training and gathering equipment, and in the meantime, the convention of Western Virginians at Wheeling would proceed toward its own declaration of secession while its own militia formed up and joined with the Ohio militia under McClellan.

The overall situation in the region would simmer, while Lee was building his defensive line and opposing armies only probed and considered their next moves.

At the extreme western end of his defensive line, as has been noted, Lee chose the town of Grafton. That decision would prove to be a mistake, if not a severe one. The commander that Lee installed at Grafton was Colonel George A. Porterfield, who had only five hundred men, with which he occupied the town on May 24.

Over the course of the war, Confederate, or in this case Virginia commanders would be expected to build up their armies by recruiting local men. Porterfield was supposed to expand his force at Grafton in that way, but since this was Unionist territory, he not only found few takers, he found such hostility from the local population that he saw fit to abandon the town and fall back to a village a little deeper in the mountains, by the name of Phillipi.

Porterfield’s occupation of Grafton would trigger more responses than Jackson’s earlier occupation of Maryland Heights, and more than Porterfield or Lee had intended.

Up to this point, the activity in the region was still all defensive in nature on both sides, even when it appeared to be the opposite, as in the case of Jackson’s raising of artillery on Maryland Heights.

Before withdrawing from Grafton, for what he considered strictly defensive reasons, Porterfield destroyed bridges in the area, to slow down any pursuing federal forces. This action, however, became known to the convention in Wheeling, which took alarm and appealed for help from the federal government, fearing Porterfield’s ultimate goal was to attack them and shut down the convention. Obviously Porterfield was in no position to even contemplate such an aggressive move, especially against a position so far removed from his tenuous base, but the convention had no way of knowing his predicament or intentions.

It was destruction of bridges that set off alarm bells for Winfield Scott, in his capacity of general in chief. Scott telegraphed the commander of the Ohio militia, McClellan, suggesting that he should do something about Porterfield.

The man who had organized the local Western Virginia volunteers into a fighting force was a Benjamin Kelley and his unit was designated the First Virginian (Union) regiment. Obviously, Kelley had found better pickings in creating a little army in Western Virginia than Porterfield had done.

In response to the activities of Porterfield, on May 26, McClellan ordered Kelley and Colonel James Irvine, with the 16th Ohio to across the River at Bellair, move down and repair bridges destroyed by Porterfield and seize control of Grafton. It will be noted that this was May 26, and Virginia’s referendum on secession had passed, placing the state by its own reckoning in the condition of disloyalty to the Union. Thus McClellan’s action could not possibly have an effect now on Virginia’s decision, which thus made it acceptable for federal forces to enter the state.

Another way of putting this is that the condition of Virginia as no man’s land had ended.

Already, on May 24, with the referendum passed the day before, the Union army under McDowell had immediately crossed the Potomac River into Alexandria, Virginia. Again, with the Virginia’s technical neutrality broken, the state was fair game for invasion by federal forces, and McDowell had wasted no time moving across the river into that state.

The crossing of McClellan’s troops at Bellair on May 26 was thus the second actual penetration by federal soldiers into secessionist territory.

May 30, Brigadier General Thomas A. Morris was also ordered to Grafton from Indianapolis with the Ninth Indiana Brigade, while Col. James B. Steedman was dispatched to Parkersburg with 14th and 18th Ohio Volunteers. The 6th Indiana Infantry under Col. Thomas T. Crittenden and 7th Indiana Volunteers, under Colonel Ebenezer Dumont, were to follow Steedman. Dumont was to join Morris at Grafton. On May 27, Steedman moved out of Parkersburg but was so paranoid of rebels that it took him until late on May 30 to reach Clarksburg, the same day Crittenden reached Grafton.

By then, Porterfield had retreated to Phillipi, claiming he would build up his forces and attack northward again when the time seemed right.

As a result of these moves, by May 30, in the viewpoint of the Virginia leadership, their state was now crawling with federal forces, albeit far out in the already hopeless area soon to become a new state entirely.

On June 3, Morris sent two columns forward, which closed around Philippi, chasing Porterfield out of the area, in an affair nicknamed the “Philippi Races,” for the speed with which Confederate forces retreated.

Continuing forward, soon McClellan could lay claim to the entire region on the west side of the mountains, a situation which badly alarmed Lee and Davis and provided the first crack in Lee’s defensive line.

By this time, it need be noted, with the full secession of Virginia, the state had been offered and accepted a place in the Confederacy, so the actions of the militia in this area now came under the aegis of that entity. No longer were operations strictly Virginian in nature, although no actual troops from the other Southern states would arrive for awhile.

The successful advances of McClellan’s army against underwhelming numbers should not have been regarded as anything of consequence in the scheme of things. Overall, McClellan would only win a few minor victories along that Parkersburg-Staunton turnpike, and Baltimore and Ohio railroad corridor and never come close to penetrating the Shenandoah Valley, so in actual fact, although it bent, Lee’s defensive line in that area did not break.

Rather than surrendering the line, Lee would allow it to contract eastward from the area, toward more solidly secessionist positions in the mountains around Harpers Ferry, Romney, Martinsburg, and Winchester.

Leading up to these operations in Western Virginia, other events had developed off the battlefield, which would have effects on the field.

On April 19, Joseph Johnston resigned from the United States Army as the Quartermaster General. Also a Virginian, Johnston would serve a higher loyalty to his home state, not unlike Lee.

Reaching Richmond only on April 25, due to routine problems with the rail system, Johnston received promotion to the rank of major general in the Virginia militia and was assigned the job of organizing the militia’s operations in Richmond.

On April 27, as has been described, the leadership in Richmond made the decision that the militia was top-heavy in officers above the rank of captain. This overabundance of ranking officers was primarily due to the fact that in the militia, in fact on both sides, North and South, in the formative period, officers were often elected, or assumed their position because they personally raised the army in question.

As a result, a ridiculous proliferation of majors, colonels, and generals had erupted, most of whom were not qualified to carry out the duties commensurate with such ranks. This “decapitation” of many such men from their exalted ranks was a necessary evil but it was unloved by many, as one might imagine.

Certainly, despite the decapitation order, those men who actually merited remaining in their higher ranks would be maintained there, at least to a certain degree. The problem presented by this business was the fact that many of those being demoted were popular choices of their own men, whether they were actually qualified for their positions or not.

If the decapitation orders were not problematic enough, the absorption of the Virginia militia into the Confederate army brought further complexities, especially for Lee.

Joseph Johnston was reduced to the rank of brigadier general, as was Lee, but that was because the Confederacy had established, for the time being, the policy that no rank existed above brigadier general. Time in grade would count for a great deal and trigger anger among brigadiers who would normally have been major generals until the true rank major general was later instituted in the Confederate army.

As a Confederate general now, after reporting to Montgomery, before the Confederate capital shifted to Richmond, Joseph Johnston was assigned to take over command at Harpers Ferry. He reached that position on May 23, and reorganized the growing army there into brigades. The now superceded Thomas Jackson was put in command only of the Virginia contingent of the incoming Confederate forces from other points in the South. With this, however, came a promotion within the Confederate army for Jackson, also to brigadier general.

Lee was accorded the position of senior military officer of not just the Virginia militia but also of the entire Confederate army. As such, Lee was not assigned to a specific command within the Confederate army, left instead to continue his grander scale of work, finishing the creation of his defensive line.

If a general-in-chief position had been filled in the Confederate Army, Lee would have been the logical choice. But it would not be filled by a uniformed officer at this time.

The presidency of the Confederate States of America had not been the first choice of Jefferson Davis. The job he had desired was exactly that job, the supreme uniformed commander, which is to say, General-in-Chief. He had been selected (not elected) president as a safe compromise among more volatile candidates, but Davis was one of those people who would not turn down a mandate even if he thought better of accepting. It was an issue of honor: he was called to serve and he would not refuse. What he would refuse to do, however, was hire someone to the job he really wanted. Instead, he chose to simultaneously handle both jobs. While Davis could not take on the title of general-in-chief while serving as president, he acted in the capacity nevertheless.

Davis did not agree with those who named Lee as the best general in the army. His first choice for that consideration was a certain Albert Sidney Johnston, no relation to Joseph Johnston. Unfortunately for Davis, Johnston, who went by the name Sidney, was not available when the Confederate army was being organized and the first movements into the future venue of war were made, so Lee was held as the man closest under Davis in the chain of command; this cast Lee in the unenviable position of being an informal advisor to Davis in the latter’s capacity as general-in-chief of the Confederate military. This soon burdened Lee with the job of carrying out Davis’s military decisions and orders rather than generating them himself, although in some cases, Davis wisely left Lee to act as he saw fit and simply endorsed his moves.

The natural question arises, of which post, president or general in chief Jefferson Davis was most qualified to hold. Future actions would tend to suggest that he was not a wise fit for either job. While most likely he was a brilliant man, his brilliance did not aid him in making the best or often the right decisions in either of his capacities. Possibly his greatest shortcoming was to turn more work and more critical positions over to people he personally liked but who, like him, might not be the best fit, and to turn against those he did not like even if they were in fact the right men for the critical jobs. Two specific cases in each direction stand out. Davis would for much too long place far more responsibility on Braxton Bragg than was ever warranted, because Davis had warm feelings for him. On the other hand, he never cared for Joseph Johnston, who seems to have had a better understanding of how the Confederacy should have fought the Civil War than anyone, certainly including Lee. Davis never used Johnston to best advantage over the course of the war.

At least in the early going, however, in placing Johnston in Harpers Ferry and leaving Lee to his work, Davis was not yet hurting his own cause.

When the Confederate army joined up and absorbed the Virginia militia, it brought its own over-blown echelon of officers. These men were not, of course, subject to the decapitation that had reduced similar positions in the Virginia militia, and thus unqualified officers replaced men that Lee and Johnston had counted upon, at key positions. Men such as Cocke, at Manassas, would be pushed aside for some Southerner who had formed an incoming unit but was not fit to command it.

This problem was not confined to the Confederacy by any means. In addition to men, often rich, who had formed up and supplied their own units, others who were important civilians, including elected officials, on each side, arranged to be appointed commanders of militias, and often the men at the top, including Davis and Lincoln, were nervous about deposing them for political reasons. In more than one case, on both sides, such men became and remained generals throughout the war. Many of these “political generals” would cause problems and embarrassment for the regular commanders, and the commanders in chief, although a few would actually rise to a level of high achievement in command, on both sides.

As to the specific situation of Colonel Cocke, at Manassas, much more is to be said. For the moment, however, the situation was set, with Johnston commanding at Harpers Ferry and the Confederate army in the ascendancy over the Virginia militia.

Returning to the actions of northern forces in this area, with McClellan running somewhat rampant in the western stretches of the mountains and Ohio River Valley, Patterson was finally on the move. On June 15, he occupied Hagerstown, Maryland, just north of Harpers Ferry; on June 10, Lew Wallace and his Indiana contingent had advanced to Cumberland, Maryland.

Hearing rumors that in Romney, Western Virginia, rebel troops were harassing Unionist people, Wallace set forth with the purpose of dispersing the secessionists. In that area, the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad passed into Maryland before plunging back into Western Virginia, and Wallace employed that line to approach Romney by way of New Creek station, which placed him on Virginia soil.

Romney was twenty-three miles away and with his five hundred men, Wallace left the train and marched through mountains on a primitive road to Mechanicsburg. Moving through a difficult passage in the mountains, Wallace’s men came under fire from pickets. His squad quickly routed the Confederates who harassed them, then marched back to Cumberland by eleven that night. Although not much of a skirmish, this Romney clash still ranked as one of the earliest actions between North and South and since Wallace freed a number of slaves and captured forty-nine of Joseph Johnston’s men, it was a satisfying excursion over the Potomac.

Discerning that with the forward operation by Wallace, elements of Patterson’s army were on the move, Joseph Johnston determined that Harpers Ferry was not the place to make a stand. Already, the weapons and musket-making equipment which had survived the destruction attempt by the original forty-five federal officers had been transferred out, first to Winchester, not far away, then deeper into Virginia. On June 15, Johnston pulled his men out, destroying the long railroad bridge that crossed the Potomac. With that action, given that the rail line also stopped at Parkersburg on the Ohio, where no bridge existed, that entire section of the Baltimore and Ohio Rail line was broken, denied to the federals for transportation of men or supplies from the Ohio River Valley to Baltimore.

The day after Johnston saw to the wrecking of the Harpers Ferry bridge, his cavalry scouts reported that Patterson had crossed the Potomac and was marching on nearby Martinsburg. Although believing he was heavily outnumbered, seeing it as his duty to oppose incursions by the federals, and especially to prevent Patterson from making a “junction” with McClellan in the area, Johnston set forth to face off with Patterson. In order to meet Patterson, Johnston hurried forward to the town of Bunker Hill, about halfway between Martinsburg and Winchester.

Now came a momentous point in the history of the war, a communication between Joseph Johnston and the Confederate Adjutant General. At the time, anyone aware of it would have thought little of the message, but it would trigger events that would ultimately lead to Confederate victory at Bull Run, and with that, the extension of the war for four years, because the Union would fail to end the war in that first battle.

So far, Joseph Johnston had received little support from the Confederate army and it was hoped he could recruit men locally, but that was doubtful, given the Unionist bent of the people in the area. If he could reinforce his army, he was to try and hold some strategic position against the incoming federals, but if he could not, he was free to leave the area by way of the Manassas Gap and join with the Confederate army that was gathering at Manassas Junction against an anticipated attack from McDowell out of Washington.

This plan, this option for Johnston, is a key issue in the development and the results of the first battle of the Civil War at Bull Run. By this arrangement, if Johnston could not stand up to the threat of McClellan and Patterson, he was to join with the army gathering at Manassas, to help out against the Union army threatening at Washington.

The results of this plan and the manner in which it was carried out by all parties would carry massive import for both the coming battle and the entire war, and must be carefully considered.

It would not be quite accurate to describe the next series of maneuvers on either side, between Joseph Johnston and Robert Patterson as “cat and mouse.” It is true that Patterson outnumbered Johnston and could have played the “cat” role, but the actions of the armies were not nearly as simple as a cat attempting to get at a mouse and the mouse artfully dodging. Johnston, for instance, was not necessarily avoiding a head-on conflict with Patterson; in fact it was the cat who seemed to be dodging the mouse.

Indeed, before he reached Winchester, Johnston received word that inexplicably, Patterson had re-crossed the Potomac, back into Maryland, withdrawing from his move toward Martinsburg. Johnston could assume that this was due to his own counter-move of forces to Romney which had the potential to entrap Wallace, causing Patterson to change positions on the convex side of the Potomac-shaped defensive line, in order to support or even rescue Wallace in his Romney adventure.

This was the true case, but only up to a point.

Yes, Patterson had seen the need to change positions on the outside of the line, in other words, evacuate from Virginia by crossing the Potomac, in case he had to drag Wallace out of the fire. He would prefer to do this while not fighting off more of Johnston’s forces on the wrong side of the river, so he had returned to Maryland for the positional transfer. This placed him on the outside of the convex defensive line, forcing him to travel farther to reach the next penetration point than Johnston, employing interior lines, had to do.

The desire to support Wallace, however, was only part of the reason for Patterson’s withdrawal, temporary as it would prove to be. Very recently, Patterson had received orders from Washington to release five thousand of his men, who would be shifted to the capital forces under McDowell. Disgruntled but willing to comply, Patterson chose to disengage from the threat of immediate combat, especially on Virginia soil, in order to carry out an orderly process of removing the requisitioned five thousand and dispatching them the long way to Washington.

Now down to 14,344 men, and believing the Confederates opposing him had more than that, Patterson nevertheless returned to a position from which he could again menace Johnston.

To understand how these preliminary maneuvers by Johnston and Patterson fit into the whole, it is necessary to catch up with what had developed in the region of Washington and Manassas in the interim.

Chapter Thirteen

Initially, aware of the accumulation of men in Washington, Lee raised the number of Virginia militia at Manassas under Cocke to nearly a thousand men, which was next to nothing compared to the 40,000 in the command of McDowell. After May 22, however, he would have the opportunity to tap into the availability of incoming Confederate troops and would do so in a big way.

To understand Lee’s situation at Manassas, it is necessary to cast back to May 1. That day, Lincoln greeted representatives of New York troops that were arriving, first to defend Washington, then to form part of the buildup of forces for the next phase of business in the looming war. In his remarks, he addressed that next phase, as noted by his private secretaries, Nicolay and Hay:

....Just now the Government had three things to do: defend Washington, blockade the ports, and retake Government property. All possible dispatch was to be used in these matters, and it would be well if the people would cordially assist in this work before clamoring for more....

This is an important set of priorities to consider, and relating them to what had developed in the region, militarily, up to May 1, is necessary to place what follows in proper context. Based on the above, Lincoln was not yet of the mind set that solving the issue of the Confederacy and the rebellion that had come along with secession required war. This despite the fact that the nation clamored for war, and that the Confederates had done their best to trigger war, and Lincoln himself had discussed war on his way to Washington. He was still in the mode of preventing war if he could. As will be seen, he was also preparing to keep any war that must be fought as short and as nearly bloodless as possible.

Care must be taken when interpreting his declaration of a blockade against Southern ports as an act of war. Had the Confederacy been a foreign nation, such a blockade would have been an undeniable act of war. This must be tempered by the fact that the provocation by Jefferson Davis in response to which Lincoln declared a blockade, back on April 19, was the act which could have been described as one of war, had the Confederacy in fact been a foreign nation. Instead, it was only yet another act of treason and insurrection against which Lincoln was not only within his rights to respond with a blockade, he was obliged to do so, based on his interpretation of the situation.

The provocation which was the genesis of the blockade was the issuance by Jefferson Davis, as president of the Confederacy, of “letters of marque,” which authorized under, certain conditions, private ships to seize Union merchant ships and their cargo as prizes.

In Lincoln’s April 19 proclamation (which is printed as Appendix III,) the president laid out his case for a blockade, which was in fact an extension of the case he made on April 15 in calling out the militia as a federal army:

Whereas an insurrection against the Government of the United States has broken out in the States of South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Florida, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas, and the laws of the United States for the collection of the revenue cannot be effectually executed therein comformably to that provision of the Constitution which requires duties to be uniform throughout the United States:

And whereas a combination of persons engaged in such insurrection, have threatened to grant pretended letters of marque to authorize the bearers thereof to commit assaults on the lives, vessels, and property of good citizens of the country lawfully engaged in commerce on the high seas, and in waters of the United States: And whereas an Executive Proclamation has been already issued, requiring the persons engaged in these disorderly proceedings to desist therefrom, calling out a militia force for the purpose of repressing the same, and convening Congress in extraordinary session, to deliberate and determine thereon....

In this document, Lincoln made clear that the naval action to come was required as part of his mission to carry out the laws of the constitution, upon a foreign nation, but in the insurrectionary South.

In his May 1 statement, the only threat of direct military ground force implied was that of engaging any hostile military that threatened Washington, ahead of other considerations.

Thus Lincoln continued to hew to the line of only intending to retake federal property and to establish the rule of law with the minimal forcible action possible. Inherent in that, however, as has been analyzed, some level of battle was almost impossible to avoid, yet Lincoln continued to deny that using force to carry out the law was a form of coercion or invasion. As for what federal forces were doing in the upper part of Western Virginia, those actions remained defensive in nature, with federalized militias simply acting to contain what they perceived as aggressive secessionist forces.

On May 3, given the positive response to his first recruitment, Lincoln issued another call, this time for a total of 64,748 soldiers and officers, along with 18,000 seamen, and for these recruits their terms were to be three years. Even if the South could be defeated in one grand battle, using, first, the 75,000 ninety day men, Lincoln would now have the forces to continue policing the South for three years. And if the single-battle theory failed, he was now preparing for a protracted war, even when no actual single battle of any kind was clearly foreseen yet.

Because it would take time to accumulate these new men and train them, for the interim, what fighting lay ahead must be done by the men who were part of the initial 75,000 that had been recruited for three months. Already, their time was running down and all that had been accomplished by this group was the activity that had been conducted up in the Ohio River Valley and out of Pennsylvania. Meantime, McDowell had tried to train the 40,000 into the best fighting condition he could achieve before he used them.

This buildup had relieved part of Lincoln’s May 1 stated concern, the defense of Washington. Therefore, instead of fretting over the security of the government, now Lincoln must worry over the countdown on the recruitment terms for these men, eager as he was to go ahead and confront the rebels somewhere in a decisive way on that hope that a single throw of the dice could decide the game, despite his unwillingness to openly proclaim this goal.

In a way, the Virginians, in joining the Confederacy, had solved one of Lincoln’s problems, in the issue of demonstrating that he could and would act to take back places seized by seceding states. Having themselves (the Virginians,) now taken federal property within fifty miles of the capital, Lincoln could send out his army to begin the process right there, almost within walking distance of the army’s base, Washington itself. If the Confederates intended to stop him by sending an army to resist the taking back of “places,” it was deemed better to fight near that army’s supply base, and even better to fight in the same climate, that of the Washington area, than in the “deep South.”

Thus, if Jefferson and Lee wanted a grand fight to trigger the war, a fight which might both open and close the war, no better place could be found for the purposes of the Union army than nearby in Virginia.

The attitude of the Northern public toward the mission of the federal army did not particularly match Lincoln’s announced intentions as of early May. A clamor was rising, to which he had referred, demanding that very same “more” that he tried to calm. This clamor revolved around a cry, “on to Richmond,” pushed by Horace Greeley, publisher of the New York Tribune. The first Confederate Congress was to convene beginning July 20 and Greeley thought it would be a dandy time for the federal army to arrive and wrap up the whole Confederate government.

With Greeley’s call, an important point emerged for consideration. Only the existence of the Confederate army could ultimately keep the Confederate government out of the hands of the federal government. Even taking back the places could become secondary to capturing the Confederate leadership itself, or at least routing it, scattering it to other locations and disrupting its ability to run the proto-country. If the Confederate army were in fact defeated to such a degree that it could not prevent the federal army going wherever Lincoln chose, the war was over. Only if the Confederacy could create more than one army, such that even if the first to confront federal forces were defeated, the next could move in and stop the federal forces, and so on, could the war then continue.

In this context, the situation of the Confederate army at the time that Bull Run began to appear on the horizon must be considered.

West of the Appalachian Mountains, which primarily meant the stretch of land represented by the length of Tennessee from the mountains to the Mississippi River, an area which would be labeled “the West” or the Western Theater, the Confederacy would for some time be hard pressed to put together an army of 21,000 men. This situation will be explored later in these pages, but suffice it to say, such an army could not have served as a secondary force against the federal army if the Confederate forces in Virginia were defeated.

The Confederate army in Virginia consisted primarily, as late as July, of Joseph Johnston’s Army of the Shenandoah at under 11,000, the forces formerly under Cocke at Manassas Junction at 23,000, and around 5,000 under a General Magruder on the Virginia peninsula.

This was what the Confederates had in the main with which to stop the federal forces, and already plans existed, as described earlier, to combine two of those armies by bringing Johnston down to merge with Cocke’s at Manassas if McDowell’s 40,000 man army came forth from Washington against Manassas. Yet the federal side had three more armies, two of which were each almost half again as large as Johnston’s, separate from McDowell’s. Those armies were McClellan’s Ohioans and Patterson’s Pennsylvanians, both of which shared out Indiana’s militia as well as the Union militia of Virginia, along with Butler’s at Fortress Monroe.

If Cocke, or whoever succeeded him at Manassas lost to McDowell, Johnston must either rush forward and throw himself in the way of the victorious federal side before it moved on to Richmond or he must retreat and cede both Richmond and the war.

The point of these exercises is that the Confederacy had everything to lose in the first battle that appeared to be shaping up, while the federal side could absorb a loss and continue to prosecute the war. In that way, the first battle, Bull Run, had the capacity to settle the entire issue of Confederate independence, if the Union were victorious.

If the three main armies of the Union were combined, that was to say, McDowell’s, McClellan’s, and Patterson’s, they would create a monster that the Confederate army could not have stood a prayer of defeating. The main hope of the Confederates was to combine their armies while fighting only McDowell’s.

This is a key situation to understand. Johnston’s army was in the area of Winchester with around 11,000 and the other significant army was at Manassas with as has been seen, around 23,000. Combined, 33,000 could have a chance against McDowell’s 40,000.

Thus when the time came to fight, Johnston’s army was needed to bolster the army at Manassas. If, however, one or both of the other federal armies joined McDowell, that better balance would be lost. So what was shaping up was a need for Johnston to join at Manassas while preventing the other federal armies under Patterson and McClellan from joining McDowell. Lee, Davis, and the generals in the field all recognized this situation.

Johnston was situated closer to Manassas than the two federal armies. By whatever means and under whatever circumstances Johnston moved to Manassas, he needed to either stand between Manassas and the other two armies, or decoy them into believing he was still around Winchester, while slipping away to join the battle looming at Manassas.

Davis saw that the best chance of the Confederates to defeat McDowell would be to prevent Patterson and McClellan from combining with him first, while at the same time, combining their own forces of Cocke/Johnston against McDowell at Manassas.

The interactions between Johnston and Patterson in the area around Winchester are generally treated as no more than a backwater issue in the war as a whole, yet the results were momentous, and ought to be given their due in any comprehensive study of the Civil War. Yet they had tremendous impact on the Battle of Bull Run and will followed in detail in the pages to come.

Davis and Lee were committed to stopping McDowell at Manassas, or the war effort must die trying. While Lincoln had the choice of whether to dispatch McDowell to engage the Confederates and trigger a battle, or not, Lee and Davis had no such choice, the Confederate army simply must stand and take the charge if it came. Davis and Lee must therefore do all the could to help that army at Manassas at least survive the predictable onslaught.

Reasons have been presented why Lincoln moved from the position of avoiding battle to calling for it. Once satisfied that Washington was secure, and given that his army existed to carry out the avowed goals of ending the insurrection, and with a Confederate army already in place waiting to be fought close to Washington instead of deep in the South, and finally, with the shelf life of that army rapidly running down, Lincoln defied the wisdom of his two key generals, Scott and McDowell, and directed the latter to march forth from his positions just across the Potomac and rout the Confederate army at Manassas if he was able.

McDowell believed his army was not ready for the task. He appealed to Lincoln to understand that his men were both too inexperienced and untrained to fight a major battle. Lincoln responded, “You are green, it is true, but they,” the Confederate soldiers, he meant, “are green also. You are green alike.” With that, as commander in chief, he persisted in compelling McDowell to make plans for action.

The war Lincoln envisioned was meant to be “limited.” That is a key distinction.

Limited war was a European concept of the time, that only armies engaged each other, that civilians were off limits, and civilian property as well. To people of modern days, limited war has been off the table a long time. In present time, and for the whole of the Twentieth Century as well, nations preferred to force their enemies into submission as rapidly and expeditiously as possible, and avoiding the targeting of civilian populations slows this process down. It is common practice to wipe out cities full of civilians if doing so achieves rapid military aims. At the outset of the Civil War, however, Lincoln had no issue with anyone except those who conducted the rebellion and the military that kept the rebellious proto-nation of the Confederacy functioning.

General Winfield Scott disagreed with this early notion of aggression, in part because it did not comport with his own grand strategy for fighting the war, but as the loyal senior military commander, he acceded to the president’s wishes and set to work formulating operational plans in support of McDowell’s coming advance.

William T. Sherman, a brigade commander in McDowell’s army, and a man who met personally with both Winfield Scott and the president during this time, characterized the general attitude of the period in his memoirs. Although he was referring to a period a few weeks in the future, the point was just as valid with regard to the period prior to the first action:

“The temper of Congress and the people would not permit the slow and methodical preparation desired by General Scott; and the cry of ‘On to Richmond!’ which was shared by the volunteers, most of whom had only engaged for ninety days, forced General Scott to hasten his preparations, and to order a general advance about the middle of July. McDowell was to move from the defenses of Washington, and Patterson from Martinsburg.”

(William T. Sherman, “Memoirs”, Volume One, Chapter IX)

May 23 had become a “magic” date, the day when all the elements of secession in Virginia were fulfilled, including the popular referendum, which by Virginia’s standards, would finally ratify secession. From the federal point of view, once Virginia was beyond retrieval, no reason existed to keep the Union army from entering the state.

Therefore, at two in the morning of May 24, the federal army crossed the Potomac, moving solidly onto Virginia territory.

The army marched in four columns, and its first job was to begin building fortifications designed to protect Washington City.

Under a flag of truce, a message was sent ahead to Alexandria allowing the 500 Confederate troops one hour to leave town. For the most part peacefully, Cocke’s little force did just that.

Captain Elmer Ellsworth had the task of securing the telegraph office at the rail station and proceeded with a small group to carry out the mission. On the way, they passed a hotel, the Marshall House, which flew a Confederate flag that had been visible from the White House, a constant irritant. Ellsworth personally climbed to the summit and cut the flag down. When Ellsworth arrived back at the first landing, the hotel proprietor stepped out of shadows and killed him instantly with a shotgun blast. The assailant was mortally wounded by one of Ellsworth’s corporals.

Ellsworth was a personal friend of the president and the first casualty of the Union’s forward advance into Virginia.

The idea of combining the three main armies of the Union, under McClellan, Patterson, and McDowell, up in the area of Winchester, one of Lee’s and Davis’s fears, was certainly considered in Washington. Rail lines ran from Manassas Junction up to Leesburg, Virginia, far outside the region where Johnston and Patterson were operating, but from that point, using a pass through the Blue Ridge Mountains called Vestal’s Gap, McDowell’s army could march right into Harpers Ferry and whether directly joining with Patterson, or creating an enveloping pincer, could hammer all the forces present on the Confederate side in that area, which meant, primarily, Johnston’s army. In that event, McClellan, farther west, could move in and join the grand army or act as an outside containment force. This could be done while leaving enough of a defensive force behind to protect Washington from the Confederate army at Manassas. Rather than trying to take Washington, that force would be needed to try and save Johnston up in the Shenandoah Valley.

On the other hand, as Lee and Davis also feared, the operation could be carried out the opposite way, with Patterson and/or McClellan rushing down to join with McDowell at Manassas and smashing everything in their way.

The worst outcome for the federal side would be for Johnston to merge with the force at Manassas and defeat one of the armies, including McDowell’s. Even then, reason dictated that the other two federal armies could then sweep down and hit the combined Confederate army from behind, and McDowell’s army, even after being defeated, should be able to rally and hit the Confederates from the other direction.

This set up a key mission for Patterson: he must not allow Johnston to disengage and join against McDowell at Manassas, or if he failed, he must follow in hot pursuit and enter the same battle from behind Johnston. The one thing he must not do was to let Johnston reach Manassas and not arrive there himself.

In military parlance, Patterson was assigned the task of “fixing” Johnston in place, essentially freezing him where he was, and better yet if possible, defeating him in the process.

This is a key point in understanding the beginning of the war and why it could have been and should have been only a few months or even weeks in duration. This is why the events that placed McClellan’s and Patterson’s army where they were at this time are important.

On paper, McDowell’s army well outnumbered the Confederates at Manassas, when Johnston was not added. When Johnston was added, the Union side, again on paper, would match the Confederate forces fairly closely. This was true, ignoring Patterson and McClellan’s armies.

Had Patterson succeeded in detaining Johnston at the north end of the Shenandoah Valley, so he never reached Manassas in time to join in against McDowell, the way the battle at Manassas actually unfolded strongly suggests McDowell, despite even failures in judgment, conduct, and execution, would have achieved victory, and perhaps handily. He could then have turned on Johnston, once the Army of the Shenandoah came south, no matter what transpired between that army and Patterson’s. Patterson would then have been expected to follow and Johnston would be caught between both armies, and it is difficult to imagine how his army could have withstood such a combination. It need be noted that all this is reckoned without McClellan moving forward from upper Western Virginia and joining in.

So much therefore depended upon Patterson’s army.

Several times in the Civil War, situations developed that could be called “lost chances,” opportunities for the war to have been changed in a drastic way by only a small adjustment of events. The failure of Patterson to keep Johnston away from Manassas is the first of the key lost chances of the Civil War.

Initially, Lee raised the number of men at Manassas, still under Cocke, from three hundred to nearly a thousand, but after May 24, when McDowell had crossed onto Virginia soil, Lee brought in three more regiments, knowing that level of reinforcement still hardly made a dent in the troop disparity.

These additional men came from the newly arriving Confederate army, now of course free to enter Virginia. (North Carolina had also finally seceded.) The man who was senior in rank among the total concentration at Manassas was one of those men who had formed a volunteer unit of his own and was made a general without earning it. His name was Bonham and Lee was not comfortable leaving a key army in such a key position in Bonham’s hands. While Lee could not just dismiss Bonham, he could bring in someone who outranked him and the critical question was who that should be.

Consulting with Jefferson, Lee arrived at the decision to replace Bonham with the flamboyant, suave, volatile commander of the forces at Fort Sumter, Beauregard.

Lee knew from the beginning that Beauregard must be somewhat kept on a leash. Well aware of the Creole general’s inclination toward aggressive, dramatic, glory-seeking, but not necessarily wise or useful action, Lee emphasized to Beauregard that the operations he was to carry out there at Manassas would be strictly defensive in character until he was told otherwise.

Those instructions cramped Beauregard’s style, and soon, true to nature, he would concoct an almost wildly aggressive scheme, which he proposed to carry out in conjunction with Joseph Johnston, from his army’s position at Winchester in the Shenandoah Valley, an operation designed to ultimately capture Washington. Lee and Davis were not charmed by the plan and turned it down flatly.

Beauregard was not alone, however, in preferring to attack and capture Washington. For weeks, calls had rung out in the South for the Confederate army to immediately march on the national capital, seize it, and either drive Lincoln away or capture him. A variety of punishments were proposed for the man they called “monster,” “baboon,” and other names.

Wiser heads, and the most important ones, Davis and Lee, refused to entertain the idea of an attack on Washington, particularly with the rapidly building federal army that stood guardian over the capital city.

Plainly now, a major battle was shaping up in the area around Manassas Junction and the Confederate army would have all it could handle, without adding the wild hare idea of capturing Washington.

In these pages, it has been demonstrated that the existence of a Confederate army, building up in slow stages, at Manassas, was always defensive in purpose, never mind Beauregard’s preference, or the initial panicked perception of those in Washington about the army’s purpose, only a little over twenty miles away. The army began as just a part of Lee’s long defensive line, designed to try and keep the federal army out of Virginia. As has also been seen, never did the Confederate army outside of Washington outnumber even the smallest force inside the capital.

Always, Davis and Lee recognized the fact that unless Johnston joined Beauregard at Manassas, McDowell’s army would badly outnumber Confederate forces there, and mere survival, never mind victory seemed difficult to count upon.

That is the scenario which led to the first real battle of the Civil War, which would come to be known as First Manassas by the South and Bull Run by the North. The series of events which developed between Patterson and Johnston in the lower end of the Shenandoah Valley deserve separate consideration before the main event at Manassas is taken into account. Had Patterson done his job, as has been suggested above, very likely Bull Run would have been the only battle of the war. And in pages to come, it will be demonstrated that even Beauregard believed this to be true.

Chapter Fourteen

Robert Patterson’s Pennsylvanians were had not gone away. After having withdrawn from Western Virginia, over the Potomac into Maryland, they moved eastward, on the longer “outside” perimeter of Lee’s defensive line, which of course coincided with the flow of the Potomac, then reappeared to once again menace Joseph Johnston. That was the situation where this narrative left off while catching up with the larger picture.

Bringing the focus back to Johnston and Patterson, the latter’s next move was a re-crossing of the Potomac back into Virginia on July 2. In that move, Patterson made as if to threaten the Virginia town of Martinsburg, about twenty miles from the border with Maryland, and Johnston sent a force to confront him.

About five miles inside of Virginia, Patterson’s advance men became engaged with some of Johnston’s own forward skirmishers. The commander of this Confederate brigade was Thomas Jackson, whose cavalry eyes and ears were led by James Ewell Brown (“J.E.B.”) Stuart. The clash occurred at a place called Falling Waters. The confrontation was not a notable battle; some forty-nine federal men were captured and while Johnston moved up closer, anticipating a general charge by the Union forces, Patterson did not oblige.

Based on his military instincts, acting in his capacity as a combat engineer more than as a commander of men, again, Johnston judged, in the same way he had decided about Harpers Ferry, that Martinsburg was not defensible and he withdrew, this time to nearby Winchester, waiting four days for Patterson to come after him. Winchester was about twenty-five miles south of Martinsburg, outside the part of the state informally considered to be “Western” Virginia, meaning inside what would later be the new border of original Virginia.

Timing was becoming tricky with regard to the situation at Manassas. Winfield Scott passed word to Patterson, of course unknown to Johnston, that McDowell would move against Beauregard on July 16.

This is key information: Patterson interpreted that it meant the actual collision, McDowell against Beauregard, would open up on that date, not that McDowell would only begin to move forward on that day. This was a crucial distinction.

Patterson further interpreted the orders to mean that if, as of July 16, Johnston was still bogged down around Winchester, meaning he had not joined Beauregard, Patterson’s job of fixing him in place had been done. This, too, is crucial to everything that followed. If July 16 came and went and Johnston was still up in the Shenandoah Valley, not fighting McDowell alongside Beauregard at Manassas, Patterson assumed he would be free to move out of the area and leave Johnston to his own devices.

McDowell expected that once he had frozen Johnston away from Manassas, Patterson would hurry down and join him, but nothing indicates Patterson ever planned to do so. He was vexed over the fact that his three month men were soon to leave his army, most of them refusing to extend their enlistments and he appears to have planned to remain in the area of Leesburg and Harpers Ferry fifty miles or so from Washington, and in fact that was where he remained.

Joseph Johnston had been placed in an almost mirror image position, of being expected to fix Patterson in place so he could not reach Manassas until the battle was over, then Johnson was expected to rush south and join with Beauregard in time to at least put up a good fight against McDowell.

When the Battle of Bull Run, as it actually unfolded, is analyzed, it appears probable that if one of two things, never mind both occurred, McDowell’s army would have won the battle, and one could almost say handily. If Johnston had arrived only a day later, or Patterson had joined McDowell, it is difficult to even imagine how Beauregard’s army alone could have defeated McDowell. The additional 14,000 men that Patterson should have added would have had a tremendous effect, even if Johnston’s 8,000, which was the number he actually brought, did arrive in time. On the other hand, if neither Johnston’s nor Patterson’s had arrived, the manner the battle unfolded would clearly have favored McDowell just the same.

When these factors are considered, Patterson’s failure to prevent Johnston from throwing his army in with Beauregard, with or without adding his own to McDowell, led to the narrow defeat of the Union army at Manassas. (Some may argue that calling the Union defeat at Bull Run “narrow” is inaccurate, but a counter argument can be made, and will be made in these pages, that if McDowell had carried out certain adjustments in his strategy, he could have conceivably won the battle despite Patterson’s absence and Johnston’s presence.)

It is difficult to deny that Patterson doubly failed in his mission to support McDowell at Manassas. In so doing, he killed the hopes of a limited one-or-two-battle Civil War. What is left is to understand the manner in which, and the reason he totally failed.

In a perfect world, from the standpoint of the Lincoln government in July of 1861, the best outcome would have been for Robert Patterson to use his superior numbers to not just delay Joseph Johnston but to defeat him outright. Winfield Scott believed this was possible and expected it to be done.

Some thought must be given to what it would have meant if Patterson defeated Johnston. The question of what constituted defeat or victory in the Civil War is not as clear-cut as it would seem on the surface. Seldom did a defeated army just disappear, with all the troops dispersing to the four winds, and even more seldom was an entire army wiped out. The two ways an army might be completely destroyed as a fighting force would be by surrender or and capture.

On the other hand, defeated armies often evacuated the area and retreated behind some protection, where they would not have to fight for awhile. In fact, that would be the result of the Battle of Bull Run, in which the Union army hurried inside the defenses of Washington, largely intact, but unwilling to fight until it regrouped.

Such an outcome would have been unlikely if Patterson had defeated Johnston in the area of Winchester. Given that their secondary assignment was to join Beauregard, Johnston’s men would have probably retreated, not to Richmond or some safer place, but to join Beauregard. Orders from Winfield Scott even anticipated that likelihood in this way:

Maj.-Gen. PATTERSON, Martinsburg:

WASHINGTON,

July 5, 1861-10 p. m.

Your letter of the 4th is received. Orders were sent this morning to Madison for the Third and Fourth Regiments from Wisconsin to repair to Williamsport via Chambersburg and report to you. The Nineteenth and Twenty-eighth New York Regiments leave here for Hagerstown to-morrow at half past 2 p. m. You will have to provide transportation for them thence to the post you may order them to. If any three-months’ men will re-engage for the long term, designate a Regular officer of your command to muster them, provided a sufficient number to form a regiment can be obtained. Having defeated the enemy, if you can continue the pursuit without too great hazard, advance via Leesburg (or Strasburg) towards Alexandria; but consider the dangerous defiles, especially via Strasburg, and move with great caution, halting at Winchester and threatening a movement by Strasburg; or the passage of the Potomac twice, and coming down by Leesburg, may be the more advantageous movement.

WINFIELD SCOTT.

This not only made clear Scott expected Patterson to defeat Johnston, but also that he was to then proceed to Alexandria, which meant joining with McDowell for the battle to come. Patterson would later say the instructions from Scott were ambiguous.

No good reason exists to delve into the reasons Patterson failed entirely, either the actual reasons or those he put forth to excuse himself. What is important is that by neither participating in the Battle of Bull Run/Manassas, nor preventing Johnston from doing so, he almost certainly precipitated the federal loss in that battle, and in so doing, prolonged the war.

If it seems overblown to suggest that victory by the federal side at Manassas would have proved fatal to the Confederacy, the words of Beauregard may be entered in evidence to deny that claim:

There was much in this decisive conflict about to open, not involved in any after battle, which pervaded the two armies and the people behind them and colored the responsibility of the respective commanders. The political hostilities of a generation were now face to face with weapons instead of words. Defeat to either side would be a deep mortification, but defeat to the South must turn its claim of independence into an empty vaunt....

In order to put the entire situation into order, it is more instructive to view what actually transpired between the two armies from Johnston’s perspective.

Upon being summoned to move up the Shenandoah Valley and over to Manassas in order to bolster Beauregard’s force, Johnston faced a decision. He could either attack Patterson first, then after doing whatever damage he was able, begin his trek to Manassas, or avoid a fight with Patterson, while fixing him in place by confusion and deceptions, long enough to do just what Winfield Scott described as “stealing a march” on Patterson.

Declaring it to be the “the most speedy and certain” option, Johnston chose the second course, and in so doing, avoided losing any men in what he deemed an unnecessary battle with Patterson. He left off a small militia force to protect the town of Winchester as much as possible. By use of a cavalry “screen,” he intended that Patterson should be led to believe that this small unit was part of Johnston’s entire army, still in place near Winchester.

This succeeded to a fare-the-well, given Patterson’s belief up to July 18 that Johnston still remained in the vicinity. This is hardly an excuse, however: that Johnston’s cavalry screen convinced Patterson that the whole army remained. Because he refused to engage, whether with the cavalry or with all of Johnston’s men, Patterson allowed himself to be fooled, and in so doing, totally failed his mission.

Patterson would not know until July 20 that Johnston was not before him at all. By then, however, Johnston’s advance elements were already arriving by train at the site of the looming battle. And also by then, Patterson assumed the battle at Manassas had come and gone, no doubt with victory for the federal side.

And of course it had not.

To understand the impact of Johnston’s arrival, in reinforcing Beauregard at Manassas, it is necessary to finally turn all attention to the battle of Bull Run/Manassas, the battle that actually marked the beginning of the Civil War.

Part II: The War Begins

Chapter One

The army that had been paced under the command of Beauregard remained at Manassas Station, or the area thereabouts, for weeks, building to a size that still seemed inadequate against what was known to be a forty thousand man force under McDowell.

As Patterson had been led to count upon, McDowell did in fact begin his forward motion out of Alexandria, toward Manassas, on July 16. The Confederate spy network continued to operate in Washington and it had no reason to stop, because the city was still a Southern city, socially and culturally, and secessionist sympathizers abounded. As a result, nothing that a federal army operating out of Washington could do would go unmarked by the Confederates.

On July 15, one of the Confederacy’s spies passed word to Beauregard that McDowell would move forward out of Alexandria the next day. Unlike the false information about the Massachusetts unit reported to be on the way to Harpers Ferry, this information was correct. And whether it was or not, Beauregard would be foolish to ignore it.

It was this information about McDowell’s movement that caused Jefferson Davis to order Johnston to fix Patterson in place and hasten to join Beauregard before McDowell could engage.

McDowell would find that nothing about the movement of his Army of the Potomac from Alexandria to Bull Run could be called smooth or rapid. The general had decried the lack of time to comprehensively train his men before going to war, and the results began to show immediately in the problems he and his officers faced in moving the army toward the enemy. The difficulty in transferring his army to the point of battle led to Patterson’s erroneous assumption that the battle of Bull Run would come and go soon after July 21 instead of five days later.

The trouble could not be laid totally at the feet of the soldiers themselves. It was not just the soldiers, nor was it only the lower echelon officers who lacked experience—that deficiency ran all the way to the top, stopping only below the level of older men such as Winfield Scott and Robert Patterson.

None of the younger generals had entered the war as generals, and none had led armies in the field. McDowell was a major quickly raised to the rank of general, and he would prove, in his first battle, to be on one hand too cautious and on the other, not cautious enough to maintain full control of his men. Some, perhaps a great deal of this, related to the quality of his officers. One might argue that the Union army had needed the same process of “decapitation” of unworthy officers that the Virginia militia had undertaken. Too many of the officers who would lead men in the battle of Bull Run had been elected from militia sources without any background or training to handle groupings of soldiers in the field.

This would be corrected in future but too late for the Union at Bull Run.

One officer who knew what he was doing, Colonel William T. Sherman, recorded the situation in his memoirs:

“In due season, about July 15th, our division moved forward leaving our camps standing; Keyes’s brigade in the lead, then Schenck’s, then mine, and Richardson’s last. We marched via Vienna, Germantown, and Centreville, where all the army, composed of five divisions, seemed to converge. The march demonstrated little save the general laxity of discipline; for with all my personal efforts I could not prevent the men from straggling for water, blackberries, or any thing on the way they fancied.”

(Sherman, ibid.)

The first night, the advanced elements camped east of the town of Fairfax Courthouse, about fifteen miles west of Washington and seven miles or so from Bull Run. According to James B. Fry, who was at the time of the battle a captain and assistant adjutant-general on McDowell’s staff, the general had already planned out the layout of his strength:

For the advance, McDowell asked “a force of 30,000 of all arms, with a reserve of 10,000.”

This is the first set of numbers which must be considered in understanding what followed in the battle. All along, the number 40,000 has been quoted as McDowell’s overall strength. According to Fry, McDowell estimated the size of the enemy in this way:

“If General J. E. Johnston’s force is kept engaged by Major-General Patterson, and Major-General Butler occupied the force now in his vicinity, I think they will not be able to bring up more than 10,000 men, so we may calculate upon having to do with about 35,--- men.” And as it turned out, that was a fair estimate of the number he “had to do with.”

It must be kept in mind, however, that number was McDowell’s estimate of what Beauregard’s strength would be when he was reinforced from armies south of his position, bringing his direct force at Manassas to the level of around 35,000. In fact, Beauregard was not reinforced to anything approaching those number, and possessed a strength of about 23,000 effectives until reinforced by Johnston, who brought only 8,340 of his 11,000 plus from the Shenandoah Valley. Thus in fact, the maximum number McDowell faced at Manassas was around 31,340.

Based on McDowell’s official records, he had led out of Washington only 34,127 men, considerably less than the 40,000 that had been touted on paper as the strength of his army, but more than Fry listed above.

As part of the numbers subtracted from the total of 40,000, the first drop-off was of Runyon’s division, about 5,500 men, left seven miles east of the town of Centreville, which was just short of the stream called Bull Run. McDowell wanted this reserve unit to hold open the line of communications between the Alexandria and Orange Railroad and the town of Vienna. This was his army’s route in, its supply route, and the line must be kept open.

McDowell dispersed the next level of reserves at the town of Centreville itself, leaving the Fifth Division, not quite 6,000 men in place. He reported later that he had done this because he feared Beauregard might get men behind him to that point, cut him off from return to Washington and “destroy” his army.

As indicated above, McDowell did not reach Centreville to make these dispositions until July 18, despite leaving on the Sixteenth.

Fry described the physical layout as well as the tactical situation in this period, before the first contacts were made between the two armies:

On the morning of the 18th his forces were concentrated at Centerville, a point about 20 miles west of the Potomac and 6 or 7 miles east of Manassas Junction. Beauregard’s outposts fell back without resistance. Bull Run, flowing south-easterly, is about half-way between Centerville and Manassas Junction, and, owing to its abrupt banks, the timber with which it was fringed, and some artificial defenses at the fords, was a formidable obstacle. The stream was fordable, but all the crossing for eight miles, from Union Mills on the south to the Stone Bridge on the north, were defended by Beauregard’s forces.

The Warrenton Turnpike, passing through Centerville, leads nearly due west, crossing Bull Run at the Stone Bridge The direct road from Centerville to Manassas crosses Bull Run at Mitchell’s Ford, half a mile or so above another known as Blackburn’s Ford. Union Mills was covered by Ewell’s brigade, supported after the 18th by Holmes’ brigade; McLean’ Ford, next to the north, was covered by D. R. Jones’ brigade; Blackburn’s Ford was defended by Longstreet’s brigade, supported by Early’s brigade; Mitchell’s Ford was held by Bonham’s brigade, with an outpost of two guns and an infantry support east of Bull Run; the stream between Mitchell’s Ford and the Stone Bridge was covered by Cocke’s brigade; the Stone Bridge on the Confederate left was held by Evans with 1 regiment and Wheat’s special battalion of infantry, 1 battery of 4 guns, and 2 companies of cavalry.

McDowell was compelled to wait at Centerville until his provision wagons arrived and could issue rations. His orders having carried his leading division under Tyler no farther than Centerville, he wrote that officer at 8:15 A. M. on the 18th, “Observe well the roads to Bull Run and to Warrenton. Do not bring on an engagement, but keep up the impression that we are moving on Manassas.” McDowell then went to the extreme left of his line to examine the country with reference to a sudden movement of the army to turn the enemy’s right flank. The reconnaissance showed him that the country was unfavorable to the movement, and he abandoned it. While he was gone to the left, Tyler, presumably to “keep up the impression that we were moving on Manassas,” went forward from Centerville with a squadron of cavalry and two companies of infantry for the purpose of making a reconnaissance of Mitchell’s and Blackburn’s fords along the direct road to Manassas. The force of the enemy at these fords has just been given. Reaching the crest of the ridge overlooking the valley of Bull Run and a mile or so from the stream, the enemy was seen on the opposite bank, and Tyler brought up Benjamin’s artillery, 2 20-pounders rifled guns, Ayres’s field battery of 6 guns, and Richardson’s brigade of infantry. The 20-pounders opened from the ridge and a few shots were exchanged with the enemy’s batteries. Desiring more information than the long-range cannonade afforded, Tyler ordered Richardson’s brigade and a section of Ayres’ battery, supported by a squadron of cavalry, to move from the ridge across the open bottom of Bull run and take position near the stream and have skirmishers “scour the thick woods” which skirted it. Two regiments of infantry, 2 pieces of artillery, and a squadron of cavalry moved down the slope into the woods and opened fire, driving Bonham’s outpost to the cover of intrenchments across the steam. The brigades of Bonham and Longstreet, the latter being reenforced of the occasion by Early’s brigade, responded at short range to the fire of the Federal reconnoitering force and drove it back in disorder. Tyler reported that having satisfied himself “that the enemy was in force,” and ascertained “the position of his batteries,” he withdrew. This unauthorized reconnaissance, called by the Federals the affairs at Blackburn’s Ford, was regarded at the time by the Confederates as a serious attack, and was dignified by the name of the “battle of Bull Run,” the engagement of the 21st being called by them the battle of Manassas. The Confederates, feeling that they had repulsed a heavy and real attack, were encouraged by the result. The Federal troops, on the other hand, were greatly depressed. The regiment which suffered most was completely demoralized, and McDowell thought that the depression of the repulse was felt throughout his army and produced its effect upon the Pennsylvania regiment and the New York battery which insisted (their terms having expired) upon their discharge, and on the 21st, as he expressed it, “marched to the rear to the sound of the enemy’s cannon.” Even Tyler himself felt the depressing effected of his repulse, if we may judge by his cautions and feeble action on the 21st when dash was required.

The operations of the 18th confirmed McDowell in his opinion that with his raw troops the Confederate position should be turned instead of attacked in front. Careful examination had satisfied him that the country did not favor a movement to turn the enemy’s right. On the night of the 18th the haversacks of his men were empty, and had to be replenished from the provision wagons, which were late in getting up. Nor had he yet determined upon his point or plan of attack. While resting and provisioning his men, he devoted the 19th and 20th to a careful examination by his engineers of the enemy’s position and the intervening country. His men, not soldiers, but civilians in uniform, unused to marching, hot, weary, and footsore, dropped down as they had halted and bivouacked on the roads about Centreville. Notwithstanding Beauregard’s elation over the affairs at Blackburn’s Ford on the 18th, he permitted the 19th and 20th to pass without a movement to follow up the advantage he had gained. During these two days, McDowell carefully examined the Confederate position, and made his plan to manoeuver the enemy out of it. Beauregard ordered no aggressive movement until the 21st, and then, as appears from his own statement, through miscarriage of orders and lack of apprehension on the part of subordinates, the effort was a complete fiasco, with the comical result of frightening his own troops, who, late in the afternoon mistook the return of one of their brigades for an attack by McDowell’s left, and the serious result of interfering with the pursuit after he had gained the battle of the 21st.

But Beauregard, though not aggressive on the 19th and 20th, was not idle within own lines. The Confederate President had authorized Johnston, Beauregard’s senior, to use his discretion in moving to the support of Manassas, and Beauregard, urging Johnston to do so, sent railway transportation for the Shenandoah forces. But, as he states, “he at the same time submitted the alternative proposition to Johnston that having passed the Blue Ridge, he should assemble his forces, press forward by way of Aldie, north-west of Manassas, and fall upon McDowell’s right rear,” while he, Beauregard, “prepared for the operation at the first sound of the conflict, should strenuously assume the offensive in front.” “The situation and circumstances specially favored the signal success of such an operation,” says Beauregard. An attack by two armies moving from opposite points upon an enemy, with the time to attack for one depending upon the sound of the other’s cannon, is hazardous even with well-disciplined and well-seasoned troops, and is next to fatal with raw levies. Johnston chose the wiser course of moving by rail to Manassas, thus preserving the benefit of “interior lines,” which, Beauregard says, was the “sole military advantage at the moment that the Confederate possessed.”

The foregoing extensive citing of Fry’s description of the set-up of the battle is warranted for a couple of reasons. For one, it clears up issues that have been misstated in other reports about this stage of the battle, such as whether Tyler’s reconnaissance to Blackburn’s Ford was authorized by McDowell or not. And some accounts do not report accurately that McDowell himself made a reconnaissance that convinced him to give up the notion of attacking Beauregard’s right, in favor of pulling out of the immediate area and traversing north.

From the Confederate side, as written by Beauregard about the buildup to Bull Run, he first referred to the spy network in Washington, then described what he believed about the federal forces coming after him:

In the several ways, therefore, I was almost as well advised of the strength of the hostile army in my front as its commander, who, I may mention, had been a classmate of mine at West Point. Under those circumstances I had become satisfied that a well-equipped, well-constituted Federal army at least 50,000 strong, of all arms, confronted me at or about Arlington, ready and on the very eve of an offensive operation against me, and to meet which I could muster barely 18,000 men with 29 field-guns.

It is obvious then that the information available to him was faulty to the high side regarding the size of McDowell’s army. This refers to a period prior to Beauregard’s receiving reinforcements from the nearby area, raising his own army to the 23,000 range.

Beauregard again:

My view of such import had been already earnestly communicated to the proper authorities; but about the middle of July, satisfied that McDowell was on the eve of taking the offensive against me, I dispatched Colonel James chestnut of South Carolina a volunteer aide-de-camp on my staff who had served on an intimate footing with Mr. Davis in the Senate of the United States, to urge in substance the necessity for the immediate concentration of the larger part of the forces of Johnston and Holmes at Manassas, so that the moment McDowell should be sufficiently far detached from Washington, I would be enabled to move rapidly round his more convenient flank upon his rear and his communications, and attack him in reverse, or get between his forces, then separated, thus cutting off his retreat upon Arlington in the event of his defeat and insuring as an immediate consequence the crushing of Patterson, the liberation of Maryland, and the capture of Washington.

This is fascinating, because it describes both the idea of rushing Johnston to Beauregard’s aid, and the threat he intended toward Washington, behind McDowell, once he was committed to reach Manassas. And this then in turn connects to the precautions McDowell made by dropping off forces to cut off the very lane of rear-attack that Beauregard describes above. When read in Beauregard’s own words, the plan to attack Washington is no longer as grandiose and absurd as when considered in other contexts. In fact, when the manner in which the battle of Bull Run concluded is later considered, the notion of attacking Washington rears its head and in fact will appear to have been so close to practicality that only McDowell’s good sense in leaving key reserves might have saved the capital.

According to Beauregard, in the passage that follows, a startling proposal existed in the halls of the Confederate capital that would have resulted in a radical change to the entire strategic situation if it had been carried out:

Furthermore, Colonel Chestnut came back impressed with the views entertained at Richmond,-as he communicated at once to my adjutant-general,-that should the Federal army soon move offensively upon my position, my best course would be to retire behind the Rappahannock, and accept battle there instead of at Manassas. In effect, it was regarded as best sever communications between the two chief Confederate armies, that of the Potomac and that of the Shenandoah, with the inevitable immediate result that Johnston would be forced to leave Patterson in possession of the Lower Shenandoah Valley, abandoning to the enemy so large a part of the most resourceful sections of Virginia, and to retreat southward by way of the Luray Valley, pass across the Blue Ridge at Thornton’s Gap and unite with me after all, but at Fredericksburg, much nearer Richmond than Manassas. These views, however, were not made known to me at the time, and happily my mind was left free to the grave problem imposed upon me by the rejection of my plan for the immediate concentration of a materially larger force,- i. e., the problem of placing and using my resources for a successful encounter behind Bull Run with the Federal army, which I was not permitted to doubt was about to take the field against me.

Had the Confederate army surrendered the entire field by pulling Johnston down to regroup with Beauregard at Fredericksburg, fifty miles or so to the rear, the Civil War would have taken on an entirely different character, whether the Confederates were victorious there or not. So much that followed in the next year in the Virginia theater would have been changed if the federal army had been able to establish a foothold much closer to Richmond, which it ought to have been able to do if the Confederates did pull back. While this account will not delve more deeply into the possibilities, the fact that according to Beauregard, such a retreat was considered, prior to the first battle of the Civil War, is fascinating.

The plans of the two commanders leading to the “affair” at Blackburn’s Ford, are subject to confusion. Some accounts describe the plans as that of both armies intending to turn each other’s left flanks, and others the opposite. The only clear source of the truth has to be the accounts of the two generals, McDowell and Beauregard.

The following is Beauregard’s own description of the situation after McDowell reached Centreville but before the action at Blackburn’s Ford:

Shortly afterward the enemy was reported to be advancing from Centreville on the Warrenton Turnpike, and at half-past 5 o’clock as deploying a force in front of Evans. As their movement against my left developed the opportunity I desired, I immediately sent orders to the brigade commanders, both front and reserves, on my right and center to advance and vigorously attack the Federal left flank and rear at Centreville, while my left, under Cocke and Evans with their supports, would sustain the Federal attack in the quarter of the Stone Bridge, which they were directed to do the last extremity.

Some of the confusion, in which the original plans by the two generals to attack each other’s left flanks might be attributed to the fact that Beauregard intended to employ his own right to attack McDowell’s left, which might have been misinterpreted as an attack on McDowell’s right. And it is clear Beauregard believed the initial intention of McDowell was to turn his left, but in the direct vicinity of Bull Run, not in his rear, as McDowell later decided to do as described here:

As reported to you in my letter of the 19th ultimo, my personal reconnaissance of the roads to the south had shown that it was not practicable to carry out the original plan of turning the enemy’s position on their right. The affair of the 18th at Blackburn’s Ford showed he was too strong at that point for us to force a passage there without great loss, and if we did, that it would bring us in front of his strong position at Manassas, which was not desired.

Our information was that the stone bridge over which the Warrenton road crossed Bull Run to the west of Centreville was mined, defended by a battery in position, and the road on his side of the stream impeded by a heavy abatis. The alternative was, therefore, to turn the extreme left of his position.

It is probable that some accounts only used this passage, failing to describe it as the alternative to McDowell’s original plan, because it was the final plan. The problem with this is that this secondary plan, to turn the Confederate left, was not a localized attack in the area of the Stone Bridge, it was a description of the much larger leftward move, three miles upstream, which was the ultimate operation carried out. The term “extreme left of his position” speaks of this as a grand movement, not a localized one.

The overall scenario, when sorted out, had McDowell, as he left Centreville, intending to hit Beauregard on the right, where he was stretched out along Bull Run, in hopes of cutting off the railroad that would be used by oncoming Johnston. McDowell sent a reconnaissance force under Tyler, but Tyler permitted himself to become engaged in a fight, which was unauthorized but served even so to let McDowell know Beauregard had too strong a force on his right to be turned.

Therefore, McDowell ordered the rest of Tyler’s division to fake an attack straight at the Stone Bridge as a diversion, although with the capability to convert it to a full attack if necessary, to hide the fact that McDowell changed his plan to that of marching two divisions all the way around Beauregard, north of Manassas, at Sudley Springs, where he could ford Bull Run uncontested, then drive nearly straight south, which was the operation that was in fact carried out.

The “affair at Blackburn’s Ford” was the unwanted contact between Tyler’s force and Beauregard, which to the federal side was a lesser event, while the Confederates labeled it as the actual Battle of Bull Run, the later, larger battle, which they called Manassas.

The following, part of McDowell’s report, describes the plan that resulted in the movement of the two main divisions to the north, to Sudley Springs:

Reliable information was obtained of an undefended ford about three miles above the bridge, there being another ford between it and the bridge, which was defended. It was therefore determined to take the road to the upper ford, and, after crossing, to get behind the forces guarding the lower ford and the bridge, and after occupying the Warrenton road east of the bridge to send out a force to destroy the railroad at or near Gainesville, and thus break up the communication between the enemy’s forces at Manassas and those in the Valley of Virginia before Winchester, which had been held in check by Major-General Patterson.

Brigadier-General Tyler was directed to move with three of his brigades on the Warrenton road, and commence cannonading the enemy’s batteries, while Hunter’s division, moving after him, should, after passing a little stream called Cub Run, turn to the right and north, and move by a wood road around to the upper ford, and then turn south and get behind the enemy; Colonel Heintzelman’s division to follow Hunter’s as far as the turning-off place to the lower ford, where he was to cross after the enemy should have been driven out by Hunter’s division; the Fifth Division (Miles’) to be in reserve on the Centreville ridge.

Another source of confusion revolves around the question of what McDowell knew about the army he was facing, and when he learned that Johnston’s army had arrived or when it was in fact arriving. Here is how Fry described the scenario:

Yet Johnston’s army, nearly nine thousand strong, joined Beauregard, Bee’s brigade and Johnston in person arriving on the morning of the 20th, the remainder about noon on the 21st.

This implies that the “remainder” reached the battlefield at noon on July Twenty-First. In fact, those forces were already on the field but in a different position and their “arrival” was in fact a rapid transfer from one part of the field to the other. Primary among those forces was Jackson’s and Bee’s commands, as will be described further shortly.

This is how Fry reported the information made available to McDowell on that same day, July Twenty First:

Although the enforced delay at Centerville enabled McDowell to provision his troops and gain information upon which to base an excellent plan of attack, it proved fatal by affording time for a junction of the opposing forces. On the 21st of July General Scott addressed a dispatch to McDowell, saying: “It is known that a strong reenforcement left Winchester on the afternoon of the 18th, which you will also have to beat. Four new regiments will leave to-day to be at Fairfax Station to-night. Others shall follow to-morrow - twice number if necessary.” When this dispatch was penned, McDowell was fighting the “strong reenforcement” which left Winchester on the 18th. General Scott’s report that Beauregard had been reenforced, the information that four regiments had been sent to McDowell, and the promise that twice the number would be sent if necessary, all came too late - and Patterson came not at all.

This is how Beauregard described the arrival and disposition of Johnston’s army:

General McDowell, fortunately for my plans, spent the 19th and 20th in reconnoissances; and, meanwhile, General Johnston brought 8340 men from the Shenandoah Valley, with 20 guns, and General Holmes 1265 rank and file, with 6 pieces of artillery, from Aquia Creek. As these forces arrived (most of them in the afternoon of the 20th) I placed them chiefly so as to strengthen my left center and left, the latter being weak from lack of available troops.

The Shenandoah forces were placed in reserve - Bee’s and Bartow’s brigades between McLean’s and Blackburn’s fords, and Jackson’s between Blackburn’s and Mitchell’s and Mitchell’s fords. This force mustered 29,188 rank and file and 55 guns, of which 21,923 infantry, cavalry, and artillery, with 29 guns, belonged to my immediate forces, i. e., the Army of the Potomac.

This confirms that Jackson and Bee were not just arriving from the Shenandoah Valley, they had already been placed in positions on the field before noon, when their arrival is described by Fry. That event was in fact their movement from the above described positions, to their left to bolster Evans, who was the first to encounter McDowell’s main thrust from the Sudley Ford straight south.

With these background factors set, the chain of events forming the battle of Bull Run can be developed more fully.

First, however, because Joseph Johnston’s movements will merge with the story of the coming battle, it is important to follow his army’s progress from its last position in the area of Winchester.

Chapter Two

The Blue Ridge Mountains screen off the Shenandoah Valley from the rest of Virginia on the east, while the Appalachians and Alleghenies serve the same function on the west.

To call any of the uplands of the state of Virginia mountains is an exaggeration. People who live in the Western part of the United States would claim that the highest mountains east of the Mississippi are foothills when compared to the likes of the Rockies, Sierra Nevada, Cascades, and so on. To be fair, however, whether truly mountains or not, the raised land masses of the region in which the Civil War was fought could not be crossed at will by armies, and thus constituted powerfully significant defensive bulwarks, or contrarily, barriers to offensive operations, depending upon one’s viewpoint.

The Blue Ridge is actually made up of a series of virtually separate peaks with “gaps” between, through which rail lines and roads allow transportation in and out of the valley.

Several times, the Blue Ridge would serve to block the view of armies that were in fact only miles from each other on either side, thus the term “screen” is used to describe how the Blue Ridge, and in fact other similar ranges in the area were used by commanders to their advantage.

To leave the Shenandoah Valley and make haste to Manassas, Joseph Johnston did not have his choice of routes. Not all the “gaps” between mountain masses were accommodating to armies.

Initially, Johnston anticipated marching his men the entire way from Winchester to Manassas, but he gave up the idea in disgust when the men treated the venture as too much of a frolic, rather than what it was, a crucial race against time. (McDowell would have sympathized with this problem.)

Upon passing out of Ashby Gap, reaching the town of Piedmont, Johnston made the decision to board his men on the Manassas Gap railroad and speed them directly to Manassas Station, where they would only then be a short stroll from the scene of the looming battle.

The choice of using a train over waiting for men to walk the distance from Piedmont to Manassas junction would seem obvious, but in the 1860’s, traveling by train could be dangerous, and boarding thousands of men was a massive undertaking fraught with perils.

Certainly, when all went well, there was no escaping the fact that moving men, artillery, horses, and all their supplies would be far speedier on trains than even the best marching pace could achieve. Johnston’s use of trains was a radical new vision of the concept of interior lines, and although trains had by July of 1861 already been used to a limited degree by both sides in transferring soldiers in this buildup to war, Johnston’s maneuver would mark the first use of trains to carry an army directly into battle on the American continent, and it would hardly be the last. Indeed, over the course of the entire war, beginning with Manassas, trains would be used to upset the balance of power in battles, and in so doing, would transformed war itself.

Prior to the arrival of Johnston’s men, Beauregard had his forces spread along Bull Run from Union Mills, where the railroad crossed the stream to the south, all the way up to just north of the Stone Bridge on the Warrenton Pike. In this arrangement, Beauregard was set up to face McDowell’s attack from the east, with only Evans unwittingly deployed in a position to face the eventual approach of the bulk of McDowell’s army from the north and behind. As it will be seen, had Johnston’s army not arrived, the Confederate army would have been hit hard from behind, and Tyler’s diversionary force on the east, demonstrating at the stone bridge, could have converted to the second jaws of a pincer movement.

On the route down which McDowell was approaching, after crossing Bull Run and completing his grand turning maneuver southward, two local prominences rose in turn, Matthews and Henry House hills by name. While the “hills” were really hardly more than uplifts in rolling farmland, such small variations in the “ground” where a battle must be fought could have great impact on the action. Indeed, some of the great battles to come would be decided by such minor differences in local elevation.

Robert E. Lee was the senior Confederate officer actually wearing a uniform, but he was not present at Bull Run. The second ranking officer in the entire army was Joseph Johnston, just arrived from Winchester. Technically, this placed Johnston above Beauregard in command, and by protocol, he could have taken overall control of the combined forces at Manassas from the moment he arrived.

Johnston, however, being a combat engineer, was not satisfied that he knew the “ground” on which the battle was shaping, nor did he know the overall situation, such as the size of relative forces, their disposition, the condition of the men already present, and what had taken place up to his arrival. There was no time for him to make up the deficit in knowledge before the battle opened, so he ceded overall command to the general who was already present, Beauregard.

Beauregard expressed the situation thus:

General Johnston was the ranking officers, and entitled, therefore, to assume command of the united forces; but as the extensive field of operations was one which I had occupied since the beginning of June, and with which I was thoroughly familiar in all its extent and military bearings, while he was wholly unacquainted with it, and, moreover, as I had made my plans and dispositions for the maintenance of the position, General Johnston, in view of the gravity of the impending issue, preferred not to assume the responsibilities of the chief direction of the forces during the battle, but to assist me upon the field. Thereupon, I explained my plans and purposes, to which he agreed.

The key point in this passage is the last line, in which Beauregard declares that Johnston agreed to his dispersal of forces against McDowell.

By five in the morning, Beauregard still planned his “wheel” motion on his right against McDowell’s left, unaware that the bulk of McDowell’s army had departed the area heading north.

Beauregard continues, setting the stage:

Meanwhile, about half-past 5 o’clock, the peal of a heavy rifled gun was heard in front of the Stone Bridge, its second shot striking through the tent of my signal-officer, Captain E. P. Alexander; and at 6 o’clock a full rifled battery opened against Evans and then against Cocke, to which our artillery remained dumb, as it had not sufficient range to reply. But later, as the Federal skirmish-line advanced, it was engaged by ours, thrown well forward on the other side of the Run. A scattering musketry fire followed, and meanwhile, about 7 o’clock, I ordered Jackson’s brigade, with Imboden’s and five guns of Walton’s battery, to the left, with orders to support Cocke as well as Bonham; and the brigades of Bee and Bartow, under the command of the former, were also sent to the support of the left.

It need be noted that the adjustment Beauregard called for by Bee’s, Bartow’s, and Jackson’s commands was only along the same line fronting Bull Run, to the left where Tyler of McDowell’s army was “demonstrating” against Evans at the Stone Bridge from across Bull Run. Not yet did Beauregard have any intimation of the attack coming from the north and behind him.

Beauregard continues:

At half-past 8 o’clock Evans, seeing that the Federal attack did not increase in boldness and vigor, and observing a lengthening line of dust above the trees to the left of the Warrenton Turnpike, became satisfied that the attack in his front was but a feint, and that a column of the enemy was moving around through the woods to fall on his flank from the direction of Sudley Ford. Informing his immediate commander, Cocke, of the enemy’s movement, and of his own dispositions to meet it, he left 4 companies under cover at the Stone Bridge, and led the remainder of his force, 6 companies of Sloan’s 4th South Carolina and Wheat’s battalion of Louisiana Tigers, with 2 6-pounder howitzers, across the valley of Young’s Branch to the high ground beyond it. Resting his left on the Sudley road, he distributed his troops on each side of a small copse, with such cover as the ground afforded, and looking over the open field and a reach of the Sudley road which the Federals must cover in their approach. His two howitzers were placed one at each end of his position, and here he silently awaited the enemy now drawing near.

This reaction was strictly by the initiative of Evans. Some accounts, including the Park Service which administers the battle field, claim that Joseph Johnston saw that Beauregard had misaligned his forces by ignoring his rear and as his men moved off the trains and filtered into position, Johnston corrected that alignment with his own men. By the description of the participants, this is an erroneous accounting of the events.

According to Longstreet:

The brigades of Bee and Bartow,—commanded by Bee,—and Jackson’s, had been drawn towards the left, the former two near Cocke’s position, and Jackson from the right to the left of Mitchell’s Ford. They were to await orders, but were instructed, and intrusted, in the absence of orders, to seek the place where the fight was thickest. About twelve o’clock that splendid soldier, Bernard E. Bee, under orders to find the point of danger, construed it as calling him to Evans’s support, and marched, without other notice than the noise of increasing battle, with his own and Bartow’s brigades and Imboden’s battery.

This intimates that Johnston’s forces were only shifted to the left, but in the same area where the rest of Beauregard’s own forces were set up, along the Run, from which they were to have wheeled left against McDowell. The only orders Longstreet describes was that Bee and Jackson were to flow to the heaviest fighting, wherever it was. When Evans recognized the true attack line—McDowell’s main force driving south after having made the Sudley crossing of Bull Run—Bee and Jackson made for positions to support Evans on their own.

Beauregard confirms this:

General Bee, of South Carolina, a man of marked character, whose command lay in reserve in rear of Cocke, near the Stone Bridge, intelligently applying the general order given to the reserves, had already moved toward the neighboring point of conflict, and taken a position with his own and Bartow’s brigades on the high plateau which stands in rear of Bull Run in the quarter of the Stone Bridge, and overlooking the scene of engagement upon the stretch of high ground from which it was separated by the valley of Young’s Branch.

Evan’s brigade was too large to fit in one place on the stone bridge, thus it was strung out to the west along the road. While facing off with Tyler, situated to the east on the other side of the Stone Bridge, Evan’s brigade was also in a position which placed their westward section on a line with McDowell’s main attack coming down from Sudley Ford. Notified of the dust cloud over the next hill but to the north, Evans perceived that the main attack was indeed coming from that unexpected angle and took actions to prepare for the onslaught bearing down from that new direction.

To set up the battle proper, it is important to describe the topography between where Evans and Bee were waiting, and the route McDowell’s army marched into attack.

McDowell described it this way:

The ground between the stream and the road leading from Sudley Springs south, and over which Burnside’s brigade marched, was, for about a mile from the ford, thickly wooded, whilst on the right of the road for about the same distance the country was divided between fields and woods. About a mile from the ford the country on both sides of the road is open, and for nearly a mile farther large rolling fields extend down to the Warrenton turnpike, which crosses what became the field of battle, through the valley of a small water-course, a tributary of Bull Run....

Beyond the Warrenton road, and to the left of the road down which our troops had marched from Sudley Springs, is a hill with a farm house on it. Behind this hill the enemy had early in the day some of his most annoying batteries planted. Across the road from this hill was another hill, or rather elevated ridge or table land. The hottest part of the contest was for the possession of this hill with a house on it.

The first hill described above, south of the Warrenton Pike, the hill that was crowned with a house was the previously mentioned Matthew’s Hill, named for the owner of the house. The second hill, farther south, across the turnpike from the first, was Henry House Hill, named after a “widow Henry.” This would become the center of the battle.

McDowell described the opening of the action, referring first to the “open space” about a mile from the crossing and another mile from Matthew’s Hill:

Shortly after the leading regiment of the First Brigade reached this open space, and whilst the others and the Second Brigade were crossing to the front and right, the enemy opened his fire, beginning with artillery and following it up with infantry.

The leading brigade (Burnside’s) had to sustain this shock for a short time without support, and did it well. The battalion of regular infantry was sent to sustain it, and shortly afterwards the other corps of Porter’s brigade and a regiment detached from Heintzelman’s division to the left forced the enemy back far enough to allow Sherman’s and Keyes’ brigades of Tyler’s division to cross from their position on the Warrenton road.

This open fire from the enemy was Evans, realizing the main attack was coming toward him. Beauregard describes the same action from the Confederate perspective:

The head of the column, Burnside’s brigade of Hunter’s division, at about 9:45 A. M. debouched from the woods into the open fields, in front of Evans. Wheat at once engaged their skirmishers, and as the Second Rhode Island regiment advanced, supported by its splendid battery of 6 rifled guns, the fronting thicket held by Evans’s South Carolinians poured forth in sudden volleys, while the 2 howitzers flung their grape-shot upon the attacking line, which was soon shattered and driven back into the woods behind. Major Wheat, after handling his battalion with the utmost determination, had fallen severely wounded in the lungs. Burnside’s entire brigade was now sent forward in a second charge, supported by 8 guns; they encountered again the unflinching fire of Evans’s line, and were once more driven back to the woods, from the cover of which they continued the attack, reenforced after a time by the arrival of 8 companies of United States regular infantry, under Major Sykes, with 6 pieces of artillery, quickly followed by the remaining regiments of Andrew Porter’s brigade of the same division. The contest here lasted fully an hour; meanwhile Wheat’s battalion, having lost its leader, had gradually lost its organization, and Evans, though still opposing these heavy odds with undiminished firmness, sought reenforcement from the troops in his rear.

At this time, Bee and Bartow shifted their positions on their own to support Evans.

Seeing that McDowell’s forces had arrived and were engaged, and with Evans shifting to this area of the battle, Sherman led a brigade forward into this area from the east, hitting the Confederates from behind. This, Beauregard describes:

Major Wheat, with characteristic daring and restlessness, had crossed Bull Run alone by a small ford above the Stone Bridge, in order to reconnoiter, when he and Evans had first moved to the left, and, falling on some Federal scouts, had shouted a taunting defiance and withdrawn, not, however, without his place of crossing having been observed. This disclosure was now utilized by Sherman’s (W. T.) and Keyes’s brigades of Tyler’s division; crossing at this point, they appeared over the high bank of the stream and moved into position on the Federal left. There was no choice now for Bee but to retire - a movement, however, to be accomplished under different circumstances than when urged by him upon Evans. The three leaders endeavored to preserve the steadiness of the ranks as they withdrew over the open fields, aided by the fire of Imboden’s guns on the plateau and the retiring howitzers; but the troops were thrown into confusion, and the greater part soon fell into rout across Young’s Branch and around the base of the height in the rear of the Stone Bridge.

This is how Longstreet developed the situation from his vantage:

Burnside was reinforced by Porter’s brigade, and afterwards by a part of Heintzelman’s division. Ricketts’s battery, and subsequently the battery under Griffin, pressed their fight with renewed vigor. The batteries, particularly active and aggressive, poured incessant fire upon the Confederate ranks, who had no artillery to engage against them except Imboden’s, far off to the rear, and the section of Latham’s howitzers. The efforts of the Federal infantry were cleverly met and resisted, but the havoc of those splendid batteries was too severe, particularly Griffin’s, that had an oblique fire upon the Confederates. It was the fire of this battery that first disturbed our ranks on their left, and the increasing pounding of that and Ricketts’s eventually unsettled the line. At this juncture two brigades of Tyler’s division, with General W. T. Sherman and General Keyes, crossed the Run at a ford some distance above the bridge and approached the Confederate right, making more unsettled their position. At the same time the attacking artillery and infantry followed up their opportunity in admirable style, pushed the Confederates back, and pursued down to the valley of Young’s Branch.

Bee, Bartow, and Evans made valorous efforts, while withdrawing from their struggle on the Matthews plateau, to maintain the integrity of their lines, and with some success, when General Wade Hampton came with his brigade to their aid, checked the progress of pursuit, and helped to lift their broken ranks to the plateau at the Henry House. The fight assumed proportions which called for the care of both General Johnston and General Beauregard, who, with the movements of their right too late to relieve the pressure of the left, found it necessary to draw their forces to the point at which the battle had been forced by the enemy. At the same time the reserve brigades of their right were called to the left. General Thomas J. Jackson also moved to that quarter, and reached the rear crest of the plateau at the Henry House while yet Bee, Bartow, Evans, and Hampton were climbing to the forward crest. Quick to note a proper ground, Jackson deployed on the crest at the height, leaving the open of the plateau in front. He was in time to secure the Imboden battery before it got off the field, and put it into action. Stanard’s battery, Pendleton’s, and Pelham’s, and part of the Washington Artillery were up in time to aid Jackson in his new formation and relieve our discomfited troops rallying on his flank. As they rose on the forward crest, Bee saw, on the farther side, Jackson’s line, serene as if in repose, affording a haven so promising of cover that he gave the christening of “Stonewall” for the immortal Jackson.

“ There,” said he, “is Jackson, standing like a stone wall.”

Some controversy surrounds both Bee’s state of mind when he made that famous and historic declaration, and exactly he meant. Some believed he was extolling Jackson’s calm, and others would say he was actually cursing Jackson for holding still while Bee’s men were being hammered. In the former version, Bee finished his declaration by crying out, “Rally around the Virginians!”

The alternate version has Bee shouting, “There is Jackson, standing like a damned stone wall!”

Another anecdote holds that in those moments while he waited for the right instant to act, someone rushed to Jackson in panic and shouted, “General, the day is going against us,” to which Jackson was reported to have calmly but a bit crossly replied, “If you think so, Sir, you had better not say anything about it.”

Still, what is known is that Jackson held his men in check, waiting for what he judged that sublime moment, when all else seemed to have failed. Now, when someone else rushed up yelling, “General, they are beating us back!” he responded, “Sir, we’ll give them the bayonet.”

Summoning his men from their positions, Jackson accompanied them on the charge, urging them to “Yell like furies,” and it is said this was the birth of the rebel yell.

In this period of the battle, Johnston and Beauregard both moved into the area and arranged the defenders to align on Jackson’s men, then Johnston withdrew to a house nearby to continue coordinating the action, while Beauregard remained on the immediate scene.

Only now, according to Longstreet, did Johnston pull all the remaining forces still strung along Bull Run, and any who were arriving from various points in Virginia to move up to the center of the fighting, around Jackson. (By then, soon after making his declaration, Bee was killed.)

Fry describes this action leading up to the formation of forces around Jackson:

After Bee joined Evans, the preliminary battle continued to rage upon the ground chosen by the latter. The opposing forces were Burnside’s and Proper brigades, with one regiment of Heintzelman’s Federal side, and Evan’s, Bee’s , and Bartow’s brigades on the Confederate side. The Confederates were dislodged and driven back to the Henry house plateau, where Bee had previously formed line and where what Beauregard called "the mingled of Bee’s, Bartow’s, and Evans’s commands" were re-formed under cover of Stonewall Jackson’s brigade to Johnston’s army.

One more take on this section of the battle must come from none other than a man in the middle of it, Beauregard:

We arrived there just as Bee’s troops, after giving way, were fleeing in disorder behind the height in rear of the Stone Bridge. They had come around between the base of the hill and the Stone Bridge into a shallow ravine which ran up to a point on the crest where Jackson had already formed his brigade along the edge of the woods. We found the commanders resolutely stemming the further flight of the routed forces, but vainly endeavoring to restore order, and our own efforts were as futile. Every segment of line we succeeded in forming was again dissolved while another was being formed; more than two thousand men were shouting each some suggestion to his neighbor, their voices mingling with the noise of the shells hurtling through the trees overhead, and all word of command drowned in the confusion and uproar. It was at this moment that General Bee used the famous expression, "Look at Jackson’s brigade! It stands there like a stone wall" - a name that passed from the brigade to its immortal commander.

If Patterson had done his job, Johnston would not have arrived, thus there would be nothing to back up Evans’s brigade; they would have absorbed the brunt of McDowell’s main attack and should have been crushed, with the rest of Beauregard’s army forced to join in, all alone, against the two separate elements of the federal army, never mind the reserves who were back toward Centreville.

This could have been the way the Civil War came and went, one glorious charge by McDowell’s men, and disaster for the Confederacy. If Patterson had done his job, Johnston and his men would have arrived when the battle had come and gone, and would be left to either make a futile strike against the victorious federals or use discretion and preserve his army for another day.

Had that scenario carried out as designed, Patterson’s own army would have arrived shortly, either having followed Johnston’s through the Shenandoah Valley or by crossing through a pass such as the Vestal Gap and hopping a train of their own at Leesburg. By whatever route they arrived, Patterson’s men would have chimed in to produce an army large enough to sweep the field, including Johnston’s delayed army, wherever it ended up, then move directly on Richmond.

With no other major army anywhere to defend it, the Confederacy would be easily subdued as Lincoln had prescribed, with the victorious Union army advancing to take back the “places,” which would have signified the restoration of federal control over the rebellious South.

Patterson had not done his job, however, and Johnston’s Army of the Shenandoah was indeed there, not yet spotted in their position behind the next hill down, Henry House Hill, until Burnside had engaged Evans.

The battle swayed back and forth; at one point, Confederates wearing uniforms strikingly similar to Union outfits managed to insinuate themselves into a position to take over federal artillery and turn it on them.

McDowell summed up the turn of the tide succintly, referring to the reinforcements Beauregard and Johnston filtered in at the key moment:

They threw themselves in the woods on our right, and opened a fire of musketry on our men, which caused them to break and retire down the hill-side. This soon degenerated into disorder, for which there was no remedy.

This was the beginning of the end. Beauregard’s vision of this turn of events:

Although the enemy were held well at bay, their pressure became so strong that I resolved to take the offensive, and ordered a charge on my right for the purpose of recovering the plateau. The movement, made with alacrity and force by the commands of Bee, Bartow, Evans, and Hampton, thrilled the entire line, Jackson’s brigade piercing the enemy’s center, and the left of the line under Gartrell and Smith following up the charge, also, in that quarter, so that the whole of the open surface of the plateau was swept clear of the Federals.

It was Jackson’s “piercing the enemy’s center” that followed his declaration, “Sir, we’ll give them the bayonet.”

Clearly, no matter the untrained state of his men or his own experience in leading men in combat, were it not for Johnston’s Army of the Shenandoah, and most especially the Jackson Brigade, McDowell had come amazingly close to victory. Had only one or two elements of the battle gone his way, or had he poured in all his men instead of holding back so many, he almost certainly would have swept the Confederates from the field, despite even the presence of the Army of the Shenandoah. Instead, it was his army that was swept.

With his charge wrecked by Jackson’s Brigade, McDowell and his army never regrouped, and the federal assault began to fall apart.

Final Confederate reserves entered the fray, principally Kirby Smith and Jubal Early, the latter moving up from the southwest, and the battle turned into a rout. The Union officers who were supposed to have led or driven their men back into some semblance of order failed and the federal army fled the field.

If the situation were not bad enough, a congregation of government personnel and their families had driven by carriages and other conveyances all the way from Washington to Centreville to take in the first major battle as if it were a play or an athletic contest, picnicking, frolicking, and happily anticipating the spectacle of a federal grand victory.

Thus, when the rout developed, like their army, the spectators also turned to flee the scene and their presence clogged up bridges and roads, slowing the retreating soldiers, which might easily have led to utter defeat had the Confederates mustered a hot pursuit.

Concerning the “greenness” of the Union troops, conflicting stories developed. In one version, the men fought magnificently until the battle turned against them, after which they did not handle the adversity well, breaking in panic and beginning to flee back to Washington.

Contrarily, according to accounts of the men themselves, and others as well, their collapse was due to the failure of their officers, so much so that the men themselves claimed they had been betrayed and that their own leaders had been treasonous. As in most events, the truth was almost certainly a combination of the two. And whatever that truth might be, the bottom line was undeniable: when the Union collapse came in the Battle of Bull Run, it was total.

McDowell summed up the situation in his official report:

It is known that in estimating the force to go against Manassas I engaged not to have to do with the enemy’s forces under Johnston, then kept in check in the valley by Major General Patterson, or those kept engaged by Major-General Butler, and I knew every effort was made by the General-in-Chief that this should be done, and that even if Johnston joined Beauregard, it should be because he would be driven in and followed by General Patterson. But, from causes not necessary for me to refer to, even if I knew them all, this was not done, and the enemy was free to assemble from every direction in numbers only limited by the amount of his railroad rolling-stock and his supply of provisions. To the forces, therefore, we drove in from Fairfax Court-House, Fairfax Station, Germantown, and Centreville, and those under Beauregard at Manassas, must be added those under Johnston from Winchester, and those brought up by Davis from Richmond and other places at the South, to which is to be added the levy en masse ordered by the Richmond authorities, which was ordered to assemble at Manassas. What all this amounted to I cannot say; certainly much more than we attacked them with.

Much can be read into this, mostly of what McDowell had anticipated. Certainly it is clear he was bitter that Patterson had done nothing, thus allowing Johnston to arrive, without Patterson arriving as well. He found the army of Beauregard apparently larger than he had been led to believe, bolstered both by new volunteers and incoming Confederate forces from outside Virginia. The fact that he ultimately did not know the size of the army he was fighting is telling. This means at best that his intelligence failed him, and at worst that he attacked without adequate preparations for the force that opposed him.

No doubt part of his bitterness was attributable to being ordered to carry out a battle he did not believe should have been fought before his men were better trained.

In evaluating the battle, one can do worse than the assessment of Joseph Johnston:

“A large proportion of it [Beauregard’s army] was not engaged in the battle. This was a great fault on my part. When Bee’s and Jackson’s brigades were ordered to the vicinity of the Stone Bridge, those of Holmes and Early should have been moved to the left also, and placed in the interval on Bonham’s left—if not then, certainly at nine o’clock, when a Federal column was seen turning our left: and, when it seemed certain that General McDowell’s great effort was to be made there. Bonham’s, Longstreet’s, Jones’, and Ewell’s brigades, leaving a few regiments and their cavalry to impose on Miles’ division, should have been hurried to the left to join in the battle. If the tactics of the Federals had been equal to their strategy we should have been beaten. If, instead of being brought into action in detail, their troops had been formed in two lines with a proper reserve, and had assailed Bee and Jackson in that order, the two Southern brigades must have been swept from the field in a few minutes, or enveloped. General McDowell would have made such a formation, probably, had he not greatly underestimated the strength of his enemy.”

Obviously, in Johnston’s opinion, in part due to Johnston’s own admitted mismanagement of aspects of the battle, had McDowell thrown all he had into the attack coming over Matthews and onto Henry House hills, despite the inexperience of his men, these “green” men, too little trained, in their first battle, the Army of the Potomac could as well have won Bull Run as lost it, even after bringing so few men onto the field and facing Johnston’s additional forces.

In this light, it is so obvious that had Johnston’s men been kept off the field by Patterson, or had Patterson carried on to join McDowell at Manassas, or had McDowell thrown in even part of his reserves that never saw battle, it seems more than clear that he would likely have defeated Beauregard at Bull Run.

When the last shots had been fired, and the Union army had slunk back with its figurative tail between its legs into the security of its Washington defenses, what could not be denied any longer was that the Civil War had begun, more than three months after the firing on the flag at Fort Sumter. That being so, it must be insisted that until that day, when the first battle was fought, the war had not yet come into existence.

Bull Run was reckoned a terrible, massive battle, but when numbers of men engaged, and numbers of casualties are considered, it was actually little more than a skirmish, especially compared to battles to come. And what Bull Run did not do was to prepare the nation for the duration and the true horror of the war that had just begun.

Chapter Three

Bull Run/Manassas was a pivotal point in the Civil War, at the very outset of the conflict. One of the interesting facts is that for such a heralded and “major” battle, the casualty count was almost shockingly low. That is a positive thing, of course, but it demonstrates the inexperience of the fighters on both sides, to know that so many shots were fired in back and forth exchange, so much artillery employed, yet so few shots found targets, when compared to future battles of the war.

Still, it cannot be argued away that had the Union won this war, all those other casualties of future battles could have been prevented.

For the record, the casualty counts for Bull Run, while not perfectly known due to the fact that many of the “missing” had slipped away from the field and survived, are assessed as follows by the various sources of the time.

The U.S. Park Service, which administers preserved Civil War battlefields and serves as an archival body, lists casualties as about 2,900 for the Union side and 1,759 for the South. Those numbers reflect both killed and wounded for both sides.

Fry wrote,

The revised losses are as follows: Federal, 16 officers and 444 enlisted men killed; 78 officers and 1046 enlisted men wounded; 50 officers and 1262 enlisted men missing. Confederate, 25 officers and 362 enlisted men killed; 63 officers and 1519 enlisted wounded; 1 officer and 12 enlisted men missing.

That works out to 2896 Union, which tallies with the “about 2900,” and 1982, obviously a couple hundred higher than the Park Service lists for the Confederates. The ballpark numbers are sufficient to make the point, that out of around 60,000 engaged in all the action of the battle, around 4900 or so casualties, with barely over 800 killed, Bull Run was a very mild battle, again when compared with what was to come, yet given what might have been, that is, that Bull Run might have been the only major battle of the war, Patterson’s failure to prevent Johnston from joining Beauregard is both a tragedy for each side in the long run, and a lost chance to end the war practically before it began.

While concentration in this narrative has focused upon the possibilities had the Union won the battle, a controversy swirled around the way the battle ended, from the Southern side, in that had the Confederate army followed up on the victory, many believed they could have pursued the retreating federals right into Washington, seized the city, and likewise ended the war, but to the benefit of the Southern cause.

Considerable anger rose in the South over this failure. The analysis of the battle, which was undertaken in considerable detail above, would not be complete without considering the issue of this failure, as the Southern people perceived it, versus the chances of its success, and the reasons the leaders of the Confederacy who were involved did not cause the army to seriously attempt to take Washington at the time.

This controversy existed even between Confederate generals.

It should be considered that after winning the battle, the Confederate army was not in the greatest of condition itself, having come so close to failure rather than success. This would not be the last time a victorious army ended the battle too exhausted to put in a pursuit that would have resulted in an even grander victory.

Joseph Johnston summed up the argument in clear enough terms to serve as the final word on this subject:

“The apparent firmness of the U.S. troops at Centreville, who had not been engaged, which checked our pursuit; the strong forces occupying the works near Georgetown, Arlington, and Alexandria; the certainty, too, that General Patterson, if needed, would reach Washington with his army of thirty thousand men sooner than we could, and the condition and inadequate means of the Army in ammunition, provisions, and transportation prevented any serious thoughts of advancing against the capital. It is certain that the fresh troops within the works were in number quite sufficient for their defense. If not, General Patterson’s army would certainly re-enforce them soon enough.”

The only quibble to be made about this report is his tremendous over-estimate of Patterson’s strength, but the point is still the same. It must be borne in mind that the actual facts are not what is important here, it is what Johnston, firmly in command of the entire army in the wake of the battle, perceived about the situation. If he feared Patterson, whether Patterson were on his way or not, and considered the reserves McDowell had left behind at Centreville and farther east for exactly the purpose of preventing a Confederate advance in that direction to be formidable to go up against, then no other factors matter. He had what he considered sufficient reasons not to proceed and that ends the discussion.

In the wake of the battle, the next subject that needs to be taken up is the response in the North as a whole and Washington in particular to the loss at Bull Run.

In short, the North was shocked and depressed by the Union loss at Bull Run, but the focus on the battle itself was displaced. The worst outcome was not the loss of one battle, and a “small” one at that, especially when Bull Run was compared to later battles in terms of casualties. The greatest tragedy of Bull Run was its failure to serve as the only battle of the war.

Had the people of the North given proper consideration to Bull Run, what they would have realized was that the Confederacy had survived a close call. So easily could the victory have gone the other way that the South had no reason to celebrate.

The oddest reaction in the North was the concern that because the very inexperienced, barely untrained Union army had lost to an equally inexperienced Confederate army, the Confederacy must be more powerful than the Union overall, and that no hope existed for the North to win the war that had barely begun.

That was an absurd notion. What the Northerners were ignoring, or failing to recognize, was that this army was doomed anyway. It was part of the three month call-up of 75,000 and would disappear when that time was up. Only those men who desired to re-enlist would remain, while an entirely new army that Lincoln had called for afterward would replace it. Even if McDowell’s army, with or without Patterson’s and McClellan’s added, had won Bull Run and subsequently moved on to Richmond, it would have to be replaced when the enlistment terms ran out. McDowell’s army by no means could be taken as an indication of the future of the Union’s military might, compared to the South’s.

The next battles would be fought by the army Lincoln had called up on May 3, still gathering and training, and five hundred thousand more that Congress authorized on July 22 in response both to Bull Run and Lincoln’s July 4 call for four hundred thousand. Therefore, for the public to fall into the mindset that as a result of losing one battle with barely trained men who were on a short enlistment, the Union was doomed, made no sense, but in the despair of suffering its first loss, the public could be somewhat excused.

In truth, both sides, North and South ought to have reflected on certain realities exposed by Bull Run. For the South, the belief that Northerners lacked the courage to fight was destroyed. For both sides, the notion that Americans would not fight other Americans was likewise blown to pieces. And the myth that one Southern man was worth this or that number of Yankees in battle was likewise now left behind on the trash-heap of lost Southern dreams.

And added to all this was the fact that those Yankees who had fought and fought well for a considerable part of the battle were McDowell’s “green,” untrained, inexperienced troops. The South should have suffered nightmares to imagine what well trained and experienced Northern soldiers might do. Then again, the North must face the same concern about Southerners.

Bull Run/First Manassas serves as an example of battles which ended because one army left the field, ceding it to the army that remained. Another way of describing the ending of it was that the majority of men on one side unilaterally determined they had done all they could, had had all they wanted of the battle and unceremoniously quit the field. No one lifted a white flag, at least no one representing leadership, and asked for truce or offered surrender. Nothing formal occurred to mark the end of the battle, and it finally ended when men on each side no longer were within range of each other and thus had nothing and no one at which to keep shooting.

Therefore, this was not a battle in which one side so heavily defeated and dominated the other that the only choices were between total annihilation, total surrender, or retreat. The men on the federal side thought that had their officers been well enough trained to reorganize the troops back into skirmish lines instead of allowing them to fall into total disorganization, they could have fought on, and might still have won the battle, but seeing the futility under the circumstances, they were not ready to die for the mistakes of leaders. Absent that reorganization and leadership, the men threw up their hands, not in surrender, but in frustration, and left the field while they could. The result, of course, appeared as a generalized panic.

Why McDowell never brought forward the reserves from behind Centreville, and what that would have done to the morale of the men who reached their limits around Henry House Hill and other places west of Bull Run is not clear, but the federal army was certainly not defeated by the main force of the Confederate army. Perhaps the Union retreat could be summed by “discretion being the better part of valor,” in that particular time, place, and circumstance.

Under a few future Union commanders, given all the same circumstances of Bull Run, the Union would not have lost. Perhaps if this had been McDowell’s second or third battle as commander, a different outcome would have occurred. All the generals in the war were just beginning to learn what war in this era was like and how to run a battle. Johnston fully acknowledged his own mistakes and it was clear that Beauregard had not performed in a sterling manner either.

Present on both sides at Bull Run were future commanders who would have fought this battle in a different way and probably would have won, or won more decisively than those actually in charge on the field.

Another perspective might be gained in considering the Battle of Bull Run in a different way. Robert E. Lee had laid out a defensive line to prevent the invasion of Virginia soil by the federal government, and once McDowell’s army retreated back across the Potomac, not one inch of “seceded” territory had been reclaimed by the federal government and in that respect, Lee’s line had held. Again and again, the federal army would retreat over the coming war, although slowly, they would push forward until Lee’s secondary line, at the Rappahannock River, would be invoked, but that in turn would hold for much longer.

While the presence of Patterson’s and McClellan’s armies on Virginia soil, as feeble as their impact had become, would not last beyond the expiration of the ninety day enlistments, replacement armies would sweep down into the Shenandoah Valley from time to time, so Lee’s line in that area must be described as flexible.

At the same time, his own armies would rage up and down the Shenandoah Valley many times over the coming war.

Indeed, because until the last months of the war, no Union army used the Shenandoah as a route to threaten Richmond, it could be said the line in that area was effective enough, in that it kept “invaders” out of the heart of the state for most of the war.

Oddly, the Northern public seemed to have viewed the Army of the Potomac, those 40,000 men, of whom less than half actually entered the battle, as the only army the North would ever have. With that army defeated, who would take back the seceded states? Who would bring federal authority back to the South? They seemed to have missed the fact that Bull Run had nearly been won by men who were hardly trained; the three year men would have plenty of time to be as prepared as their commanders desired before they next faced the Confederates but the North managed to ignore this truth.

All in all, the gloom in the North was so deep that many in that section despaired of the Union armies ever being able to beat the South, a ridiculous projection of the results of the first battle that was so little more than a pre-season skirmish. The population as a whole refused to consider the details of Bull Run, and fell into a fit of anxiety that had no basis in reality. For some time, however, nothing positive would give cause to improve their depressing and depressed attitude.

Chapter Four

Even up to the Battle of Bull Run, Lincoln’s plan for putting an end to the Confederacy’s bid for independence was vague. Winfield Scott had proposed his own plan, which was primarily a containment rather than an invasion policy, including a naval blockade and takeover of the Mississippi River. Part of this plan was based on Scott’s theory that Unionists locked up inside the Confederacy would create an insurgency that would have great effect, a sixth column which would force the South to fight within itself.

General Scott’s idea to strangle the Confederacy was ridiculed on both sides of the nation as the “anaconda plan,” and some questioned just how seriously, given that he was a Virginian, he desired to actually defeat the South.

In contrast to Scott’s proposed low-impact war, the Republicans were clamoring for Lincoln to crush the rebels.

According to Hay and Nicolay, even while following the news of the failure of McDowell’s army at Bull Run, Lincoln prepared the first serious plan for concerted action against the South, which would follow the impetuous rush to battle that brought about Bull Run:

President Lincoln received the news quietly and without any visible sign of perturbation or excitement; but he remained awake and in the executive office all of Sunday night, listening to the personal narratives of a number of congressmen and senators who had, with undue curiosity, followed the army and witnessed some of the sounds and sights of the battle. By the dawn of Monday morning the President had substantially made up his judgment of the battle and its probable results, and the action dictated by the untoward event.

(A Short Life of Abraham Lincoln, Condensed from Nicolay and Hay’s Abraham Lincoln: A History by John George Nicolay, 1902, [The Century Company], Chapter XVI)

The specifics of Lincoln’s strategy:

Let the plan for making the blockade effective be pushed forward with all despatch.

Let the volunteer forces at Fort Monroe and vicinity under General Butler be constantly drilled, disciplined, and instructed without more for the present.

Let Baltimore be held as now, with a gentle but firm and certain hand.

Let the force now under Patterson or Banks be strengthened and made secure in its position.

Let the forces in Western Virginia act till further orders according to instructions or orders from General McClellan.

Let General Frémont push forward his organization and operations in the West as rapidly as possible, giving rather special attention to Missouri.

Let the forces late before Manassas, except the three-months men, be reorganized as rapidly as possible in their camps here and about Arlington.

Let the three months forces who decline to enter the longer service be discharged as rapidly as circumstances will permit.

Let the new volunteer forces be brought forward as fast as possible, and especially into the camps on the two sides of the river here.

When the foregoing shall be substantially attended to:

Let Manassas Junction (or some point on one or the other of the railroads near it) and Strasburg be seized, and permanently held, with an open line from Washington to

Manassas, and an open line from Harper’s Ferry to Strasburg—the military men to find the way of doing these.

This done, a joint movement from Cairo to Memphis, and from Cincinnati on East Tennessee.

Despite these plans, following the retreat of the federal army inside the defenses of Washington, no massed forces, North or South, existed in positions which would have made a battle of any kind possible, for months. As a result, the war would enter into a period of lull, with the Confederate army that had been victorious at Manassas remaining at that position, and the two Union armies that had operated in the Shenandoah Valley— Patterson’s and McClellan’s—stalling out and doing nothing to follow up on Bull Run, as their enlistments ran out.

As for McDowell’s time-expiring army, it would not be sent forth again, in its existing form. Certainly, a good many of the three month men would fill in as part of the three year quota, eagerly re-enlisting, and with their one-battle experience, forming a good core to the new army being brought in, but the army that fought at Bull Run ceased to exist.

Based on his background, and most importantly, upon the fact that he had won small victories in the upper reaches of Western Virginia, George B. McClellan loomed as the superstar of generals in Lincoln’s eyes.

On July 26, Lincoln promoted McClellan to command of the Department of the Potomac, which put him in charge of the armies in the region of Washington. With McClellan in command of the army that existed at Washington, McDowell would be subordinate to him.

Trusting McClellan to any further responsibility would be Lincoln’s worst decision in the entire war, and much more will emerge in that regard in these pages.

Another bad decision had been made, implicit in Lincoln’s statement of operations listed above, by which John C. Frémont had been placed in charge of the small armies so far gathering in the western section of the war zone, at St. Louis. Missouri was a problem because federal and secessionist forces were struggling for control of the state, and more will be told about that later as well.

Attention will be paid in the proper time to the other provisions of Lincoln’s order, as well as the manner in which they were conducted, but in simple form, the point was clear, that with the first battle fought, Lincoln wanted the federal army to move forward and take ground and control it in upper Virginia, and to some extent in the west, before any greater penetration into the heart of the South would be made, never mind his original goal in “holding” the “places” seized by the Confederate rebellion.

It had been made obvious to Lincoln that carrying out his simply stated goals would not be simple, clean, or short and that the war was not going to be held to a limited basis.

Having seen that the war would not be won in a hurry, he was now calling for a less ambitious approach, but a more practical one than the vague initial notion of “on to Richmond.”

Despite his desires to move with alacrity, the lull that had already fallen over the war in Virginia would continue for months. It is sensible at this juncture to move across the line and consider the strategy of the South up to and following Bull Run, before taking up further activities in the developing war.

Chapter Five

The Confederate war strategy had much to do with the way the war was fought versus how it might have been, and should have been fought by both sides.

Jefferson Davis has been described herein as having taken on the role of both president and general-in-chief over all the Confederate militaries, at least for the duration of the war. In that capacity, although he would accept advice from subordinates, the final word on strategy and on planning would be his.

Turning back to March 6, before any clear military emergency existed for the Confederacy, and by all means before any direct threat had been presented beyond Lincoln’s promise to bring law and order back into all corners of the nation, Davis had already called for 100,000 volunteers to fill out the Confederate army, and those who answered were enlisted for a year.

On April 16, in response to President Lincoln’s call for 75,000 men, Davis instituted conscription in the Confederacy. The draftees would serve a term of three years, and to make that universal, the terms of those initial 100,000 volunteers were likewise raised to three years.

Interestingly, commentators around the world would on one hand would suggest that the United States had little chance of defeating an enemy of such size as the Confederacy, while others would see the mission of that same Confederacy to win its independence as a daunting, perhaps impossible one.

On the surface, the argument that no population as great as that of the Confederacy had ever failed to win its independence seemed powerful. Countering this argument was one that suggested that the idea of defeating a nation of the size and possessing the resources of the United States seemed hopeless. Clearly, one of these arguments would prevail: eventually, either the Confederacy would become an independent nation or it would be forced to submit to the Union.

It was difficult to deny that in all major ways, the United States held a great edge. In theory, it could summon tens of thousands more men into battle over the course of a long war, up to perhaps twice the number available to the South. The North could out-produce the South in every way, but especially in arms. It could feed its civilian population comfortably, while at the same time feeding its army; it could sustain its economy, albeit with some sacrifice, while the South would have to call out every resource, every effort of all its people just to survive while fighting a war.

Despite those differences, one major mark against the likelihood of ultimate victory by the federal side must be taken into account.

The eleven Confederate states covered 750,000 square miles, as large as France, Spain, Germany, Italy, and England combined. Even with armies in the hundreds of thousands, a Napoleon had been unable to defeat a territory so large and keep it defeated.

This was pointed out by a military analyst who wrote for the London Times:

It is one thing to drive the rebels from the south bank of the Potomac, or even to occupy Richmond, but another to reduce and hold in permanent subjugation a tract of country nearly as large as Russia in Europe...No war of independence ever terminated unsuccessfully except where the disparity of force was far greater than it is in this case...Just as England during the revolution had to give up conquering the colonies so the North will have to give up conquering the South.

(London Times, July 18, 1861; August 29, 1862.)

This was not quite an accurate assessment, given England’s problems during the revolution, but it made a good point about the situation the Union faced. To somewhat counter the argument, it can be said that the United States army did not have to occupy the South, in the process of winning the war and taking the South back under its control. It only had to defeat the Confederate armies, wherever they took up position, and only if doing so led the Union army over the entire space of the South would the Union have to occupy the South. The reason for this is relates to the actual mission of the United States in the war.

Furthermore, against Napoleon, the nations comprising the territory he failed to conquer had been able to respond with hundreds of thousands of fighters, and although the Confederacy could approach those numbers, the Union, if it was able to fully tap its base for soldiers, could well exceed the amount of soldiers ultimately available to the South, which turned the edge, even given the amount of terrain to be retaken, back to the federal side.

Perhaps the deciding factor would be the possibility that the North might not be able to pour its soul into the war effort. Entire segments of Northern society might not care enough about whether seven or even eleven states broke away, to send the cream of their younger generation to die for the issue. Plenty of Northerners had no interest in freeing slaves one way or another, and many others were in fact disinterested in having freed slaves coming north looking to take jobs, and others still were openly supportive of slavery in principle.

Those elements opposed to abolition were certainly not in favor of fighting for the liberation of black people, and although that was by no means the stated reason for the war, propagandists made the case that it was.

In fact, an entire political party, the Democrats, vaguely supported the cause of the South and openly opposed the war, nor did they have any love of abolition. If the Northern people should elect a majority from that party to Congress, they would likely force Lincoln to grant Confederate independence.

Lincoln had alluded to that possibility in his inaugural address when he said, “Doing this I deem to be only a simple duty on my part; and I shall perform it, so far as practicable, unless my rightful masters, the American people, shall withhold the requisite means, or in some authoritative manner, direct the contrary.” A Congress made up of a majority of Democrats would most likely “withhold the requisite means” and their election would be the people’s way of directing “the contrary.”

The next opportunity for such an outcome would be the 1862 Congressional elections, and the Southern people, the generals, and especially Davis were well aware of this.

Countering the possible disinclination of the Northern people to support the war to a military end, the Southern people in general, that is, in the great majority, fighting for an ideal, would support the war for as long as was necessary to win independence.

In strategy, going up against the power of the North, Davis envisioned a war to be fought on the model of George Washington’s campaign in the Revolutionary War. Washington had less won the war than he managed not to lose it, until the point was reached when the people back in England no longer supported the war, and at the same time, France entered the fray on the side of the colonies, which both directly benefited the colonies and diverted England’s military power away.

It was reasonable to suggest that England had let the war against the colonies fritter away because it could no longer see the positives in fighting a two-front war.

Davis believed a parallel might occur in the Civil War if Europe could be convinced to threaten Lincoln with a second front or to directly enter the war with the Confederacy.

Even if the Europeans did not step in, Davis saw two opportunities for the American people to force Lincoln to submit. The first was intimated above, the election of 1862, the one in which the Democrats might prevail if the Northern public was ready to stop the war. The second would be Lincoln’s bid for re-election in 1864. If Lincoln were voted out, almost certainly he would be replaced by a Democrat, who would be very apt to willingly give up the war, to the Confederacy’s advantage.

This was a key point in Davis’s war strategy: he would gear his plans toward the goal of avoiding defeat until 1864, if necessary. Of course, if along the way a victory could be achieved, that is, the Union forces were defeated so often and so heavily that they could not sustain a continued offensive, all the better. If along the way, the European powers brokered a peace, good enough. All in all, however, Davis’s strategy must be to keep the Confederacy viable and able to continue hurting the Union on the battle field so dearly that the voters in 1864 would sour on the war and throw Lincoln out.

A key to this, more than just not losing the war, revolved around maintaining enough soldiers to field an army until 1864 in the worst case. This meant that the war must be fought as conservatively, in terms of casualties, as absolutely possible and still keep the Union army at bay.

This point is so important that it must be heavily emphasized and will be at every significant crisis point.

This point demands that the main goal of the Confederate army ought to have been less the defeating of Union forces and more of what Lee set out to do in upper Virginia: keeping the Union army as much outside of Confederate territory as possible until 1864.

If the Confederate army were to hew to this principle, Southern generals must never be more aggressive in battle than absolutely necessary, not take the fight to the Union except when quick, easy, and most of all, meaningful victories were possible, while concentrating above all upon the goal of keeping Union soldiers off of Confederate turf.

Such a strategy was called at times a “cordon” defense because it essentially dictated the creation of defensive lines around the entirety of the Confederacy, and in so doing, limiting the fighting to that narrow perimeter at the edges of that border. In this, Lee’s work in upper Virginia served as a near-perfect model.

While it is true that the Confederate leaders and people liked to compare their war and their situation to that of the colonies in the Revolutionary War, tactically, that was not an accurate comparison. No such thing as cordon defense had existed in the Revolutionary war. The entire war was fought on the home soil of the defending side rather than at its borders, which makes sense because in many cases, those borders were created by the Atlantic Ocean.

In the Revolutionary War, often, huge swaths of ground were surrendered, with the hope of defeating an enemy force somewhere, anywhere, at any time, for the purpose of stalling the enemy’s ultimate victory as long as possible. By military terminology, Washington had surrendered “space,” meaning territory, for “time.” He had allowed the British to possess and occupy much of the nation, not that he had a choice, and had taken it all back not by direct conquest but by adjustments with the defeated enemy when the war was over.

Davis was not permitted this luxury, if luxury it was. By the very nature of the Confederacy, a loose amalgam of states, each very conscious of its own sovereignty—the very essence of the States Rights form of government—those states were not willing to sacrifice one square inch of their space for time. Davis was expected to seal the federal armies out of all the territory of the Confederacy, all the time. That was the essence of the cordon defense. This demand was a prescription for failure from the beginning, because it left Davis little in the way of margin.

The better strategy, which more closely matched what Washington had somewhat succeeded in doing, would have been to entice federal armies into the interior of the South, entrap them, surround them, and beat them one by one. This strategy would in fact be carried out to an admirable degree in Virginia, aided greatly by the ineptitude or other characteristics of the majority of the Union field commanders who opposed them over most of the war.

When tried, or forced upon Confederate generals in the heart of the South, that is, the states other than Virginia, however, the strategy was a miserable failure because the federal armies there refused to cooperate by being beaten one by one.

Adding to the difficulties for Davis in the beginning, trying to build a defensive, never mind offensive plan, is the interesting fact that he could not know just what the borders he must defend would be until late May, when the last four states had joined the Confederacy.

Defensively, even given the line that Lee had devised and a similar if less effective one that would develop in the western stretches of the war, the best defensive situation for the South had not been created by man. Just as Lee had been greatly aided by the flow of the Potomac River to his favor in upper Virginia, Davis was favored by the long line of mountains which overall stretched from southern Pennsylvania into Alabama and western Georgia, known as the Appalachians or the Alleghenies according to regions, mountains impenetrable by armies over most of their length. That entire range could essentially be ignored by both sides because it did not have to be defended by armies. After all, if enemy armies could not cross to penetrate into Virginia, and Confederate armies could not cross to reinforce their brothers in the West, the entire stretch could be treated as an unbeatable defensive work. This was true because no series of passes existed that would allow armies through from the area around Grafton, Western Virginia, all the way down to the famed Cumberland Pass.

Had no such line of mountains existed, the war would likely have been far shorter, because the differential in manpower between North and South would have made it virtually impossible for the Confederacy to hold Union armies out of Virginia from western approaches.

Despite the fact that he was burdened with the need to create a cordon defense, in actual fact, Jefferson Davis did not do much to bring it about. Given that he simply inherited the defensive line Lee had created along the Potomac, before he had any authority in Virginia, Davis had not contributed to its existence in any way. Similarly, he hardly supported the effort of his commander west of the mountains in building a defensive line to cordon off that section of the Confederacy.

That stretch of terrain, which corresponded with the northern border of Tennessee from the mountains to the Mississippi River, was beyond doubt the Achilles Heel of the Confederacy. Not unlike the Union leadership, but in fact even more flagrantly, Davis would largely ignore the West through most of the war, paying attention to it when it was too late to save the effort there. From the outset, once he chose a general to defend the expanse that stretched from the mountains to the Mississippi River, Davis left that man mostly on his own to safeguard the long border, by failing to send him troops from the Confederate army to use against federal forces that might gather in place to penetrate the border. As a result, most of the Confederacy in the West, over most of the war, would be defended or not depending upon how militias were able to fill their ranks from local secessionist supporters.

(Texas and New Mexico were special cases because they were so remote that it would be a long time before the Union could extend any attention to penetrating into that region. )

The other natural barrier that helped the Confederacy at first was the Mississippi River itself. Much of Winfield Scott’s anaconda plan revolved around trying to move armies down that river, and to stop them, Davis only needed a few key positions where artillery, more then men, would prevent Union advance.

All in all, as both president and general in chief, Davis would in actuality leave most of the Confederate armies to survive on their own. Where he did involve himself, it was mostly in Virginia; otherwise, he mainly assisted by shifting forces from one place to another, and not usually on his own initiative but in response to demands by his generals or his cabinet.

Another problem for Davis and the Confederate leadership was an intangible one. The Southern people expected him to both defend the Confederacy, and stay on the offensive. It wasn’t in their psychology to play a waiting game. They believed their men could outright defeat the Union, no matter how unreal that notion might be, and Davis would live under the pressure to fulfill that expectation.

When all those factors are considered, the war plan that Davis was forced to adopt was a hybrid, what he would call “offensive-defensive” in nature. It appears that no specific elucidation of this plan was made, it was developed and carried out in the stages in which it was needed, from point in time to point in time. In effect, however, it was a plan to move men around in a way similarly to Lee’s notion along the upper defensive line in Virginia, employing interior lines, from invasion point to invasion point, and when opportunities existed, to attack in an offensive way.

If this was a workable idea in theory, the problem emerged when the commanders who were expected to carry it out far too often overreached in the area of offensive operations, Robert E. Lee being the chief among them. Far too often, he threw away men in hopes of a local or relatively minor victory, or in fact for a victory of any kind when merely forcing the Union out of Virginia would have sufficed. It will be a contention of this work that any offensive and aggressive operations by the Confederacy against the Union was a mistake for the reason that every man lost unnecessarily would lessen the chances the Confederacy could hold out against the North. In virtually every step of the way, the South would have been wiser to block the advance of the Northern armies as much as possible, using every defensive position available to them rather than ever fighting in a head-to-head way. It will be demonstrated, by what happened in 1864 in Virginia, that had they managed to maintain their manpower, the Confederates could have held out much longer and might well have worn down the will of the Northern people to carry on the war if they had fought strictly on the defensive. Then again, the question of whether the Southern people would have stood by a leadership that fought that way must be questioned, and Davis could well have been ousted for someone who would go on the offensive.

That was great dilemma for Jefferson Davis: defend the entire space of the Confederacy without losing too many men, satisfy the blood lust of his constituency, while finding a way to eventually force the Union to give up on the war.

Chapter Six

Based on the strategy Davis should have adopted, the fact that after Bull Run, the federal side would not field an army in Virginia for months ought to have been taken as a gift handed to him by the Union. Although the Confederates saw their army as stymied at Manassas, with no one to fight, instead, they should have reveled in the fact that every minute that ticked by with their army intact, not losing men, and holding the entire border of the Confederacy as they continued to do, was a minute closer to the magic dates, the elections of 1862 and 1864. That time of lull should have been regarded as absolutely golden for the Confederate cause.

Certainly, if they were not moving forward and backwards, the Confederate army at Manassas was not static. New men were arriving, training was ongoing, and the outfit was bracing for the time when beyond doubt, Lincoln would send his forces back out to hit them head-on again. He would, wouldn’t he?

Ah, that was to be the rub.

As implied previously, Robert E. Lee’s defensive line had held completely. After Bull Run, excepting those men at Fortress Monroe who had already been present in the state, all Union forces were again outside the borders of Virginia, and that meant Virginia and the Confederacy had not lost one foot of land to the enemy and the Union was not one foot closer to taking back the places or carrying out any of Lincoln’s other mandates.

For the time being, the army under Joseph Johnston, (who was now fully in charge over Beauregard,) was the largest army in the nation and in the field. With this status quo established for some time, it is worthwhile to consider the long range strategy of the Union in the war.

Unlike Jefferson Davis, Lincoln never aspired to serving as a military strategist himself. In the beginning of the war, with Lincoln’s own military background restricted to the duty of an elected officer in a frontier Indian war, and having inherited the experience of one of the great generals of American history up to that time in Winfield Scott, the president saw no reason to try and force his will on the military.

That did not keep Mr. Lincoln from obtaining what military knowledge he could on the run, so to speak, and he was not shy about at least expressing his thoughts and ideas, without demanding that his wishes be carried out.

That would prove to actually be unfortunate: had Lincoln pressed his own military imperatives upon commanders, the war would likely have been shorter and far less tragic, for he would prove to do more poorly at choosing field commanders than he would at forming military plans and strategies of his own.

As he had on the issue of Fort Sumter, Lincoln willingly listened to the advice of those in his cabinet, whether he made use of it or not.

The man who presented the first coherent master plan for executing the war was Scott himself, in the form of the un-beloved Anaconda Plan, but the war plan which was actually adopted was primarily developed from Lincoln’s adjustments to Scott’s plan, adjustments that were in many cases extensive and far-reaching.

Winfield Scott did not see the good of planning for a major war, believing that was the incorrect route to subduing the South. As described previously, he believed the Confederacy should be choked off, its ports blocked, its borders closed by a cordon in reverse, and as a result, in time, the people would cave in from starvation and deprivation of needed goods, since the South manufactured little of its own supplies outside of food. If they could not trade cotton with Europe, or the North, they could not survive as a nation.

Scott placed tremendous emphasis upon regaining control of the Mississippi River. Of course the Confederates only controlled that part of the river which passed through their territory, but just as holding Manassas Junction “broke” the railroads passing through, so did holding any section of the Mississippi break the river as far as the North was concerned.

The key advantage of the Mississippi to the Union was its route as an access for those parts of the nation that could not easily move goods to or from the Atlantic coast. The Ohio River flowed into the Mississippi at the pointed end of Illinois, so the entire Ohio River Valley was cut off from the Gulf of Mexico when the Confederacy put a stop to shipping by way of New Orleans.

On the other hand, while it was suggested above that the Mississippi River was a defensive line in a way similar to the Appalachian Mountains to the east, it was more nearly a two-way sword. If the Union could regain control of the Mississippi, the river itself, unlike the mountains, could become a powerful route by which federal soldiers could penetrate into the South.

This, Scott knew, and so he emphasized retaking the river. His plan, however, revolved around massive movement of troops south, down the river from St. Louis through the intervening states, to reach all the way to New Orleans. This avenue would not be opened until the middle of 1863, whereas New Orleans would be taken from the opposite direction, by way of the Gulf of Mexico and up the river, much sooner.

Jefferson Davis failed dismally in making sure the seaward capture of New Orleans was prevented.

Another benefit of the Union retaking the Mississippi River would be that of cutting off the westernmost provinces of the Confederacy. No bridge crossed the wide river over the entire stretch of the Confederate holdings. Even at Vicksburg, a key rail nexus, train lines stopped at the river in both directions, their cargoes and passengers ferried across the Mississippi on barges. If the river fell into Union hands, those rail lines were also broken at Vicksburg.

As a result, once the Union controlled the river, the so-called “Trans-Mississippi” section of the Confederacy would be left entirely on its own, and the Union need not waste much effort trying to subdue it until late in the war, as a cleanup operation.

By Scott’s plan, once the Mississippi, and with it, New Orleans were taken, he believed that elsewhere, smaller army detachments would close the land borders of the Confederacy, and the Navy could stop up the other ports. In the meantime, the Unionists locked up inside the Confederacy would create an insurgency that would have great effect, forcing the South to fight within its own borders.

That was the plan, and what it presented in size, it lacked in specifics. Few details of exactly where to apply men, including the gigantic army designed to seize the Mississippi and New Orleans, were included in the plan.

Those in the North who wanted more direct, vigorous action were hardly pleased with the strategy.

Out of the elements of Scott’s Plan, Lincoln most favored the naval blockade, as has been seen.

Otherwise, although part of Scott’s plan involved closing off the borders of the Confederacy by land as well as sea, little could or would be done in the early months to make that happen in the West.

Unlike Virginia, which toppled over in May to the secessionist side of the ledger, Kentucky had managed to remain neutral. Although Tennessee had ultimately declared for secession, Kentucky remained a vast no man’s land through which armies were reluctant to march and thus to clash with each other for some time, although certain arrangements were made for each side to possess home-grown militias, all of which will be detailed in pages to come. Because of Kentucky’s neutrality, no dire threat existed either for the Union or Confederacy in that section of the west although both sides would perceive one from the other.

When Lincoln did push action in the West, it was not out of worry over the Union territory, it was due to concerns for Union citizens caught inside Confederate borders, primarily in Tennessee.

Unlike Kentucky, contention for the official loyalty of Missouri led to fighting between militias and federal soldiers. At first, the combat there had nothing to do with penetration of the Confederacy by federal forces, although the operations that were part of the struggle within the state would develop into forward action in the future.

Although not as a result of deliberate planning, by Scott or anyone else, the developments in Missouri and in nearby spaces would by default serve well in his containment plan, and beyond that, would evolve into the plan to push Union forces down the Mississippi, although never as far as New Orleans from the north.

Little more can be said about the federal war strategy because little more existed. What has been said previously in describing the reason Lincoln created an army in the first place also serves to describe his intentions in using it, and that was as much of a war plan as he saw the need to develop up to Bull Run. What has been described as his plan afterward was as much as he developed overall for months. Primarily, as has been seen, that plan was to advance where federal armies could gain headway and fight what Confederate forces they encountered, and where they were victorious, move into new spaces within the Confederacy. In truth, however, that that plan served well, where it was implemented by effective generals, to whittle away the territory that the Confederacy claimed as its own, in the West.

Although Lincoln’s plan, enunciated after Bull Run, involved both the Eastern and Western theaters, it did not lead to effective coordination the operations between the two sections. One attempt would be made in coming months to bring about such a thing but for the wrong reasons and it would never be implemented. That attempt would not be triggered by the White House but by the incoming general-in-chief, McClellan.

Ironically, strategic war planning was not what won the war. And where strategic planning was attempted in Virginia, it generally was flawed and actually held up the efforts in the field. Had the generals at department level in the West been allowed to go forward as they saw fit, they would have swept through the Gulf Coast and Mississippi Valley states of the Confederacy far more rapidly than did occur, because they saw where the enemy was weak and what objectives should have been taken in what order better than their superiors.

That seems counterintuitive, that the commanders “on the ground” in a region had a better grasp of the strategic picture than those back in the national capital, who were in the position to think in terms of the big picture, but it was true. Most likely this was due to the preoccupation of Lincoln, Scott, and his successors with the war that was being fought out their window, so to speak, in Virginia.

The war was won for the most part because the generals at the department level overcame the failures of their superiors in strategic planning. All this will be seen in detail as the story of the war is carried forward in these pages.

Had the president chosen wisely in the generals who led the effort in Virginia, it is demonstrable that the federal armies in that theater would also have swept forward in numbers too great for the Confederates to withstand, directly to Richmond, and straight on into the Carolinas at the same time the armies in the west were pushing into the Mississippi River Valley and turning the corner and driving eastward. In a year or two it is conceivable the two divisions of the overall federal army would have met and the Confederacy would no longer exist.

Alternately, even if Lincoln could have known that Robert E. Lee would stymie the federal army north of Richmond for virtually the entire war, he could have simply demanded that the federal army contain Lee in that area, and poured every other available man into the push in the west, to speed up the progress made by the federal armies there, and it is also demonstrable that the war could have been wrapped up at least a year earlier if this formula had been followed.

In that case, the very same defensive line that served so often to keep the Union from the interior of Virginia could have been turned into a pen to keep Lee and his army in, preventing him from making two raids into Maryland and in the second case, on into Pennsylvania. In time, virtually the entire state of Virginia could have fallen into siege conditions and the Confederate army slowly starved out, while the Union armies in the West continued to move forward, on their eventual way to reaching Virginia from the South, behind Lee’s line.

APPENDIX I

President Abraham Lincoln’s First Inaugural Address

March 4, 1861

Fellow-citizens of the United States:

In compliance with a custom as old as the government itself, I appear before you to address you briefly, and to take, in your presence, the oath prescribed by the Constitution of the United States, to be taken by the President “before he enters on the execution of this office.”

I do not consider it necessary at present for me to discuss those matters of administration about which there is no special anxiety or excitement. Apprehension seems to exist among the people of the Southern States, that by the accession of a Republican Administration, their property, and their peace, and personal security, are to be endangered. There has never been any reasonable cause for such apprehension. Indeed, the most ample evidence to the contrary has all the while existed, and been open to their inspection. It is found in nearly all the published speeches of him who now addresses you. I do but quote from one of those speeches when I declare that “I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where it exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so.” Those who nominated and elected me did so with full knowledge that I had made this, and many similar declarations, and had never recanted them. And more than this, they placed in the platform, for my acceptance, and as a law to themselves, and to me, the clear and emphatic resolution which I now read:

Resolved, That the maintenance inviolate of the rights of the States, and especially the right of each State to order and control its own domestic institutions according to its own judgment exclusively, is essential to that balance of power on which the perfection and endurance of our political fabric depend; and we denounce the lawless invasion by armed force of the soil of any State or Territory, no matter what pretext, as among the gravest of crimes.

I now reiterate these sentiments; and in doing so, I only press upon the public attention the most conclusive evidence of which the case is susceptible, that the property, peace and security of no section are to be in any wise endangered by the now incoming Administration. I add too, that all the protection which, consistently with the Constitution and the laws, can be given, will be cheerfully given to all the States when lawfully demanded, for whatever cause—as cheerfully to one section as to another. There is much controversy about the delivering up of fugitives from service or labor. The clause I now read is as plainly written in the Constitution as any other of its provisions:

“No person held to service or labor in one State, under the laws thereof, escaping into another, shall, in consequence of any law or regulation therein, be discharged from such service or labor, but shall be delivered up on claim of the party to whom such service or labor may be due.”

It is scarcely questioned that this provision was intended by those who made it, for the reclaiming of what we call fugitive slaves; and the intention of the law-giver is the law. All members of Congress swear their support to the whole Constitution—to this provision as much as to any other. To the proposition, then, that slaves whose cases come within the terms of this clause, “shall be delivered,” their oaths are unanimous. Now, if they would make the effort in good temper, could they not, with nearly equal unanimity, frame and pass a law, by means of which to keep good that unanimous oath?

There is some difference of opinion whether this clause should be enforced by national or by state authority; but surely that difference is not a very material one. If the slave is to be surrendered, it can be of but little consequence to him, or to others, by which authority it is done. And should any one, in any case, be content that his oath shall go un-kept, on a merely unsubstantial controversy as to how it shall be kept?

Again, in any law upon this subject, ought not all the safeguards of liberty known in civilized and humane jurisprudence to be introduced, so that a free man be not, in any case, surrendered as a slave? And might it not be well, at the same time to provide by law for the enforcement of that clause in the Constitution which guarantees that “the citizens of each State shall be entitled to all privileges and immunities of citizens in the several States”?

I take the official oath to-day, with no mental reservations, and with no purpose to construe the Constitution or laws, by any hypercritical rules. And while I do not choose now to specify particular acts of Congress as proper to be enforced, I do suggest that it will be much safer for all, both in official and private stations, to conform to, and abide by, all those acts which stand un-repealed, than to violate any of them, trusting to find impunity in having them held to be unconstitutional.

It is seventy-two years since the first inauguration of a President under our national Constitution. During that period fifteen different and greatly distinguished citizens, have, in succession, administered the executive branch of the government. They have conducted it through many perils; and, generally, with great success. Yet, with all this scope for precedent, I now enter upon the same task for the brief constitutional term of four years, under great and peculiar difficulty. A disruption of the Federal Union, heretofore only menaced, is now formidably attempted.

I hold, that in contemplation of universal law, and of the Constitution, the Union of these States is perpetual. Perpetuity is implied, if not expressed, in the fundamental law of all national governments. It is safe to assert that no government proper, ever had a provision in its organic law for its own termination. Continue to execute all the express provisions of our national Constitution, and the Union will endure forever—it being impossible to destroy it, except by some action not provided for in the instrument itself.

Again, if the United States be not a government proper, but an association of States in the nature of contract merely, can it, as a contract, be peaceably unmade, by less than all the parties who made it? One party to a contract may violate it—break it, so to speak; but does it not require all to lawfully rescind it?

Descending from these general principles, we find the proposition that, in legal contemplation, the Union is perpetual, confirmed by the history of the Union itself. The Union is much older than the Constitution. It was formed in fact, by the Articles of Association in 1774. It was matured and continued by the Declaration of Independence in 1776. It was further matured and the faith of all the then thirteen States expressly plighted and engaged that it should be perpetual, by the Articles of Confederation in 1778. And finally, in 1787, one of the declared objects for ordaining and establishing the Constitution, was “to form a more perfect Union.”

But if destruction of the Union, by one, or by a part only, of the States, be lawfully possible, the Union is less perfect than before the Constitution, having lost the vital element of perpetuity.

It follows from these views that no State, upon its own mere motion, can lawfully get out of the Union—that resolves and ordinances to that effect are legally void, and that acts of violence, within any State or States, against the authority of the United States, are insurrectionary or revolutionary, according to circumstances.

I therefore consider that in view of the Constitution and the laws, the Union is unbroken; and to the extent of my ability I shall take care, as the Constitution itself expressly enjoins upon me, that the laws of the Union be faithfully executed in all the States. Doing this I deem to be only a simple duty on my part; and I shall perform it, so far as practicable, unless my rightful masters, the American people, shall withhold the requisite means, or in some authoritative manner, direct the contrary. I trust this will not be regarded as a menace, but only as the declared purpose of the Union that will constitutionally defend and maintain itself.

In doing this there needs to be no bloodshed or violence; and there shall be none, unless it be forced upon the national authority. The power confided to me will be used to hold, occupy, and possess the property and places belonging to the government, and to collect the duties and imposts; but beyond what may be necessary for these objects, there will be no invasion—no using of force against or among the people anywhere. Where hostility to the United States in any interior locality, shall be so great and so universal, as to prevent competent resident citizens from holding the Federal offices, there will be no attempt to force obnoxious strangers among the people for that object. While the strict legal right may exist in the government to enforce the exercise of these offices, the attempt to do so would be so irritating, and so nearly impracticable with all, that I deem it better to forego, for the time, the uses of such offices.

The mails, unless repelled, will continue to be furnished in all parts of the Union. So far as possible, the people everywhere shall have that sense of perfect security which is most favorable to calm thought and reflection. The course here indicated will be followed, unless current events and experience shall show a modification or change to be proper; and in every case and exigency my best discretion will be exercised according to circumstances actually existing, and with a view and a hope of a peaceful solution of the national troubles, and the restoration of fraternal sympathies and affections.

That there are persons in one section or another who seek to destroy the Union at all events, and are glad of any pretext to do it, I will neither affirm nor deny; but if there be such, I need address no word to them. To those, however, who really love the Union may I not speak?

Before entering upon so grave a matter as the destruction of our national fabric, with all its benefits, its memories, and its hopes, would it not be wise to ascertain precisely why we do it? Will you hazard so desperate a step, while there is any possibility that any portion of the ills you fly from have no real existence? Will you, while the certain ills you fly to, are greater than all the real ones you fly from? Will you risk the commission of so fearful a mistake?

All profess to be content in the Union, if all constitutional rights can be maintained. Is it true, then, that any right, plainly written in the Constitution, has been denied? I think not. Happily the human mind is so constituted, that no party can reach to the audacity of doing this. Think, if you can, of a single instance in which a plainly written provision of the Constitution has ever been denied. If by the mere force of numbers, a majority should deprive a minority of any clearly written constitutional right, it might, in a moral point of view, justify revolution—certainly would, if such right were a vital one. But such is not our case. All the vital rights of minorities, and of individuals, are so plainly assured to them, by affirmations and negations, guaranties and prohibitions, in the Constitution, that controversies never arise concerning them. But no organic law can ever be framed with a provision specifically applicable to every question which may occur in practical administration. No foresight can anticipate, nor any document of reasonable length contain express provisions for all possible questions. Shall fugitives from labor be surrendered by national or by State authority? The Constitution does not expressly say. May Congress prohibit slavery in the territories? The Constitution does not expressly say. Must Congress protect slavery in the territories? The Constitution does not expressly say.

From questions of this class spring all our constitutional controversies, and we divide upon them into majorities and minorities. If the minority will not acquiesce, the majority must, or the government must cease. There is no other alternative; for continuing the government, is acquiescence on one side or the other.

If a minority, in such case, will secede rather than acquiesce, they make a precedent which, in turn, will divide and ruin them; for a minority of their own will secede from them whenever a majority refuses to be controlled by such minority. For instance, why may not any portion of a new confederacy, a year or two hence, arbitrarily secede again, precisely as portions of the present Union now claim to secede from it? All who cherish disunion sentiments, are now being educated to the exact temper of doing this.

Is there such perfect identity of interests among the States to compose a new Union, as to produce harmony only, and prevent renewed secession?

Plainly, the central idea of secession, is the essence of anarchy. A majority, held in restraint by constitutional checks and limitations, and always changing easily with deliberate changes of popular opinions and sentiments, is the only true sovereign of a free people. Whoever rejects it, does, of necessity, fly to anarchy or to despotism. Unanimity is impossible; the rule of a minority, as a permanent arrangement, is wholly inadmissible; so that, rejecting the majority principle, anarchy or despotism in some form is all that is left.

I do not forget the position assumed by some, that constitutional questions are to be decided by the Supreme Court; nor do I deny that such decisions must be binding in any case, upon the parties to a suit; as to the object of that suit, while they are also entitled to very high respect and consideration in all parallel cases by all other departments of the government. And while it is obviously possible that such decision may be erroneous in any given case, still the evil effect following it, being limited to that particular case, with the chance that it may be over-ruled, and never become a precedent for other cases, can better be borne than could the evils of a different practice. At the same time, the candid citizen must confess that if the policy of the government upon vital questions, affecting the whole people, is to be irrevocably fixed by decisions of the Supreme Court, the instant they are made, in ordinary litigation between parties, in personal actions, the people will have ceased to be their own rulers, having to that extent practically resigned their government into the hands of that eminent tribunal. Nor is there in this view any assault upon the court or the judges. It is a duty from which they may not shrink, to decide cases properly brought before them; and it is no fault of theirs if others seek to turn their decisions to political purposes.

One section of our country believes slavery is right, and ought to be extended, while the other believes it is wrong, and ought not to be extended. This is the only substantial dispute. The fugitive slave clause of the Constitution, and the law for the suppression of the foreign slave trade, are each as well enforced, perhaps, as any law can ever be in a community where the moral sense of the people imperfectly supports the law itself. The great body of the people abide by the dry legal obligation in both cases, and a few break over in each. This, I think, cannot be perfectly cured, and it would be worse in both cases after the separation of the sections, than before. The foreign slave trade, now imperfectly suppressed, would be ultimately revived without restriction, in one section; while fugitive slaves, now only partially surrendered, would not be surrendered at all, by the other.

Physically speaking, we cannot separate. We can not remove our respective sections from each other, nor build an impassable wall between them. A husband and wife may be divorced, and go out of the presence, and beyond the reach of each other; but the different parts of our country cannot do this. They cannot but remain face to face; and intercourse, either amicable or hostile, must continue between them. Is it possible, then, to make that intercourse more advantageous or more satisfactory, after separation than before? Can aliens make treaties easier than friends can make laws? Can treaties be more faithfully enforced between aliens than laws can among friends? Suppose you go to war, you cannot fight always; and when, after much loss on both sides, and no gain on either, you cease fighting, the identical old questions, as to terms of intercourse, are again upon you.

This country, with its institutions, belongs to the people who inhabit it. Whenever they shall grow weary of the existing Government, they can exercise their constitutional right of amending it, or their revolutionary right to dismember or overthrow it. I cannot be ignorant of the fact that many worthy and patriotic citizens are desirous of having the national Constitution amended. While I make no recommendation of amendments, I fully recognize the rightful authority of the people over the whole subject to be exercised in either of the modes prescribed in the instrument itself; and I should, under existing circumstances, favor rather than oppose a fair opportunity being afforded the people to act upon it. I will venture to add that to me the Convention mode seems preferable, in that it allows amendments to originate with the people themselves, instead of only permitting them to take or reject propositions, originated by others, not especially chosen for the purpose, and which might not be precisely such as they would wish to either accept or refuse. I understand a proposed amendment to the Constitution, which amendment, however, I have not seen, has passed Congress, to the effect that the federal government shall never interfere with the domestic institutions of the States, including that of persons held to service. To avoid misconstruction of what I have said, I depart from my purpose not to speak of particular amendments, so far as to say that holding such a provision to now be implied constitutional law, I have no objection to its being made express and irrevocable.

The Chief Magistrate derives all his authority from the people, and they have referred none upon him to fix terms for the separation of the States. The people themselves can do this if also they choose; but the executive, as such, has nothing to do with it. His duty is to administer the present government, as it came to his hands, and to transmit it, unimpaired by him, to his successor.

Why should there not be a patient confidence in the ultimate justice of the people? Is there any better or equal hope, in the world? In our present differences, is either party without faith of being in the right? If the Almighty Ruler of nations, with his eternal truth and justice, be on your side of the North, or on yours of the South, that truth, and that justice, will surely prevail, by the judgment of this great tribunal of the American people.

By the frame of the government under which we live, this same people have wisely given their public servants but little power for mischief; and have, with equal wisdom, provided for the return of that little to their own hands at very short intervals. While the people retain their virtue and vigilance, no administration, by any extreme of wickedness or folly, can very seriously injure the government in the short space of four years.

My countrymen, one and all, think calmly and well, upon this whole subject. Nothing valuable can be lost by taking time. If there be an object to hurry any of you, in hot haste, to a step which you would never take deliberately, that object will be frustrated by taking time; but no good object can be frustrated by it. Such of you as are now dissatisfied still have the old Constitution unimpaired, and, on the sensitive point, the laws of your own framing under it; while the new administration will have no immediate power, if it would, to change either. If it were admitted that you who are dissatisfied, hold the right side in the dispute, there still is no single good reason for precipitate action. Intelligence, patriotism, Christianity, and a firm reliance on Him, who has never yet forsaken this favored land, are still competent to adjust, in the best way, all our present difficulty.

In your hands, my dissatisfied fellow countrymen, and not in mine, is the momentous issue of civil war. The government will not assail you. You can have no conflict without being yourselves the aggressors. You have no oath registered in Heaven to destroy the government, while I shall have the most solemn one to “preserve, protect, and defend it.”

I am loth to close. We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battle-field, and patriot grave, to every living heart and hearth-stone, all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.

APPENDIX II

Jefferson Davis’s Inaugural Address

Montgomery, Alabama, February, 1861

Gentlemen of the Congress of the Confederate States of America:

Called to the difficult and responsible station of Executive Chief of the Provisional Government which you have instituted, I approach the discharge of the duties assigned me with an humble distrust of my abilities, but with a sustaining confidence in the wisdom of those who are to aid and guide me in the administration of public affairs, and an abiding faith in the patriotism and virtue of the people. Looking forward to the speedy establishment of a provisional government to take the place of the present one, and which, by its great moral and physical powers, will be better able to contend with the difficulties which arise from the conflicting incidents of separate nations, I enter upon the duties of the office for which I have been chosen with the hope that the beginning of our career as a Confederacy may not be obstructed by hostile opposition to the enjoyment of that separate and independent existence which we have asserted, and which, with the blessing of Providence, we intend to maintain.

Our present position has been achieved in a manner unprecedented in the history of nations. It illustrates the American idea that government rests upon the consent of the governed, and that it is the right of the people to alter or abolish a government whenever it becomes destructive of the ends for which it was established. The declared purposes of the compact of Union from which we have withdrawn were to establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, to provide for the common defence, to promote the general welfare, and to secure the blessings of liberty for ourselves and our posterity; and when in the judgment of the sovereign States now comprising this Confederacy it had been perverted from the purposes for which it was ordained, and had ceased to answer the ends for which it was established, an appeal to the ballot box declared that so far as they were concerned the government created by that compact should cease to exist. In this they merely asserted a right which the Declaration of Independence of 1776 defined to be inalienable. Of the time and occasion for its exercise, they, as sovereign, were the final judges each for itself. The impartial and enlightened verdict of mankind will vindicate the rectitude of our conduct, and He who knows the hearts of men will judge the sincerity with which we have labored to preserve the government of our fathers, in its spirit and in those rights inherent in it, which were solemnly proclaimed at the birth of the States, and which have been affirmed and reaffirmed in the Bills of Rights of the several States. When they entered into the Union of 1789, it was with the undeniable recognition of the power of the people to resume the authority delegated for the purposes of that government whenever, in their opinion, its functions were perverted and its ends defeated. By virtue of this authority, the time and occasion requiring them to exercise it having arrived, the sovereign States here represented have seceded from that Union, and it is a gross abuse of language to denominate the act rebellion or revolution. They have formed a new alliance, but in each State its government has remained as before. The rights of person and property have not been disturbed. The agency through which they have communicated with foreign powers has been changed, but this does not necessarily interrupt their international relations.

Sustained by a consciousness that our transition from the former Union to the present Confederacy has not proceeded from any disregard on our part of our just obligations, or any failure to perform every constitutional duty—moved by no intention or design to invade the rights of others—anxious to cultivate peace and commerce with all nations—if we may not hope to avoid war, we may at least expect that posterity will acquit us of having needlessly engaged in it. We are doubly justified by the absence of wrong on our part, and by wanton aggression on the part of others. There can be no cause to doubt that the courage and patriotism of the people of the Confederate States will be found equal to any measure of defence which may be required for their security. Devoted to agricultural pursuits, their chief interest is the export of a commodity required in every manufacturing country. Our policy is peace, and the freest trade our necessities will permit. It is alike our interest, and that of all those to whom we would sell and from whom we would buy, that there should be the fewest practicable restrictions upon interchange of commodities. There can be but little rivalry between us and any manufacturing or navigating community, such as the Northwestern States of the American Union.
It must follow, therefore, that mutual interest would invite good will and kindness between them and us. If, however, passion or lust of dominion should cloud the judgment and inflame the ambition of these States, we must prepare to meet the emergency, and maintain, by the final arbitrament of the sword, the position we have assumed among the nations of the earth. We have now entered upon our career of independence, and it must be inflexibly pursued.

Through many years of controversy with our late associates, the Northern States, we have vainly endeavored to secure tranquility and obtain respect for the rights to which we were entitled. As a necessity, not a choice we have resorted to separation, and henceforth our energies must be devoted to the conducting of our own affairs, and perpetuating the Confederacy we have formed. If a just perception of mutual interest shall permit us peaceably to pursue our separate political career, my most earnest desire will have been fulfilled. But if this be denied us, and the integrity and jurisdiction of our territory be assailed, it will but remain for us with a firm resolve to appeal to arms and invoke the blessings of Providence upon a just cause.

As a consequence of our new constitution, and with a view to meet our anticipated wants, it will be necessary to provide a speedy and efficient organization of the several branches of the executive departments having special charge of our foreign intercourse, financial and military affairs, and postal service. For purposes of defence, the Confederate States may, under ordinary circumstances rely mainly upon their militia; but it is deemed advisable, in the present condition of affairs, that there should be a well instructed, disciplined army, more numerous than would be usually required for a peace establishment.

I also suggest that for the protection of our harbors and commerce on the high seas, a navy adapted to those objects be built up. These necessities have doubtless engaged the attention of Congress.

With a constitution differing only in form from that of our forefathers, in so far as it is explanatory of their well known intents, freed from sectional conflicts which have so much interfered with the pursuits of the general welfare, it is not unreasonable to expect that the States from which we have parted may seek to unite their fortunes with ours under the government we have instituted. For this your constitution has made adequate provision, but beyond this, if I mistake not the judgment and will of the people, our reunion with the States from which we have separated is neither practicable nor desirable. To increase power, develop the resources, and promote the happiness of this Confederacy, it is necessary that there should be so much homogeneity as that the welfare of every portion be the aim of the whole. When this homogeneity does not exist, antagonisms are engendered which must and should result in separation.
Actuated solely by a desire to protect and preserve our own rights and promote our own welfare, the secession of the Confederate States has been marked by no aggression upon others, and followed by no domestic convulsion. Our industrial pursuits have received no check; the cultivation of our fields has progressed as heretofore; and even should we be involved in war, there would be no considerable diminution in the production of the great staple which constitutes our exports, and in which the commercial world has an interest scarcely less than our own. This common interest of producer and consumer can only be interrupted by external force, which would obstruct shipments to foreign markets—a course of conduct which would be detrimental to manufacturing and commercial interests abroad. Should reason guide the action of the government from which we have separated, a policy so injurious to the civilized world, the Northern States included, could not be dictated even by the strongest desire to inflict injury upon us; but if otherwise, a terrible responsibility will rest upon it, and the suffering of millions will bear testimony to the folly and wickedness of our aggressors. In the meantime there will remain to us, besides the ordinary remedies before suggested, the well known resources for retaliation upon the commerce of our enemy.

Experience in public stations of subordinate grade to this which your kindness has conferred on me, has taught me that care and toil and disappointments are the price of official elevation. You will have many errors to forgive, many deficiencies to tolerate, but you will not find in me either a want of zeal or fidelity to a cause that has my highest hopes and most enduring affection. Your generosity has bestowed upon me an undeserved distinction, one which neither sought nor desired. Upon the continuance of that sentiment, and upon your wisdom and patriotism, I rely to direct and support me in the performance of the duties required at my hands. We have changed the constituent parts, not the system of our government. The constitution formed by our fathers is the constitution of the “Confederate States.” In their exposition of it, and in the judicial constructions it has received, it has a light that reveals its true meaning. Thus instructed as to the just interpretations of that instrument, and ever remembering that all public offices are but trusts, held for the benefit of the people, and that delegated powers are to be strictly construed, I will hope that by due diligence in the discharge of my duties, though I may disappoint your expectations, yet to retain, when retiring, something of the good will and confidence which welcome my entrance into office. It is joyous in perilous times to look around upon a people united in heart, who are animated and actuated by one and the same purpose and high resolve, with whom the sacrifices to be made are not weighed in the balance against honor, right, liberty and equality. Obstacles may retard, but cannot prevent their progressive movements. Sanctified by justice and sustained by a virtuous people, let me reverently invoke the God of our fathers to guide and protect us in our efforts to perpetuate the principles which by HIS blessing they were able to vindicate, establish and transmit to their posterity, and with the continuance of HIS favor, ever to be gratefully acknowledged, let us look hopefully forward to success, to peace, and to prosperity.

APPENDIX III

President Lincoln issued a Proclamation of Blockade Against

Southern Ports, of April 19, 1861:

Whereas an insurrection against the Government of the United States has broken out in the States of South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Florida, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas, and the laws of the United States for the collection of the revenue cannot be effectually executed therein comformably to that provision of the Constitution which requires duties to be uniform throughout the United States:

And whereas a combination of persons engaged in such insurrection, have threatened to grant pretended letters of marque to authorize the bearers thereof to commit assaults on the lives, vessels, and property of good citizens of the country lawfully engaged in commerce on the high seas, and in waters of the United States: And whereas an Executive Proclamation has been already issued, requiring the persons engaged in these disorderly proceedings to desist therefrom, calling out a militia force for the purpose of repressing the same, and convening Congress in extraordinary session, to deliberate and determine thereon:

Now, therefore, I, Abraham Lincoln, President of the United States, with a view to the same purposes before mentioned, and to the protection of the public peace, and the lives and property of quiet and orderly citizens pursuing their lawful occupations, until Congress shall have assembled and deliberated on the said unlawful proceedings, or until the same shall ceased, have further deemed it advisable to set on foot a blockade of the ports within the States aforesaid, in pursuance of the laws of the United States, and of the law of Nations, in such case provided. For this purpose a competent force will be posted so as to prevent entrance and exit of vessels from the ports aforesaid. If, therefore, with a view to violate such blockade, a vessel shall approach, or shall attempt to leave either of the said ports, she will be duly warned by the Commander of one of the blockading vessels, who will endorse on her register the fact and date of such warning, and if the same vessel shall again attempt to enter or leave the blockaded port, she will be captured and sent to the nearest convenient port, for such proceedings against her and her cargo as prize, as may be deemed advisable.

And I hereby proclaim and declare that if any person, under the pretended authority of the said States, or under any other pretense, shall molest a vessel of the United States, or the persons or cargo on board of her, such person will be held amenable to the laws of the United States for the prevention and punishment of piracy.

In witness whereof, I have hereunto set my hand, and caused the seal of the United States to be affixed.

Done at the City of Washington, this nineteenth day of April, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and sixty-one, and of the Independence of the United States the eighty-fifth.

# # #

THE AWFUL ARITHMETIC VOLUME II

Stan McCown

THE AWFUL ARITHMETIC: VOLUME II

Part IV: The War in Virginia, The McClellan Period

Chapter One

Before McClellan brought his army to Fortress Monroe, that base had served as the jumping off point for an expedition bound to North Carolina by ship under the command of General Ambrose Burnside. This was part of the federal blockade operation, designed to deny coastal ports or landfall in the Carolinas to privateers and blockade runners.

By early February, Burnside had captured Roanoke Island from a small Confederate force and over weeks to come, he seized a number of other positions and upset Confederate operations based out of the region. Later, by the end of the campaign McClellan conducted in Virginia, Burnside’s men had turned over the work on the Carolina coast to the navy and transferred to a position along the Potomac at Aquia Creek, forming a base in Virginia that would be used when McClellan’s army returned toward Washington.

It will be recalled that at the advent of McClellan’s campaign into Virginia, Lincoln had relieved him of the position of general-in-chief, leaving McClellan in command only of his own army, the Army of the Potomac. Nevertheless, a need existed for someone to coordinate the activities of the various federal armies operating in Virginia, in the position of overall field commander. Such a command would not encompass McClellan’s own army, but it would include those of Banks, Frèmont, and McDowell, as well as Burnside at Aquia Creek.

Lincoln was not ready yet to name a full-scale general-in-chief again. Whoever took command over all the armies in Virginia except McClellan’s would command from the field, not in Washington, and McClellan had demonstrated that a general-in-chief operating from the field was not a practical situation.

Although Winfield Scott had retired from the army, he still served as a military consultant to Lincoln, but he had long since become physically unable to perform in the field, so he was disqualified for the new position being contemplated, that of coordinator/commander of the consolidated armies. When he had retired, Scott had wished to have Henry Halleck replace him as general-in-chief rather than McClellan. In the period when McClellan’s army had transferred to the Virginia peninsula, Scott still believed it was Halleck who should be brought in to at least play a larger role than he played as a department commander out in the West. That would have set Halleck in line to take over this new command in Virginia, but he was much more of a desk commander than the new job required.

Worse than that, in his role as department commander, in the West, Halleck was doing more damage than good. It proved unfortunate that Lincoln had not come to recognize that yet. Instead, he left Halleck where he was for the time being, in which position, as has been seen, he made a botch of the operations under his command.

It can be stated boldly that Lincoln had not yet begun to recognize who were the best men among all his generals. He demonstrated that lack by selecting John Pope, from the Western Theater, for the new job of overall field commander of all the armies in Virginia except McClellan’s.

Pope had not accomplished a fraction of what Grant, Sherman, or even Don Carlos Buell and George Thomas had already achieved in the West, but he was one of those men who, like the king of them all, McClellan, talked a good game. And Pope was not even as charming about it as McClellan. On the other hand, he did possess one attribute that set him far above McClellan: when fighting was needed, Pope would fight.

General Order Number 103 placed Pope in command of a new army called the Army of Virginia. Order Number 103 read:

The following is an order of the President of the United States, dated June 26, 1862:

I. The forces under Major-Generals Fremont, Banks, and McDowell, including the troops now under Brigadier-General Sturgis, at Washington, shall be consolidated and form one army, to be called the Army of Virginia.

II. The command of the Army of Virginia is specially assigned to Major General John Pope, as commanding general. The troops of the Mountain Department, heretofore under command of General Fremont, shall constitute the First Army Corps, under the command of General Fremont; the troops of the Shenandoah Department, now under General Banks, shall constitute the Second Army Corps, and be commanded by him; the troops under the command of General McDowell, except those within the fortifications and city of Washington, shall form the Third Army Corps, and be under his command.

This arrangement would be enacted near the end of McClellan’s operations in Virginia, at a time when the immediate threats to Washington by the Confederate army had diminished.

It might be argued that if enough men were available to fill two sizable armies in this way, such coordinated operations ought to have been set up before McClellan left for the Virginia Peninsula. What blew up this idea was the confusion about how many troops McClellan had or had not left behind to guard Washington. Until that was resolved, it would have been impossible for anyone to attempt any kind of coordinated operations by the armies left out of McClellan’s Peninsular Campaign.

And not until Jackson was pulled out of the Shenandoah Valley was the threat to Washington removed, freeing up those additional armies to actually be used in a coordinated offensive way.

That is enough to say about the Army of Virginia for the moment, but as developments unfolded with McClellan in Virginia, it needs to be borne in mind that this other army was on the opposite side of Richmond preparing, hopefully, to pick up where McClellan left off.

With that made clear, it is time to pick up with events involving McClellan at the beginning of what would be known as the Seven Days Battles.

The last battle of the Peninsular Campaign, known as Seven Pines, had just been fought. To keep up with what is to follow, it should be noted that the main body of McDowell’s army never approached closer than thirty miles to McClellan’s, leaving a huge opening through which Confederate armies would soon move, hoping to hit McClellan’s exposed northern wing before McDowell could join. It must also be noted that the Confederates had no reason to believe McDowell would not, indeed, join McClellan, but as was seen with the order creating the Army of Virginia, McDowell would be held back to form part of that new force.

The Seven Pines/Fair Oaks battle occurred over May 31 and June 1 of 1862.

In the time that followed, McClellan shifted positions, finally transferring his headquarters to south of the Chickahominy River. Still believing McDowell would join him in with the rest of his army, McClellan decided to wait for McDowell to arrive before proceeding in his advance toward Richmond.

On May 27, McClellan had dispatched Porter’s V Corps as far north as Hanover Station, where they had defeated a brigade under General Lawrence O’Brien Branch.

Afterward, Porter returned to the area of Mechanicsville, where he was to hold position in order to serve as a contact point for McDowell’s still expected army. The intent was for McDowell to fill in on that flank, which would then mean McDowell’s own right flank would be up in the air until he could also anchor it on some stable position, such as the river or move in along with Porter’s force, after which the entire isolated northern wing would finally cross the Chickahominy, re-joining with the rest of McClellan’s army as a formidable body.

The reason McDowell might have ever been released to McClellan was due to the fact that after Jackson’s successful Shenandoah Campaign, in which McDowell’s army had participated before returning to Falmouth, Jackson had left the region from which he could threaten Washington, in order to cooperate with Lee against McClellan.

By that time, however, McDowell was of greater importance to Pope’s future operations than to McClellan’s and he was attached to Pope when the latter arrived to create the Army of Virginia. Reasons for this will develop, which emerged from McClellan’s increasingly feeble and tentative approach to the mission of capturing Richmond or defeating Lee.

In the time when McClellan waited for McDowell, in vain as it turned out, Jackson was approaching the great open space that yawned between McDowell’s army and Porter’s wing north of the Chickahominy.

Robert E. Lee was now in full field command of the Army of Northern Virginia, and he intended to see that McDowell never did join with Porter, by defeating Porter, before he could cross the Chickahominy and recombine with McClellan. Then he had designs on turning toward McDowell and defeating him.

When he had attacked McClellan’s wing that had been south of the Chickahominy, which had led to the battle of Seven Pines, it will be recalled that Joseph Johnston had faced two choices. He could have taken on the wing that was isolated on the north side of the river or the one on the south, as he did do. In so doing, he had left alone the wing north of the river. Now, Lee would make the choice that Johnston had turned down, and Jackson’s army was designed to be a key element of this attack. If McClellan would not pull Porter across the river and take care of his dangling flank, Lee could not resist attacking it.

Lee already had McClellan pegged. He believed the Union commander would not make a great forward offensive against Richmond but would instead proceed “post to post,” which was the hallmark of generals who preferred to maneuver their enemies out of positions rather than attack directly. What Lee feared was that McClellan would approach near enough to lob shells into Richmond, to bombard the city into submission without having to directly attack. Lee preferred to hit McClellan hard enough to keep him too busy to undertake that bombardment, or better yet, drive him out of Virginia, and his plan to attack north of the Chickahominy played into that design. As further insurance, to keep McClellan as far back from Richmond as possible, Lee, once nicknamed “the king of spades” because his passion for digging defensive works, again set men to work adding to those works already in place around Richmond.

While Lee could perceive the threat that McClellan would either shell Richmond, driving off the population and the Confederate government, or lay siege to the city, McClellan either failed to see the same possibility or chose not to carry it out. In that, McClellan appeared to avoid yet one more action that would have delivered his avowed target—Richmond—into his hands. Whenever opportunities presented themselves to McClellan for taking Richmond, or on the other hand, to defeat the army directly before him, he appeared reluctant to accept them. It is tempting to suggest that McClellan continually avoided opportunities that might lead to a premature victory over the Confederacy.

Both sides would make what adjustments necessary, or believed necessary, between the June 1 ending of Seven Pines and the next battle. McClellan moved his command but not all his army south of the Chickahominy, leaving the same wing on the north side, perpetually, it seemed, waiting for McDowell.

In fact, on June 8, McDowell sent McClellan a message that he had sent McCall and his 9,500 men ahead by ship and that McDowell would arrive by land in ten days.

While waiting, McDowell rebuilt bridges and other projects, sending Lincoln the optimistic message:

I shall be in perfect readiness to move forward and take Richmond the moment McCall reaches here and the ground will admit the passage of artillery.

McCall arrived six days after that and now, McClellan reported he would wait for the weather and ground to improve. On June 18, the weather did improve, and he reported:

After tomorrow we shall fight the rebel army as soon as Providence will permit.

McClellan claimed to have reached the conclusion during this time that his army was the only hope for the nation.

He expressed that by saying:

When I see such insane folly behind me I feel that the final salvation of the country demands the utmost prudence on my part, and that I must not run the slightest risk of disaster, for if anything happened to this army our cause would be lost.

At a future time, McClellan would use this same argument to avoid winning a battle that would have ended the war almost immediately, by virtually destroying Lee’s army, at a town called Sharpsburg.

On the surface, this sounds like typical McClellan melodrama, but based on what he wrote his wife, he would not win the war by defeating Lee at all. He would “push them in upon Richmond and behind their works. Then I will bring up my heavy guns, shell the city, and carry it by assault.” Again, Lee had McClellan pegged.

The combat engineer persona of Lee loved defensive works, but his commanding general persona tended to be aggressive, sometimes to a fault. Despite having built up those strong defensive protections before Richmond, he preferred to remain pro-active and could not be satisfied with keeping McClellan away from Richmond, or even with merely chasing him back to Washington. Lee was consumed by the desire to defeat McClellan altogether, and failing that, to defeat as many elements of McClellan’s army as possible, doing as much damage as he could in the process.

It could be viewed as both reasonable and honorable for Lee to want to defeat McClellan heavily in the process of pushing him away from Richmond. That would be true, however, only if Lee had an unlimited supply of men both at the time and over the entire forecastable future of the war, but he did not.

The kind of war the Confederacy should have fought, the battle plan that should have been adopted, has already been explored in Volume I. That was the model of war Lee should have been fighting. By that model, the goal of every general in the Confederacy should have been that of keeping the Confederacy in the war for as long as possible, and instead of fighting to win at the cost of unnecessary casualties, commanders should have been fighting to string out the war as long as possible while preventing outright defeat for their armies.

Lee did not follow that plan. Instead, too often Lee’s aggressiveness threw men away. Even so early in the war, he needed desperately to preserve every life he could, yet he was willing to risk too many men in not just keeping McClellan at bay, or to chase him back to Washington, but in trying to defeat him.

While facing the army before him, Lee was not neglectful of the specter that Pope represented, with the threat of the Union Army of Virginia squeezing in on Richmond from the other side, which might have been fatal for the Confederacy if successfully carried out. Even before McClellan began to wind down as a threat, Lee had plans in place to deal with Pope.

On June 25, 1862, McClellan sent his Third Corps forward toward Richmond to probe the defenses, due east of the city. This pitted his men against the thinner, but well-entrenched line Lee had recently planted in the way. McClellan hoped to maneuver some of his guns closer to the city, as Lee had predicted, but was repelled and thwarted by Lee’s pre-arranged dispositions. A skirmish broke out at a site called Oak Grove, east of Seven Pines, and although little came of it, this would be reckoned as the first of a series of battles called the Seven Days.

The next day, Lee launched his attack on Porter, to the north. Jackson, now near enough to figure directly in Lee’s plans, was ordered to approach from north of Porter’s position so as to descend upon him with three divisions, in such a way as to cut McDowell off from joining Porter without a fight. This possibility was a danger that had existed for the Union as long as Porter’s wing was isolated north of the Chickahominy. McClellan should have been able to predict that sooner or later, Lee would attack that area, and in so doing, attempt to drive a wedge between Porter and McDowell.

If such a maneuver was done right, Lee’s army could maul Porter, before McDowell could come to his aid. Once finished with Porter for the moment, the combination of Jackson and Lee could then turn and take on the incoming McDowell and inflict heavy damage on his flank, if not outright defeat him.

That plan would have been feasible—if McDowell were in fact coming to Porter’s aid. What Lee did not know was that no such plan existed. McDowell would remain near Falmouth even if Lee attacked Porter.

With units stripped from other parts of the South, with Jackson added to the overall mix, Lee could count 86,000 men to stand against McClellan’s overall tally of 106,000 or so. For Lee’s purposes, these were workable numbers, if his men were managed in the best way, using enough men to hold the new entrenchments with part of his army and hitting Porter then McDowell with the other. Lee saw the situation as 30,000 men, multiplied in effect by defensive works, holding off 75,000 on his right while his additional 55,000 plus hit only about 30,000 of McClellan’s, north of the Chickahominy, which were obviously good odds for Lee. If the attack on Porter succeeded, McClellan would have to pull men from the other side of the river to protect his supply base, turning the advantage there to Lee, side as well.

From Lee’s point of view, in still believing McDowell as a threat, the key to Lee’s attack north of the Chickahominy was Jackson’s maneuvering into position between Porter and McDowell. Jackson’s arrival in that space was to trigger a cascade of moves by Confederate forces to flush the Union corps that were north of the Chickahominy out of their defenses, sending them reeling backward. Soon as Jackson was known to have reached his jumping off point, the subsequent attacks would open up in sequence.

In time, the two wings of the Confederate army would converge, those, including Jackson, attacking Porter north of the river, and those holding off the rest of McClellan’s army south of the Chickahominy, finally joining to present a solid front, in so doing, cutting McClellan off from his base.

One potential problem would develop if McClellan cut loose from that base at White House on his own and set up a new base to the south on the James River. To make that change, however, McClellan would have to move all the way through White Oak Swamp, an extensive network of bogs and woods south of the Chickahominy. That should hold him up long enough for the Confederates to do even more damage, if not defeat him entirely.

Jackson gave June 26 as the day he would be in place.

McClellan had perceived the danger to his White House base, and had countered it by in fact preparing a backup base on the James River at Harrison’s Landing, just as some in the Confederate brain-trust had feared. And in fact, just as some in Washington feared, because such a move would signal that McClellan was already thinking about evacuating the entire region by way of the James River, rather than putting up a serious attempt either to defeat Lee or take Richmond.

As to the double-edged attack Lee had concocted, McClellan had advance information on Jackson’s approach and figured out the plan Lee intended to explode on him and as a result, Porter was as prepared as he could be to defend himself, and as it turned out, as prepared as he needed to be.

On the day when both sides expected Jackson to enter the picture, he did not arrive.

Ambrose Powell (“A.P.”) Hill commanded the next unit in line on the Confederate side, near Beaver Dam Creek, a stream just east of Mechanicsville where Porter was entrenched. This unit was to join in with its own attack when Jackson arrived; since it was Powell who would first be aware of Jackson’s presence in place, his attack would be the signal to Lee that Jackson was ready, and from that point on, the other moves of the overall operation would set into motion. That was the theory.

A.P. Hill tried to keep his patience while waiting for Jackson to show up. All day of June 26, both sides waited for Jackson, who was to have “gone in” at dawn.

At three in the afternoon, Hill made the decision on his own that the operation had to be opened by someone and as he put it, “I determined to cross at once.”

Even without Jackson, the other corps followed suit in proper order after Hill, and the attack achieved initial success, with Porter driven back to his gun emplacements along Beaver Dam Creek.

In the beginning, Lee, and even Jefferson Davis, who was monitoring the operation from the field, assumed that Hill’s movement did indeed signal that Jackson was near, which in turn would indicate that the overall plan was intact and now underway. They had no way of knowing that Hill had lost his composure and decided to vent his frustration and trigger the “show” on his own despite Jackson’s failure to arrive.

In his assumption that A.P. Hill’s attack meant the plan was still on line, Lee tried to send in Daniel Harvey (“D.H.”) Hill to hit Porter’s flank at the creek, but Porter’s artillery proved overwhelming and the attempt failed. By nine at night, the great hope for this operation that had appeared so promising was dimmed, the battle lost for the Confederacy.

Jackson’s failure to reach the rendezvous had come as a result of unexpected resistance by Union cavalry much farther out from the battle, slowing him down to such a degree that he had only reached within three miles of his jump-off point a devastating ten hours behind schedule. His men were exhausted from the long slog over rough terrain in the draining heat of this part of Virginia, and Jackson, who had only slept ten hours out of the last ninety-six, had reached a limit and finally put his men to bed without carrying on to the now unsuccessful battle.

While Jackson thus had a viable reason for missing his timing to set off the battle, he lacked any excuse for having never sent a message to Lee and Davis alerting them to his problems and the fact that he would not arrive until long after expected, which might have allowed Lee to modify the operation, or put it off until he knew beyond doubt Jackson was arriving.

The actual casualties of this battle of Beaver Dam Creek were mild, but the worst result was the failure of the entire operation to cause significant damage to McClellan’s northern wing.

Now, Lee recognized, McClellan was in the driver’s seat. If he wanted to wipe out Lee’s army by reinforcing on that northern wing, he was in position to do so, or he could pull his army together south of the Chickahominy for an all-out thrust to Richmond.

McClellan being McClellan, however, he took neither avenue. Instead, he panicked, or at least portrayed panic, by reckoning himself outnumbered in all directions and considering it lucky that his army had survived the Beaver Dam battle. In that mindset, he was in no mood to undertake offensive moves in any direction.

When Jackson did arrive, he found no battle to enter, yet just his presence gave McClellan a fright. He withdrew Porter three miles south and had him hunker down on the east bank of Boatswain Swamp, an admittedly strong position with a looping river to hide behind.

A smart commander, in fact any commander undertaking such a raid into enemy territory as McClellan had conducted, would have gone in with a contingency plan for getting out in the worst of cases. That plan for McClellan appears to have been evacuating the army onto boats on the James River and taking them back the way they had come, to Washington, or thereabouts. The location that would serve best for McClellan’s army to board ships on the James was about fifteen miles away, called Harrison’s Landing, where he had already decided to make his new base.

Despite still holding a powerful position near Richmond, in his panic after the threat to Porter’s wing, added to the near disaster at Seven Pines, McClellan began thinking in terms of terminating his entire campaign and evacuating his army from Virginia, just as Washington feared. A cynic—and in Washington there were plenty of such cynics, among the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War—would have suggested that this had been McClellan’s plan all along, to put up the appearance of a spectacular operation that carried almost to the doors of Richmond, only to cross to the James and take his army away, without accomplishing much of anything except killing time.

If that were true, McClellan had given the Confederates exactly what they needed, wasted weeks of survival without any serious threat of defeat, weeks that all counted toward the elections of 1862 then 1864. Although the Confederates had lost some men, the casualty list was nothing compared to what horrors McClellan could have leveled upon them if he had half-tried.

In evaluating McClellan’s performance based on this “tour” through Virginia that was already being wound down, only three possibilities appear:

Either One, McClellan was one of history’s most cowardly major commanders, Two, he was one of the worst tactical commanders, or Three, he was, by the standards of his own government, a full-scale traitor. It is difficult to find a fourth explanation for what he had done—or more accurately, had not done—up to that point, and indeed, for what he would continue doing in the overall course of his entire campaign against Richmond.

Following his refusal to attack Magruder at Seven Pines, and his scare over Porter’s vulnerability, in the remaining time his army spent in Virginia, McClellan would only fight enough to get away from Lee and escape to Harrison’s Landing. Already, he was for all intents and purposes out of the business of either trying to take the Confederate capital or to defeat the enemy.

The only fighting McClellan would now consent to engage in was self-defense, fending off Lee’s continued attacks, Lee’s continued attempts to actually slow down McClellan’s retreat to Harrison’s Landing. That was another mistake on Lee’s part: he should not have been trading casualties merely to do damage to an army whose commander was already essentially conceding defeat and appeared only to want to leave the area.

It is true, however, that Lee could not actually know this was McClellan’s intent. Still, he did not need to defeat McClellan. By now, he could see that at worst, and he had even admitted himself, McClellan was intent only on fighting “post to post,” rather than to carry out any major offensive. All Lee had to do was move his army in place between McClellan and Richmond, to protect the city, and McClellan would have stood back rather than threatened Lee’s army in any meaningful way.

Instead, Lee bedeviled McClellan every step of the way on his retreat to Harrison’s Landing, constantly intent upon doing all the damage he could, no matter how many of is own men it cost.

Lee was not built that way, however.

As a result, the Seven Days battles continued.

June 27, the day after Beaver Dam, Lee pushed his men to attack Porter, unaware of what a strong defensive line Porter had established behind Boatswain’s Creek adjacent to and north bank of the Chickahominy River. The attack nearly came to disaster for the Confederacy, delivered by Porter’s men who were well dug in and protected from direct assault.

To try and root the Union forces out, Lee planned for Jackson to again flank Porter on the right, from the direction of a crossroads called Cold Harbor, so that when Porter turned to face Jackson, he would be weakened frontally and could be attacked by other corps.

Again, Jackson did not arrive. Investigation revealed that he had taken a wrong road, and additional confusion resulted in D.H. Hill’s simultaneous attack being ordered to a stop by Jackson himself.

Eventually, late in the day, Lee cobbled together a full-scale assault and chased Porter and reinforcements who had joined him across the Chickahominy.

This seeming “evacuation” by Porter, however, was not the victory it seemed for Lee. In fact, Porter used the battle as a screen behind which he carried out exactly the maneuver prescribed for him now, which was to cross the Chickahominy and reunite with the main army under McClellan. Rather than chasing Porter over, Lee had actually traded casualties while Porter conducted the maneuver he had set out to conduct.

Another byproduct of the battle, to the favor of McClellan was that Porter’s stand at Boatswain’s Creek served as a diversion that bought time for McClellan’s operations to carry on toward the retreat to Harrison’s Landing.

The key factor in this battle, which was called First Cold Harbor, or Gaines Mill, after two nearby landmarks, was the number of casualties.

Just to drive Porter where he meant to go, the Confederate side gave up 1,483 killed, 6,402 wounded, and 108 missing—nearly 8,000 men Lee could not afford to lose in a battle that achieved nothing. The Union, which could afford it, lost appreciably fewer, and if such a rate of exchange were to continue, the Union could afford to fight such essentially dead-end battles for years and eventually run the Confederacy down to its last man standing. This has been stated before, but it cannot be overstated and each such battle only made the fact more glaring.

During this exchange, Magruder, still holding south of the Chickahominy, had put in another masterful performance, convincing most of McClellan’s generals that they were severely outnumbered. McClellan sent messages to Washington detailing how his army had barely survived after Cold Harbor, when in fact a key objective had been achieved, as has been described above.

McClellan portrayed himself as being unable to believe that Lee had given the best he had. Instead, McClellan chose to believe that the attacks at Beaver Dam and Cold Harbor had only been half of a one-two punch and that the other half was coming any moment from his left.

Lee reckoned that he had at least achieved the objective of breaking McClellan’s supply line north of the Chickahominy, but that was also illusory. McClellan had already “cut loose” from that supply line, in favor of the new one extending down to the James River, as part of his evacuation plan.

The sad reality is that the only thing McClellan truly accomplished and would ultimately accomplish in his entire campaign through Virginia was to whittle down Lee’s army a little more. Lee’s activity during these battles would serve as a signal that he had the tendency to be overly aggressive, willing to, or at least unable to avoid throwing men away to gain little.

It may seem that dwelling upon only a couple of thousand dead Confederates at a time seems excessive. When battle after battle resulted in thousands dead, however, an entire army would have been taken away from Lee by the time of the last days of the war, an entire army that might have saved the Confederacy. Even if an equivalent number of men had likewise been taken away from the Union by April of 1865, the Union could still have fielded a gigantic army right up to the last.

The very title of this work reflects the situation that resulted: the attrition of so many men on both sides, with the advantage to the Union, formed part of Lincoln’s “awful arithmetic.”

McClellan had placed himself in an ironic situation of his own. Hating to lose casualties, fighting when at all possible in such a way as to avoid major battle, McClellan had carried out a campaign that that had gone nowhere. At the end of it, however, that is, after he had reached the point of panicking and looking for an exit strategy, McClellan had maneuvered himself into a position in which, in order to avoid a major battle to take Richmond and defeat Lee, he now must fight smaller battles one after the other just to escape from Virginia. If he had put the same energy and force into a head-on battle for Richmond that he was forced to do by default, he could very well have ended the war by August.

The striking fact is that throughout this process, despite his real—or his portrayed—panic, of the course of the Seven Days Battles, McClellan continued to hold in his hands the power to defeat Lee, either directly or by turning toward Richmond and forcing Lee to conduct what might have amounted to a suicidal defense. It might have been true that in so doing, McClellan’s own army would have been roughed up considerably, but they would be roughed up considerably anyway, just trying to leave Virginia again, so they might as well have gone the whole way and won rather than running away.

The situation somewhat mirrored Patterson’s in the area of Winchester when, had he been willing to sacrifice some of his men, in so doing, he could have helped win the war at that time. With a little more aggression now, in June and July of 1862, McClellan could have brought the same result.

When at last, intelligence convinced Lee that McClellan was abandoning his base at White House, Lee still had to face three possibilities to describe McClellan’s plans: McClellan might be changing his base to the James, he might be trying to slip past Lee and return to Fortress Monroe, down the peninsula instead of via the James River, or he might be preparing for the final lunge to take Richmond.

Lee had to make a decision, to focus upon one of those alternatives and act upon it. Logic combined with what he had perceived of McClellan’s tendencies told Lee that the true case in the enemy’s plans was to shift base to the James, meaning Harrison’s Landing. That did not tell Lee what McClellan would do when he got there, but Lee burned with the desire to intercept and defeat McClellan before he could carry out the operation. Happily for Lee, in what would have appeared to him as the best case scenario, combat engineers working for General Longstreet discovered that key fortifications McClellan would have used to turn toward Richmond had been dismantled, and Lee read that to mean McClellan was on his way only to escape Virginia altogether.

Still, rather than just let him go and leave Richmond alone, Lee would attempt to break McClellan’s army, at great risk to his own.

Chapter Two

After Cold Harbor, McClellan wrote an extraordinary letter to Secretary of War Stanton:

HEADQUARTERS ARMY OF THE POTOMAC, SAVAGE’S STATION, June 28, 1862, 12.20 A. M.

I now know the full history of the day. On this side of the river (the right bank) we repulsed several strong attacks. On the left bank our men did all that men could do, all that soldiers could accomplish, but they were overwhelmed by vastly superior numbers, even after I brought my last reserves into action. The loss on both sides is terrible. I believe it will prove to be the most desperate battle of the war. The sad remnants of my men behave as men. Those battalions who fought most bravely, and suffered most, are still in the best order. My regulars were superb; and I count upon what are left to turn another battle, in company with their gallant comrades of the volunteers. Had I twenty thousand or even ten thousand fresh troops to use to-morrow, I could take Richmond; but I have not a man in reserve, and shall be glad to cover my retreat and save the material and personnel of the army.

If we have lost the day, we have yet preserved our honor, and no one need blush for the Army of the Potomac. I have lost this battle because my force was too small.

I again repeat that I am not responsible for this, and I say it with the earnestness of a general who feels in his heart the loss of every brave man who has been needlessly sacrificed to-day. I still hope to retrieve our fortunes; but to do this the Government must view the matter in the same earnest light that I do. You must send me very large re-enforcements, and send them at once. I shall draw back to this side of the Chickahominy, and think I can withdraw all our material. Please, understand that in this battle we have lost nothing but men, and those the best we have.

In addition to what I have already said, I only wish to say to the President that I think he is wrong in regarding me as ungenerous when I said that my force was too weak. I merely intimated a truth which to-day has been too plainly proved, if, at this instant, I could dispose of ten thousand fresh men, I could gain the victory to-morrow.

I know that a few thousand more men would have changed this battle from a defeat to a victory. As it is, the Government must not and can not hold me responsible for the result.

I feel too earnestly to-night. I have seen too many dead and wounded comrades to feel otherwise than that the Government has not sustained this army. If you do not so now, the game is lost.

If I save this army now, I tell you plainly that I owe no thanks to you, or to any other persons in Washington. You have done your best to sacrifice this army.

G. B. McCLELLAN.

According to Nicolay, the effect of this letter was like a thunder bolt in Washington, less for the nasty and insubordinate tone than for the implication that McClellan saw no hope of victory.

In actual fact, Lincoln did not see the last paragraph until long after McClellan no longer mattered, because an army censor in the telegraph office removed it before passing it along.

Based on what parts of the letter he did see initially, however, Lincoln met with governors in New York for the purpose of building up support for an additional outlay of recruits, but the letter that accompanied his request for new men is an indicator of the strategy he expected on both fronts, and in one case, represents a change from his previous focus:

“What should be done is to hold what we have in the West, open the Mississippi, and take Chattanooga and East Tennessee without more. A reasonable force should in every event be kept about Washington for its protection. Then let the country give us a hundred thousand new troops in the shortest possible time, which, added to McClellan directly or indirectly, will take Richmond without endangering any other place which we now hold, and will substantially end the war. I expect to maintain this contest until successful, or till I die, or am conquered, or my term expires, or Congress or the country forsake me; and I would publicly appeal to the country for this new force were it not that I fear a general panic and stampede would follow, so hard it is to have a thing understood as it really is.”

From the distance of a hundred fifty years later, it is easy to see the fundamental flaw in this strategy espoused by Lincoln. In order to do so, however, the concept must be studied with two different points in mind.

The first point is that if Lincoln meant to throw a hundred thousand more men against Richmond, unless this was done under a different commander, who had his heart in the work, it would be a waste of men who should be sent to the West to truly win the war. With another hundred thousand men, any general who intended to fight could have wiped out the Army of Northern Virginia and taken Richmond almost in hours. On the other hand, the idea of sending even one more man to McClellan for any reason was a grave mistake.

By all means, the only thing Lincoln ought to have done with regard to McClellan was to sack him as rapidly as possible and promote someone else who was already in a key command within his army and on the scene, provided that next man was not one of McClellan’s Democrat-supporting friends. Given where the army was located at that time, what was needed, rather than another hundred thousand men, was a head on fight against Lee by threatening Richmond and forcing him into a defensive last stand, while Pope came on hard from the other direction. Such a plan would seem to have been a clear road to victory.

Another point needs to be cleared up in that context. Richmond was still not the proper target of the federal army nearby, any more than it should ever have been. At the same time, however, the notion of threatening Richmond for Lee to see was reasonable. Above all, at this time, Lee would cherish and act to protect Richmond, even so far as to throw his army in front of it. And McClellan should have caused him to do just that, and then hit him with all he had. If in fact, another commander had taken over at that time, and Lincoln had in fact given him another influx of troops, the great battle of the war would have resulted, and if Pope attacked with his army from another direction, this time in fact against Richmond, it is difficult to imagine the Confederacy surviving without surrender.

In that case, Richmond would be the lure, not the objective, but nevertheless, it would have fallen into Union hands by default upon the surrender.

Even if Lee did not defend Richmond, and left the city in Union hands and instead, took his army on the run—as he did do in April of 1865—the Union forces would have been able to pursue, all the way into the Carolinas, or wherever Lee’s army fled, and in time, Lee would be caught between the Union army from Virginia and the armies in Mississippi. The Confederate armies wherever they were based would be pushed together for one great battle somewhere in the South, and it might have taken another year to end the war, but that would have been far better than the overall four year bloodbath that history records.

That assumes that Lee would abandon Richmond. If he did not, then the great fight would have occurred either at the doors of Richmond or even within its streets.

If on the other hand, McClellan was to remain in command, the last thing Lincoln should have done would be to divert one more man to him. Instead, every spare fighting body ought to have been sent into the West, where generals were actually winning victories and pushing Confederate armies around.

A phenomenon had developed in the nation that is still difficult to process. No matter what progress Western armies achieved, the population of the North only judged progress in the war by what happened in Virginia. It was as if the fighting in any other area was not really a part of the war but instead, a side show. For the entire four years, the Union armies in the Eastern Theater remained tied up either in Virginia—except for two Confederate excursions northward, to Sharpsburg, Maryland, and Gettysburg, Pennsylvania—while the armies in the West ultimately swept entirely through the remainder of the South, and were heading at a rapid pace toward Virginia for the coup de grace when the war in Virginia finally ended, only around a hundred miles from where it had begun.

When that ending came, the greatest of the western armies, under Sherman, was only a couple hundred miles away. It consisted of only around 60,000 men, not because it had been knocked down to that size by the enemy but because its commander considered 60,000 to be all he needed to sweep what remained of Confederate armies aside. The army he had left behind had defeated the last sizable Confederate army in Nashville, and was itself on the move to join the final confrontation in Virginia.

In short, the war was won in the West, while the Union armies in the East frittered away every opportunity to completely finish the enemy until those in the West had essentially completed their sweep across the rest of the Confederacy. Yet the people of the North continued to lament the fact that the armies in Virginia were losing the war.

Therefore, Lincoln had it backward when he proposed holding down the size of the Western armies in order to pour everything into McClellan’s hands against Lee in Virginia. Only if McClellan were to be replaced by someone willing to finish Lee should even another man have been sent to his army outside of Richmond.

Another way of putting the situation is that if more men were to be brought into the army, they should always have been sent to the Union force that was advancing more rapidly and powerfully, wherever it happened to be. Since that was the West, no good reason existed why the armies in Virginia could not be used merely to lock Lee inside that state, with the minimum number of troops required, perhaps a total of a hundred thousand, with all other men and armies being poured into the gaping hole that had been opened by Grant and Sherman, beginning at Shiloh and continuing forward to Corinth.

The fact that in the future, Lee would “leak” out of containment and make raids twice into the North does not negate this cordon plan. The reason he was able to escape and make the raids owed to the failure of intelligence and the containment operations of the Union army, not the theory of containment. Under better commanders, that army could have headed off Lee and he would likely have been discouraged from attempting to break out in the first place.

The good news was the fact that Lincoln did not end up sending another hundred thousand men into the sinkhole that was McClellan’s command. He only sent another fifteen thousand to appease McClellan, who continued to idle around Richmond, setting up not a grand assault on either Lee or the city, but merely preparing to provide protective cover while he sent his army back down the peninsula behind Lee, to boats at Fortress Monroe, completing an overall campaign which accomplished little more than to whittle down Lee’s army by a few thousand men.

While all those decisions were made and followed out, McClellan continued marching his army toward Harrison’s Landing.

The route that McClellan’s army must follow from the Chickahominy River to the James passed through that difficult stretch of ground called White Oak Swamp. An army crossing such terrain on the roads that penetrated the area must move in columns, which meant McClellan’s large army would be strung out for miles. The column would be long enough that while units were entering the swamp in the north, others would be exiting on the other side, a perfect recipe for attacks on each end, which could have led to disastrous results for McClellan.

Lee did not waste the opportunity, setting Magruder to strike the part of the army that was trailed out north of the swamp, supported by Jackson, while General Benjamin Huger would hit the southern element, supported by Longstreet.

Roads crossed through the swamp at angles to the main route McClellan was using, offering him the chance to turn off in the direction of Fortress Monroe, unless Lee sent units of his own to intercept him. That job fell to Ewell.

Lee tended to plan complicated operations that required close cooperation between components of his army, similarly to Joseph Johnston’s planning at Seven Pines. This attempt to heavily damage McClellan at White Oak Swamp would be no exception.

As part of the plan, Confederate forces must be moved ahead of McClellan in order to catch his army leaving White Oak Swamp, but the dual attacks did not have to be simultaneous. No need existed for the Magruder-Jackson operation to wait for the attack on the other end of McClellan’s army before it could begin.

Magruder went to work, but again, Jackson failed to make the rendezvous and converge, leaving Magruder to go it alone. Even with the use of a huge gun mounted on a train, Magruder’s 13,000 men could not do the job unsupported—the federals were too massed in the area north of the swamp and Magruder could not make a dent in their position. This fight, on June 29, came to known as the Battle of Savage Station, named after a nearby nexus on the rail line.

Savage Station did not slow McClellan’s progress down or do much damage to his army, in other words, for the Confederates, it was a “fizzle.”

The cause of Jackson’s failure this time was the need of his army to cross the Grapevine Bridge over the Chickahominy in order to reach the attack point. Porter had taken the precaution of destroying the bridge after having used it for his own crossing. Jackson spent the entire day rebuilding the bridge and as a result, never entered the arena of battle.

It will be recalled that controversy surrounded the events at Henry House Hill in the Battle of First Bull Run, when General Bernard Bee had referred to Jackson’s standing like a stone wall. After his failure to come to Magruder’s aid, some began revisiting that famous statement by Bee, now remembering not that he had praised Jackson but that he had cursed him for taking so long to jump into the fight that day.

Here, Jackson appeared to have repeated the performance, taking what seemed like forever to finally act, but without the saving bayonet charge at the end.

Nevertheless, despite the failure of the attack at Savage Station, north of the swamp, the columns that were to attack McClellan on the other side were moving into place on three different roads, aiming for a clash with McClellan at the town of Glendale.

Lee’s plan designed that 45,000 men would hit McClellan’s right flank, and 25,000 would hit him again from the rear. By that time, McClellan would be out of the swamp and it was to be a fight in the open, with his army still stretched thin by its disposition along the roads.

Some of McClellan’s generals felt the victory at Savage Station should be the beginning of something better than an element of the continued evacuation to the James River. They believed they should turn and stay in the fight for the long haul. Sumner was chief among those who felt this way, but McClellan’s firm orders dictated that the evacuation would continue.

So dedicated did McClellan remain to retreat after Savage Station that he allowed a Union hospital with some 2,500 wounded to fall into enemy hands, along with valiant surgeons who willingly accepted capture to remain with the patients.

Lee was in the mode of setting up battles ahead of McClellan’s direction of flight and waiting for the latter to fall into them. As part of that, the location du jour would be the aforementioned Glendale, although several names eventually attached themselves to the coming fight, including Frayser’s Farm, since it occurred over an area and not at one point.

Huger was to “open the ball” on the Union right, while Jackson, after passing through White Oak Swamp, would hit the rear, and a General Holmes on the left. Again, Lee counted on fine choreography among his elements and again, for various reasons, much of it to do with the terrain of the area, the Confederate elements did not converge in time and McClellan’s army helped slow them down by setting up obstructions on the cross roads.

As has been explained, the battle at Glendale was meant originally to take place against elements of McClellan’s army that were emerging from White Oak Swamp. The operation was delayed so long, however, that following the Savage Station battle, McClellan hurried his men through the swamp, then worse from Lee’s perspective, on through the town of Glendale itself, before the Confederates could carry out their attack.

Holmes could see McClellan’s army working its way up a slope onto a local prominence called Malvern Hill, close to the James River. He set his artillery to shelling the Union forces but soon got better than he gave: on the river, federal gunboats responded with greater firepower and broke up the artillery attack. McClellan’s own artillery mounted the slopes of Malvern and added their contribution against Holmes’s men, forcing him to remove his army from the intended convergence upon McClellan at Glendale.

From time to time, Jackson fell into a strange malaise, in which he seemed oblivious to orders or what was needed. Again, he allowed his army to bog down and personally spent part of the afternoon writing a letter to his wife and napping, and in that way, failed to follow up the rear attack on McClellan’s army at Glendale on June 30.

By the end of that day, some of the Union army had topped out over Malvern Hill, crossing to the down-slope leading to Harrison’s Landing. Lee had lost the race: if he continued with an attack, he would only be hitting the rear of McClellan’s army.

Still, Glendale developed into the big battle of the Seven Days, and a bloody one.

On the surface, Glendale/Frayser’s Farm appeared to have been a Confederate victory, only because they held the ground afterward, but the point of the battle had not been position. Lee had desired to heavily damage McClellan one time before he could escape, while the latter’s mission at Glendale was to hold off the enemy long enough for his army to get clean away and on toward Harrison’s Landing, and despite some casualties, he achieved that purpose. Again, McClellan could afford far more casualties than Lee, and his men only needed to prevent Lee from blocking progress to Harrison’s Landing, and in doing so at Glendale, they succeeded. As a result, the federal army was able to continue its retreat in almost entirely one piece.

This was the point when Lee should have left McClellan to make his escape. Lee being Lee, however, the Confederate commander hoped that at least the battle at Glendale had set McClellan’s army on edge, enough so that if he hit it again, it might crumble and he could still achieve a significant victory. This was Lee being greedy and unacceptably aggressive, prepared to waste men to achieve something already achieved, the end of McClellan’s campaign against Richmond.

In defense of Lee, he apparently feared that once gathered at the river, if left alone, McClellan might yet turn front and make a final massive lunge at Richmond.

The final stage of the withdrawal to Harrison’s Landing had not been completed with the action at Glendale and Holmes’s own withdrawal under federal artillery fire. To fully protect his back as the army proceeded over the hill and on to the river, McClellan set up a heavy artillery presence on the slight elevation that Malvern Hill represented, in good defensive ground.

In response, Lee set up his own artillery array around the northern slopes of Malvern Hill and Longstreet picked out a position from which something like 120 artillery pieces could hit the Union army from more than one direction, which ought to throw their own artillery operations in confusion. The idea was that when the Union’s guns were put out of action, Confederate infantry could still carry an assault on the rear of McClellan’s army.

Under the circumstances, however, Longstreet’s artillery could not gain a position that allowed it to bring converging fire on the federal guns, situated as they were at higher elevation, a distinct advantage. Making use of that and their rifled cannon, which provided greater accuracy, one by one, huge numbers of Union guns would zero in on individual Confederate cannons until they were reduced to rubble, then shift to the next, methodically eradicating the Confederate artillery capability. In only thirty minutes, the Union guns simply wiped out their Confederate counterparts.

Ultimately, this battle of Malvern Hill was won when the federal cannon turned against Confederate infantry advances, resulting in 6,000 Southern casualties, with absolutely nothing gained for it for the Confederate cause.

That was the finale of the Seven Days Battles.

A postscript must be inserted, however. Either McClellan, as some said, almost fell apart emotionally in the last stages of the Seven Days, or simply left the events to operate on their own for reasons he did not admit. While his men fought and died, and in truth, placed themselves in a position from which they could have still beaten Lee and taken Richmond, McClellan absented himself from the fray, literally and mentally, disappearing five miles off during Glendale, dealing with the logistics of the army’s coming encampment at the river, leaving no one out front actually in charge of the operations. It seems that Porter took some initiative, but one historian has stated that had the Union army been mauled, enough to render it useless in the future, McClellan would have earned a court martial and whatever punishment the court might choose, for dereliction of duty. And in the Malvern Hill battle, he left the field, moving aboard an iron clad ship on the James, the Galena, appearing detached from what was developing in the field.

Chapter Three

Lee has been all but deified in the South as the greatest of all possible generals, but he was the wrong man for the kind of war he ought to have been fighting now. A time might come when he would need to be aggressive, but this was not that time or even close to it. Yet he was not in the frame of mind to wait McClellan out, or to keep McClellan on the slow road through Virginia.

If it were true that McClellan’s intent was to clandestinely cooperate with Lee, or whoever was leading the Army of Northern Virginia, beginning with Joseph Johnston, McClellan would have done well to find a way to secretly impart this fact to the other side. If he could have convinced Johnston, Lee, or even Jefferson Davis that he was trying to work to their long-range survival, thousands of lives could have been saved, and like Magruder at Yorktown and Beauregard at Corinth, a play could have been carried out, a sham war, to deceive Lincoln and the North, while avoiding any more deaths by the unknowing armies themselves as possible.

This sounds like a flight of fancy, and it is, because even if this were treasonous in the slightest degree, such a gambit by McClellan would have been dangerous and almost impossible to conceal. Dangerous, that is to say, to himself, for surely, had word of such a conspiracy reached the Committee, it would have been almost impossible for even Lincoln to keep McClellan from being hanged, without risking tremendous political trouble for himself. And there is no certainty if the situation reached that pass that Lincoln would have even desired to save McClellan.

What purpose would have been served for McClellan to pass such a message to the Confederates? If his intent was for the Confederacy to actually survive until he was elected president, the message could have allowed Lee to handle the situation of the Seven Days Battles far differently. In these pages, it has been intimated that Lee’s best policy ought to have been to simply provide enough pressure to see that McClellan did indeed leave the area, without giving up a single life he did not have to.

If he had known McClellan truly had the South’s better interests in mind, Lee could have put on his own sham performance for the world—and most importantly, Lincoln and the North—to see, without causing any more deaths on his side than the play required to be convincing.

By the time McClellan was working his way to Harrison’s Landing, had he passed such a surreptitious message to Lee, the latter could have had a greater lead time to begin filtering his army away from the area to face a general who would have been one of the last to cooperate with him: Pope.

As it actually occurred, Lee would in fact begin shifting fronts to deal with Pope soon enough.

If one is to set aside the possibility that McClellan was acting in a treasonous way, and instead, accept that he may instead have been either clumsy as a commander, or incompetent, and in that case, that he did in fact truly desire to defeat the Confederacy, then it can be noted that one of his primary vulnerabilities, especially with an army so large, was his line of supply. Jeb Stuart had already ridden his cavalry completely around McClellan’s army once by the time he had determined to give up the offensive, so it seemed feasible Lee could have used Stuart to cut those precious supply lines, move ahead of McClellan when there was time, cutting off his escape to Harrison’s Landing, and just isolate the Union army in the vicinity of Richmond but not near enough to threaten it, and from that point, leave the Union army stagnate and starve until McClellan was forced to ask for terms.

Instead, Lee kept making a fight of it; this strategy of reckless aggressiveness was unsupportable. Yes, he wanted to totally defeat McClellan, but he could never kill the entire army under the best of circumstances, while instead, taking most of it prisoner, or sending it home in disgrace after a mass surrender should have been all he could have asked.

Lee’s goal should have been to protect Richmond and avoid big battles doing it, but Lee was not playing along, refusing to let well enough alone. McClellan was strangling himself and all Lee needed to do was encourage him to finish the job. Or as has been indicated earlier, let him leave Virginia without further waste of lives, although the risk existed, as far as Lee knew, that in that case, McClellan’s army would appear elsewhere, in support of Pope.

A greater danger could conceivably follow from Lee’s aggressiveness: if he continued to make McClellan look bad, Lincoln might wake up and replace McClellan with someone who would know what to do with his huge army, someone who could still annihilate Lee’s smaller army from the Union position outside of Richmond. Even Pope might be capable of that if he should have taken over for McClellan now, not in the western section of Virginia, but over McClellan’s own army outside of Richmond.

Most likely, Lee realized that indications were wrong, that McClellan was not in fact giving up, because McClellan could still strike and take Richmond out from under Lee out of his base at Harrison’s Landing, if he chose to try. Because of the artillery cordon that had been established at Malvern Hill, protecting McClellan’s base on the river, Lee could not reach and threaten him. Because of the way McClellan’s army was situated at that time, after winning the artillery battle at Malvern hill, that could have been one of the key moments of the war: had McClellan, in that time and place, turned away from the river and gone back on the offensive, he might well have been able to defeat Lee and little would have saved Richmond from his army. It would have been the complete package needed to likely end the war immediately.

So evident was this, that Generals Kearny and Hooker convinced their Corps commander Heintzleman to approach McClellan and insist they ought to march straight to Richmond. Kearny so vehemently denounced McClellan’s intention of retreating that McClellan would have had grounds to arrest Kearney for insubordination if he chose to, but he permitted Kearny to vent and get it out of his system without taking action.

Kearny had written, “I, Philip Kearny, an old soldier, enter my solemn protest against this order for retreat; we ought, instead of retreating, to follow up the enemy and take Richmond. And in full view of all the responsibility of such a declaration I say to you all, such an order can only be prompted by cowardice or treason.”

There, someone right in the thick of things was using the “T word.” It wasn’t just disaffected civilians back in Washington who saw the possibility that McClellan was a traitor.

Had McClellan in fact taken Richmond at that point, Lee would have been on the outside of the city, having to dig in around whatever base he could find, and surely all available Confederate forces in Virginia would be called in to try and save the day, and perhaps Beauregard or his successor out West would have been likewise called upon to send all forces, ceding the west to Grant and Halleck, in a last ditch effort to save the Confederacy.

Pope could have turned front to intercept that army from the West, or ignore it, finish off Lee and Richmond, and then set up a holding force while Grant moved in the wake of Beauregard directly through the Deep South and through the Carolinas to wrap up the war, in weeks.

If that had not been enough, McDowell could have thrown his thirty-plus thousand into the fray. In that scenario, there would have been no hope for the Army of Northern Virginia, or the Confederacy.

None of that happened. Instead, McClellan continued his plan to evacuate the region and did not threaten Richmond at all, and thus ended the invasion.

The story is more complicated yet because of political events that occurred during this period on the US side. Despite all the angst he was supposedly suffering, McClellan had the time to take rather suspicious activities in support of his next possible career. More on this will emerge in time.

Beyond even this, more dark sides to McClellan, which would also taint some of his friends in the army, were revealed when at one point in this period, McClellan rode with his Judge Advocate through the camps, and when the men cheered, he noted, “How these brave fellows love me, and what a power that love places in my hands! What is there to prevent my taking the Government in my own hands?”

The Judge Advocate hastened to warn McClellan that while his men would fight and die for him against the enemy, they would turn on him if he attempted a coup against Washington. The truth of that assertion is not proven, left to the Judge Advocate’s own opinion.

Soon after this, talk in Washington grew more open about traitors, with McClellan’s name often attached to the rhetoric.

As an evacuation, supposedly due to the dire situation that McClellan perceived concerning his Army of the Potomac, it was an oddly leisurely retreat. It is striking that an invading army could just plunk itself down in enemy territory while it sorted things out to leave, and the defending forces could do nothing about it. Even more intriguing is that in that time, the president of the enemy nation was able to sail right into mainland rebel territory and carry out a heart-to-heart with his general.

Lincoln did do just that.

In this meeting with Lincoln, McClellan had the audacity to lecture the chief magistrate on the meaning of the war and how Southern civilians ought to be treated, which was to say, with kid gloves. This little incident once more presented a serious hint of where McClellan’s sympathies really seemed to lie.

During his visit to Harrison’s Landing, Lincoln wanted answers he could not expect to receive from McClellan alone. He asked McClellan’s five corps commanders, Keyes, Franklin, Heintzleman, Sumner, and Porter, “If it were desired to get the army away from here, could it be safely affected?”

Keyes and Franklin answered in the affirmative, adding that it was also the right move to make. Heintzleman and Sumner believed the opposite, meaning they were in favor of remaining in place and fighting and Porter agreed, which should have been surprising, given how faithfully Porter tended to support his boss and friend, McClellan, and would in fact do so again in the near future, to his own personal detriment.

In the end, early August, with his whole great expedition now recognized as an abject failure, McClellan was ordered to go ahead and pull his men out of the region and join Ambrose Burnside, who had returned from his successful Carolina expedition, now back at Aquia Creek on the Potomac. After that, McClellan’s great army would be relegated to supporting Pope in his own offensive.

In this would be sowed even greater troubles for the Union and the armies, especially Pope’s.

Considerable negotiations led to this decision and for some reason, McClellan himself, who had triggered the bailout toward the James River, now resisted leaving the area. He had continually insisted that he was outnumbered, yet off and on, had claimed he was only hours away from taking Richmond. Then when the perfect opportunity arose to do just that, after the victory at Malvern Hill, he again refused, against the urgings of his own corps commanders, as has been seen.

This is where the issue of supporting Pope reared its head. While it is unproven, the evidence will suggest that McClellan now wished to keep his army from being used to

back up Pope, and the surest way to do so would be to keep his army as far from the scene of the coming action as possible, even when that meant hanging out on the north shore of the James River outside of Richmond.

A parenthetical bit of house-keeping must be inserted here for the next series of events to make sense. After having been promoted to his first goal, command in the West, Halleck had reached the absolute zenith of his military career when Lincoln finally agreed with Winfield Scott and named him general-in-chief to fill the place McClellan’s demotion had left empty. This turned the tables between Halleck and McClellan, with the former now latter’s boss. And at least, removed Halleck from hovering directly over Grant in the West.

As general in chief, Halleck wished to have the Army of the Potomac transferred back to be within striking distance of whatever fighting in which Pope should become engaged, since McClellan was clearly done with offensive operations against Lee. It is interesting to consider the manner in which Halleck used McClellan’s own logic against him in arguing that he must now abandon his operations in Richmond and join Pope.

To set this up, it is necessary to describe one of the arguments McClellan had developed to claim his situation was more calamitous by far than it actually was. For some time, in the course of the Seven Days Battles, McClellan had been insisting that due to the evacuation of Beauregard’s army from Corinth, in the West, that army was on its way to join with Lee. Several intriguing points would have emerged from such a scenario.

First, if the largest army for the Confederacy in the West pulled out there, the Union army in that theater would have romped its way through the greater South, because there was not much to stand in their way except Beauregard’s army. In that case, that Union army would in fact be right on the heels of Beauregard’s, on the way to Virginia, and would soon be closing in on Lee from behind, in a pincer that would have ended the war in weeks.

Second, the scenario in which Beauregard would have been called out of the West, would have developed if McClellan had in fact turned from Harrison’s Landing and seized Richmond. In that case, Beauregard could not have arrived with his army in time, and even if he had, again, Grant et al would have been right behind him and again, the Confederacy would already be defeated.

All in all, McClellan’s claim that Beauregard was on his way to support Lee was utter hogwash. The truth is that no such order and no such operation occurred, that is, the Confederate armies in the West, still temporarily under Beauregard, certainly did not drop everything and come racing to Lee’s side in Richmond.

Why would McClellan make such a claim? If it were true, the arrival of the majority of the Confederate forces in Virginia, joining Lee, would severely reinforce the Army of Northern Virginia, which was a false story McClellan desired to be propagated, in order to explain his failure to take Richmond, or his failure to defeat Lee, or in fact his failure to accomplish anything. In response to the false threat of Beauregard, McClellan claimed he could still win against Lee if he received 80,000 more men.

This is the manner by which Halleck used McClellan’s own claims and his words against him: if McClellan could not win with what he had, and if Halleck could not send the huge number of men McClellan demanded, then McClellan could not win against Lee and therefore must evacuate the region and move down in support of Pope.

That was final, no matter what McClellan might counter. He was ordered to leave Harrison’s Landing and support Pope.

With that decided, with or without McClellan’s agreement, the question became that of how to carry out the evacuation in order to send McClellan’s army in support of Pope in the most expeditious way.

Pope believed McClellan should proceed by land northward, or return down the Virginia Peninsula, anything but use the James, the longest possibly route by which to move his army.

The arranged position near Washington where McClellan was expected to take his men, by whatever route, was at Aquia Creek, where as described above, Burnside had arrived with his expeditionary force from the Carolinas. Aquia Creek was within easy marching and striking distance of Pope’s area of operations, so when McClellan’s army arrived there, it could be “thrown” into whatever situation Pope was up against at that time.

Granting the numbers McClellan cited for the relative size of the armies, Union and Confederate, Halleck argued that only the combined weight of McClellan’s and Pope’s armies could stand up to Lee now. This was quite fallacious, given that at no time had Lee come close to even outnumbering McClellan’s army, let alone Pope, McClellan, and McDowell combined, but Halleck was again employing McClellan’s constant exaggeration of his enemy’s strength as leverage against him.

The flavor of Halleck’s messages in this period is found in the following example:

WASHINGTON, August 9, 1862, 12.45 P. M.

I am of the opinion that the enemy is massing his forces in front of Gens. Pope and Burnside, and that he expects to crush them and move forward to the Potomac.

You must send re-enforcements instantly to Acquia Creek. Considering the amount of transportation at your disposal, your delay is not satisfactory. You must move with all possible celerity.

H. W. HALLECK,

Major-General.

Not for days did McClellan respond to this demand. Finally, he sent a dispatch dated August 14 at eleven in the evening:

“Movement has commenced by land and water. All sick will be away to-morrow night.”

By Halleck’s orders, the transport of the men who were too sick to fight was to have taken place much earlier by days, so even in that, McClellan had procrastinated. In the above message, by “movement,” he had meant the transport of his entire army. Over twelve hours later, McClellan reported,

“Two of my army corps marched last night and this morning en route for Yorktown— one by JONES’ Bridge, and the other via Barrett’s Ferry, where we have a pontoon bridge. The other corps will be pushed forward as fast as the roads are clear; and I hope before to-morrow morning to have the entire army in motion.”

It must be noted that now, instead of leaving by boat from Harrison’s Landing, McClellan was sending forces all the way back through the peninsula up which he had come, to leave again at Fortress Monroe. It must be noted that Harrison’s Landing was between sixty and eighty miles from Fortress Monroe, depending upon roads used, and Lee’s army was in no position to cut off the march of McClellan’s evacuating army from their position now up close to Richmond.

Barratt’s Ferry was on the road along the south shoreline of the river, passing by Jamestown, crossing the mouth of the Chickahominy River, and Jones’ Bridge crossed the same river northwest of Harrison’s Landing, well east of White Oak Swamp. It will be remembered that when McClellan’s army was entering that swamp, one of Lee’s concerns was that McClellan might turn east and make for Fortress Monroe, and the route over Jones’ Bridge would have converged with that same road.

In short, now evacuating, McClellan was sending his men by a way he could have chosen days earlier, saving countless lives on both sides. Instead, he had bought the Confederacy time, in exchange for the lives lost. Not good management of resources by either side no matter the ultimate goals had been exercised in the entire Peninsular Campaign and the Seven Days Battles.

Even that much movement had come two weeks after the initial orders from Halleck to begin moving immediately, issued the Third of August .

On August 21, Halleck sent McClellan another message. At that time, McClellan had transferred entirely to Fortress Monroe, on the tip of the Virginia Peninsula.

“The forces of Burnside and Pope are hard pushed, and require aid as rapidly as you can send it. Come yourself as soon as you can. By all means, see that the troops sent have plenty of ammunition. We have no time here to supply them. Moreover, they may have to fight as soon as they land.”

McClellan responded,

“I have ample supplies of ammunition for infantry and artillery, and will have it up in time. I can supply any deficiency that may exist in Gen. Pope’s army.”

These exchanges are not simply normal messages between commanders concerning situations normal to a transfer of armies in the midst of a battle. They form key evidence relative to the events that would lead to the Second Battle of Bull Run and McClellan’s conduct in that period.

With a corps under Keyes remaining behind on the peninsula to occupy Yorktown, and Sumner’s corps not yet supplied with water transportation to join the rest of the army, McClellan personally sailed on to Aquia Creek late on August 23, reporting in the next morning and on August 27, reached Alexandria, Virginia.

Before detailing the events that followed, with McClellan’s army essentially back where it started, meaning the entire campaign into and out of the vicinity of Richmond was finished, comment need be made on that sorry episode of the war.

For the most part, and certainly given its promise and its mission, the campaign had been an abject failure. Yet it cannot be denied that it had achieved something, no matter how sad and dismal from the Confederate point of view, toward the eventual end of the war: the entire series of battles had sucked up 3,478 Confederate lives, a cost, which, while relatively small, Lee could not afford. When the wounded and missing were added in, a Confederate casualty list of over 20,000 for the entire McClellan escapade had been rung up. If many of those wounded could not return to service and the missing did not turn up, the number of overall casualties began to reach a serious level for the Army of Northern Virginia. Let it be stated here that when Lee surrendered at Appomattox, he surrendered about 12,500 men, much fewer than had already been subtracted from his army in the Peninsular and Seven Days campaigns. In other words, this was the effective loss of an entire army for Lee. It does not matter at what period in the war such losses occurred if they could never be made up. The fact that only so many men would ever be available to the Confederacy made every such loss intolerable.

This is not a callous assessment, to suggest that the suffering and the pain for the families, indeed, on both sides does not matter. That, however, is not the issue when the ability of the Confederacy to sustain a war until 1864, as was originally intended, is considered. The sheer lack of bodies to fill the ranks and go up against the far more abundant number of bodies available to the North is the main point in this particular discussion. Every body, if one wishes to consider soldiers as units, that was lost to Lee now would come back to haunt him that day in April of 1865, when every man still standing counted heavily.

The awful arithmetic made what McClellan failed to achieve in his sweep through Virginia all the more egregious, because he had it in his hands to end the war in mid-1862 and blatantly failed, whether deliberately or by incompetence. It is difficult not to cast him in the role of villain for the way he led the campaign, and it is a sad fact that he was nowhere near finished with his wrongdoing, since even after such a failure, Lincoln did not remove him from command and banish him from the army as he would do to one of McClellan’s favorites.

As a result, McClellan would have several more opportunities to continue his villainy in uniform. He would always refuse to take actions that could have destroyed the Confederate army when the opportunity was handed to him, and would always let Lee slip away with almost minimal damage done.

While McClellan seemed to be doing all he could to keep the Confederacy in the war, ironically, his failure to close the deal would result in a severe blow falling on the South just the same. Due to McClellan’s failures, paired with his constant cries for reinforcements, Lincoln had succeeded in winning his request for more men. By October, the overall Union army would consist of 421,000 three year volunteers, plus 88,000 nine month militias, an avalanche which the Confederacy could never even pray to match.

With the ejection of McClellan from the area of Virginia near Richmond, the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia entered what must have seemed like a pleasant springtime in the flow of the war. Indeed, they had not just survived an invasion by a far superior force, but had turned the momentum around. And Lee being Lee, he would not sit back and wait for the next Union offensive, but would take the war to the North. Or at least in that direction.

With McClellan slinking away toward Washington, his tail between his legs, Lee was quick to fully concentrate on Pope, still operating north and west of Richmond.

And McClellan would continue to contribute to Lee’s success.

Before moving forward, another issue must be assessed, concerning the operations of the Union army up to this point, especially in Virginia. It is amazing to realize that despite the Union army’s having reached within artillery range of Richmond at its “high water mark,” once the campaign ended and McClellan’s army returned to within miles of where it set forth, just outside Washington, the Union had not gained back one foot of land from the Confederacy in Virginia. Unlike the armies in the West, which were well inside the Confederacy and not just hanging on but firmly seated at Corinth, Mississippi, having crossed the short dimension of Tennessee, and taking its capital, the Union armies in Virginia were merely squatters rather than settlers, and before long, would retreat all the way back across the Potomac to the safety of Washington’s defenses, without having changed the figurative map that showed the size and shape of the Confederacy by an inch.

Another way of interpreting this could be that Lee’s defensive line, set up while he was still operating under the aegis of the Virginia militia, had been stretched and strained all the way to Richmond, yet was now springing back into place, and would in fact be returned to its original position when the next big battle ended with the Union in retreat back to Washington.

The invasion by McClellan was one of the great dead-ends in the history of the war, and when one considers the what-could-have-beens, it stands as one of the sorriest episodes of the entire conflict.

For his greatness in other ways, Lincoln must have points subtracted from his record for having stayed with McClellan a minute longer than his peninsular campaign lasted. On the other side of the line, however, neither had Robert E. Lee nor Stonewall Jackson proven themselves to be shining lights when their failures and poor decisions up to that point are considered. One could even toss Joseph Johnston and Longstreet into that same category, in that period.

Even at that, the same argument that explained the failures of Grant and Sherman in the West during this time also applied to Lee and his colleagues, as well as the Union generals other than McClellan: they were only beginning to learn how to conduct war with huge numbers of men, while also learning the way wars must be fought with the improving weapons and more modern communications and transportation systems of the era.

McClellan cannot be excused so readily on those grounds, however. His failures did not come from unfamiliarity with the new style of war, although it compounded them. His failures were of character, and perhaps even motive, so McClellan should not be granted the same leeway as the other generals, including his opponents.

If only McClellan had been replaced once and for all by a commander with even the slightest bit of aggression, even this far into the war, the history of the United States would have been different from that point forward.

Chapter Four

Harken back to July 8, while McClellan was still present at the James River, and Lincoln was meeting with him well inside enemy territory. At that time, McClellan presented Lincoln with an incredible document, a letter intended to instruct the president on what the policy of the government toward the war should be. Even more controversial than the fact that a general would lecture his commander-in-chief on federal policy was the actual policy that McClellan called for:

“Mr. President: ....I earnestly desire...to lay before Your Excellency for your private consideration my general views concerning the existing state of the rebellion.

....These views amount to convictions, and are deeply impressed upon my mind and heart. Our cause must never be abandoned; it is the cause of free institutions and self-government. The Constitution and the Union must be preserved, whatever may be the cost in time, treasure, and blood. If secession is successful, other dissolutions are clearly to be seen in the future. Let neither military disaster, political faction, nor foreign war shake your settled purpose to enforce the equal operation of the laws of the United States upon the people of every State.

The time has come when the Government must determine upon a civil and military policy covering the whole ground of our national trouble. The responsibility of determining, declaring, and supporting such civil and military policy, and of directing the whole course of national affairs in regard to the rebellion, must now be assumed and exercised by you, or our cause will be lost. The Constitution gives you power sufficient even for the present terrible exigency.

This rebellion has assumed the character of a war. As such it should be regarded, and it should be conducted upon the highest principles known to Christian civilization. It should not be a war looking to the subjugation of the people of any State in any event. It should not be at all a war upon population, but against armed forces and political organizations. Neither confiscation of property, political executions of persons, territorial organization of States, or forcible abolition of slavery should be contemplated for a moment.

In prosecuting the war all private property and unarmed persons should be strictly protected, subject only to the necessity of military operations; all private property taken for military use should be paid or receipted for; pillage and waste should be treated as high crimes, all unnecessary trespass sternly prohibited, and offensive demeanor by the military toward citizens promptly rebuked. Military arrests should not be tolerated, except in places where active hostilities exist, and oaths not required by enactments constitutionally made should be neither demanded nor received. Military government should be confined to the preservation of public order and the protection of political rights. Military power should not be allowed to interfere with the relations of servitude, either by supporting or impairing the authority of the master, except for repressing disorder, as in other cases. Slaves, contraband under the act of Congress, seeking military protection, should receive it. The right of the Government to appropriate permanently to its own service claims to slave labor should be asserted, and the right of the owner to compensation therefore should be recognized. This principle might be extended, upon grounds of military necessity and security, to all the slaves of a particular State, thus working manumission in such State; and in Missouri, perhaps in Western Virginia also, and possibly even in Maryland, the expediency of such a measure is only a question of time. A system of policy thus constitutional, and pervaded by the influences of Christianity and freedom, would receive the support of almost all truly loyal men, would deeply impress the rebel masses and all foreign nations, and it might be humbly hoped that it would commend itself to the favor of the Almighty.

Unless the principles governing the future conduct of our struggle shall be made known and approved the effort to obtain requisite forces will be almost hopeless. A declaration of radical views, especially upon slavery, will rapidly disintegrate our present armies. The policy of the Government must be supported by concentrations of military power. The national forces should not be dispersed in expeditions, posts of occupation, and numerous armies, but should be mainly collected into masses, and brought to bear upon the armies of the Confederate States. Those armies thoroughly defeated, the political structure which they support would soon cease to exist.

....I have written this letter with sincerity toward you and from love for my country.

Very respectfully, your obedient servant,

Geo. B. McClellan,

Major-General, Commanding”

Several points stand out from this diatribe. “It should not be at all a war upon population, but against armed forces and political organizations. Neither confiscation of property, political executions of persons, territorial organization of States, or forcible abolition of slavery should be contemplated for a moment.”

The first part of this point is admirable, and would not be adhered to through the course of the war, and it states clearly McClellan's abhorrence for upsetting the Southern people. The first problem, or contradiction with regard to this statement is the fact that rather than fighting Lee’s army, the very purpose of McClellan’s campaign was to capture Richmond, which happened to be a town full of civilians. How the city could be taken without disturbing the citizens is not explained, especially if Lee’s army were forced to hole up in that city and fight off the onslaught of the federal army.

At the same time, this declaration suggests why McClellan did not shell or ultimately attack Richmond when he was within range. Saying this is not to suggest that shelling civilians would be acceptable, but what all this seems to indicate is that McClellan entered into the entire campaign intending neither to attack and capture Richmond, nor to fight Lee head-on to defeat the Confederate army. If that is true, the question is unavoidable: just what did McClellan intend, if it was neither to take Richmond nor to defeat Lee?

The next point of this initial also clearly outlines what is important to him, “....confiscation of property....”

In that he certainly meant that houses and other physical objects belonging to Southerners should not be appropriated by the military, but more importantly, though unspoken, was the fact that to Southerners, “property” was a code for slaves. No more need be said on that point, and it would be unfair to read more into McClellan’s words.

“....Or forcible abolition of slavery should be contemplated for a moment.” Lincoln had blocked the forcible abolition of slavery in neutral states, Kentucky of chief importance, but McClellan was clearly calling for slavery to be left intact in the wake of federal armies.

That was an absolutely unsupportable demand, yet it would be some time before Lincoln violated that demand by fiat. In effect, McClellan was making a pre-emptive attack on the Emancipation Proclamation before it was even proposed.

“Oaths not required by enactments constitutionally made should be neither demanded nor received.” In time, oaths of loyalty to the Union would be called out if civilians wanted certain support or to accept or retain political office in areas liberated by the Union army. One could interpret McClellan’s demand as a wish not to actually disturb the political operation of the Confederacy, by causing people already running local governments to give up their posts in the wake of the Union army if they were not willing to foreswear secession and the Confederacy itself.

“Military government should be confined to the preservation of public order and the protection of political rights.” In other words, he was saying, the Union army should allow local people to carry on as Confederates as if the Union army wasn’t there. The very point of defeating the Confederate army was to put an end of the freedom of the Confederate government and its minions to defy the laws of the United States and McClellan seemed disinterested in using the military to restore federal authority.

It was made clear that the only reason Lincoln originally could claim for going to war was to restore federal authority over the South. By this statement, McClellan had no interest in the very purpose of the war from Lincoln’s point of view. This tells much about McClellan’s beliefs.

“Military power should not be allowed to interfere with the relations of servitude, either by supporting or impairing the authority of the master, except for repressing disorder, as in other cases.” This was a sticky issue, since Lincoln had made clear the war was not conducted to free slaves, but to blatantly stand up for slave owners was a clear hint at McClellan’s own attitude as a Democrat of the era and anti-abolitionist, himself.

“Slaves, contraband under the act of Congress, seeking military protection, should receive it. The right of the Government to appropriate permanently to its own service claims to slave labor should be asserted, and the right of the owner to compensation therefore should be recognized.”

This is a strange statement in every way. First, McClellan is against freeing slaves, yet he suggests that if slaves somehow become free, the military should protect them. It would be impossible to do both, to see that slaves remained in the hands of their masters, and to let the army protect those that got away. Worse, however, he then proposed that the Government should then claim “to its own service” those slaves that fell into its hands, making the government itself a slave master. And of course, he concluded this notion with the insistence that slave owners should be paid when they lost slaves.

In none of this was there ever expressed the notion that slaves who achieved freedom in the course of the war should be left free. Instead, they were to either remain slaves of the liberating government/army, or returned to their masters.

Given the fact that slave owners were to be compensated, for all intents and purposes, McClellan was saying the US government should buy slaves and use them in continued servitude.

“This principle might be extended, upon grounds of military necessity and security, to all the slaves of a particular State, thus working manumission in such State;”

How he construed turning slaves over to the federal government for continued service to be “manumission” is not clear.

“A system of policy thus constitutional, and pervaded by the influences of Christianity and freedom, would receive the support of almost all truly loyal men, would deeply impress the rebel masses and all foreign nations....”

It is intriguing that he should mention Christianity and freedom in the same document in which he advocated for slavery in any way.

“This rebellion has assumed the character of a war. As such it should be regarded, and it should be conducted upon the highest principles known to Christian civilization. It should not be a war looking to the subjugation of the people of any State in any event.”

It is difficult to imagine how McClellan or anyone else could have written this with a straight face. To insist that a war be conducted as a Christian enterprise is itself difficult to explain. To then insist that the war at hand should not look “to the subjugation of the people of any State in any event,” yet to further say that slavery must be preserved even in the battle zones is mind boggling. If slavery is not “subjugation” of “people,” then a new language must be devised to explain just what it is.

“Unless the principles governing the future conduct of our struggle shall be made known and approved the effort to obtain requisite forces will be almost hopeless. A declaration of radical views, especially upon slavery, will rapidly disintegrate our present armies.”

Clearly, McClellan meant to be warning Lincoln that if he were to create anything that resembled an emancipation policy, the Northern population would refuse to carry on with the war, would not supply any more soldiers.

“The national forces should not be dispersed in expeditions, posts of occupation, and numerous armies, but should be mainly collected into masses, and brought to bear upon the armies of the Confederate States. Those armies thoroughly defeated, the political structure which they support would soon cease to exist.”

Of course this is again a perfect contradiction to his own announced intent, to avoid the Confederate army and take Richmond instead. The last thing he appeared to want was to bring his army to bear upon the armies of the Confederate States.

One of the most important statements in this letter springs from the following:

“A system of policy thus constitutional, and pervaded by the influences of Christianity and freedom, would receive the support of almost all truly loyal men, would deeply impress the rebel masses and all foreign nations....”

The question hangs in the air, of why he should speak of impressing “the rebel masses” who had caused the war by rebelling. Why and how they needed or even should be “impressed” by the government attempting to bring them under federal control was the core of McClellan’s political plan.

It must be pointed out that should he be elected president in 1864, and sought rapprochement with the South, McClellan would want to have been seen as an appeaser to their needs even while fighting them. The fact that slavery was ended by the invading armies buying up the slaves would indeed no doubt impress the “masses of the rebels” when McClellan ended the war as president.

While this letter in itself does not contribute to the theory that McClellan intended to throw the war, when it is coupled with an anecdote later conveyed by Lincoln himself to his secretary and biographer John Hay, much in the letter appears damning.

The anecdote,

Two years later, at the end of September 1864, President Lincoln related to aide John Hay a complicated story of Congressman Fernando Wood’s visits to General McClellan in the fall of 1862. Mr. Lincoln said that McClellan and General William F. “Baldy” Smith had been intimate friends until “one day Fernando Wood and one other politician from New York appeared in Camp & passed some days with McClellan. From the day that this took place, Smith saw or thought he saw that McClellan was treating him with unusual coolness & reserve. After a little while he mentioned this to McC. who after some talk told Baldy he had something to show him. He told him that these people who had recently visited him, had been urging him to stand as an opposition candidate for President: that he had thought the thing over, and had concluded to accept their propositions & had written them a letter (which he had not yet sent) giving his idea of the proper way of conducting the war, so as to conciliate and impress the people of the South with the idea that our armies were intended merely to execute the laws and protect their property &*c., & pledging himself to conduct the war in that inefficient conciliatory style. This letter he read to Baldy, who after the reading was finished said earnestly “General, do you not see that looks like treason: & that it will ruin you and all of us.” After some further talk the General destroyed the letter in Baldy’s presence, and thanked him heartily for his frank & friendly counsel. After this he was again taken into the intimate confidence of McClellan. Immediately after the battle of Antietam Wood & his familiar came again & saw the General, and again Baldy saw an immediate estrangement on the part of McClellan. He seemed to be anxious to get his intimate friends out of the way and to avoid opportunities of private conversation with them. Baldy he particularly kept employed on reconnoisaances and such work. One night Smith was returning from some duty he had been performing & seeing a light in McClellan’s tent he went in to report. Several persons were there. He reported & was about to withdraw when the General requested him to remain. After every one was gone he told him those men had been there again and had renewed their proposition about the Presidency — that this time he had agreed to their proposition and had written them a letter acceding to their terms and pledging himself to carry on the war in the sense already indicated. This letter he read then and there to Baldy Smith.”

[Michael Burlingame and John R. Turner Ettlinger, editor, Inside Lincoln’s White House: The Complete Civil War Diary of John Hay, p. 231 (September 25, 1864).]

Fernando Wood was a powerful boss in the Democratic party, and a member of the notorious Copperheads, who were out to subvert Lincoln and the war effort, to the benefit of the Confederacy. Many Northerners considered this group and anyone connected with them to be traitors to the Union.

Hay and Nicolay, Lincoln’s secretaries and biographers, speculated on the reason Lincoln put up with McClellan so long. They suggested that the positive reasons revolved around the fact that since McClellan had not done anything which could be proven treasonous, while it remained a given that he handled armies and organized them well between battles, and because the president lacked anyone who was demonstrably better, McClellan remained the proper choice.

A different anecdote, however, might provide another spin on Lincoln’s refusal to remove McClellan yet.

The story was described by Nicolay:

“On October 1, the President and several friends made a visit to Antietam, and during the three succeeding days reviewed the troops and went over the various battle-grounds in company with the general. The better insight which the President thus received of the nature and results of the late battle served only to deepen in his mind the conviction he had long entertained—how greatly McClellan’s defects overbalanced his merits as a military leader; and his impatience found vent in a phrase of biting irony. In a morning walk with a friend, waving his arm toward the white tents of the great army, he asked: ‘Do you know what that is?’ The friend, not catching the drift of his thought, said, ‘It is the Army of the Potomac, I suppose.’ ‘So it is called,’ responded the President, in a tone of suppressed indignation, ‘But that is a mistake. It is only McClellan’s body-guard.’”

(Nicolay, p. 317)

The point of this was that just as McClellan had hinted at the notion of seizing the government in his hands, Lincoln saw the potential that he might try just that if Lincoln were to remove him.

No one can prove one way or another McClellan’s true intentions, or his motivations, or even his possibly unconscious reasons for conducting the war in the manner he did. It might seem frivolous to concentrate on the actions of one man, were it not for the fact that the effects of those actions upon the nation overall, including even the South, proved to be so devastating. It was not the damage McClellan did to the Confederacy but the fact that he had in his hands at least three times to end the war up to two years earlier than history records, and each time failed. Whether he “threw” the war or in fact failed by incompetence cannot be proved so those left behind can only assemble as many facts and factors and possible and each come to their own conclusion.

One of the goals of the present work is to point out all the turning points in the war when it could have been won or lost in a much shorter time, and much of McClellan’s tenure as either general-in-chief or the head of the key army in Virginia was one vast turning point that was not exploited. The impact of McClellan’s influence in that fact cannot be minimized if a serious study of the war is desired.

While it is impossible to know his true intent, it is possible to analyze the range of possibilities, in explaining McClellan’s conduct of the war. Personal foibles, his constant self-promotion and even his lies can be ignored, because other generals who actually brought positive results were guilty of the same. Even McClellan’s opinions on the conduct of the war could have been ignored, as long as those opinions did not inform his actions. Where they did so, they must be considered.

That said, what are the possible explanations for his conduct as a commander of the Army of the Potomac?

About McClellan’s motives, as with everyone on earth, more than one simplistic explanation is likely to be found. Each of those potential explanations served part of the grander explanation sought for his actions in the war, and put together may or may not create a discernible whole.

That he was a coward, as defined by military standards, is probable. This is a foible that cannot be ignored because it may point to his actions as commander.

To consider that point, it is necessary to refer back to the successes of McClellan’s army in the upper section of Western Virginia that brought him the attention that led to his promotion to general-in-chief. During the key battles his army won, the fact was recorded by many people, all the way down to privates, that McClellan never placed his person within gun range of the enemy, unlike many generals in the war, more than a few of whom were killed. The contrast to a Joseph Johnston, Sidney Johnston, Sherman, Grant, and by all means, Lee himself is too keen to ignore.

In the other engagements for which he is famous, McClellan appears to have been personally absent, in the rear echelons as the saying goes, and not on the line.

This was clearly true during the battles of Glendale and Malvern Hill in the Seven Days series.

Even if that were true, that personally, McClellan was a coward, which is not proven even by the above anecdotes, fear of being exposed to combat on the part of the commanding general does not does not automatically conflate with timidity in the manner in which he directs his forces, as long as he personally does not have to fear for his own life. Grant was personally squeamish about blood and gore, yet led some of the bloodiest battles of the war.

As long as a general who is personally frightened of combat has in his command “gallant” and fearless generals and colonels who can go forward and move the forces at the front, he is free to be as aggressive and forward thrusting as any other commander while protecting his own life and limb.

As has been described herein, McClellan was one of those generals, like Halleck, who preferred to fight and win by avoiding battle, using his army as a threat and deterrent, by its placement to block and control the actions of the enemy. That was not to say, armies used in this way would never fight, but when they did, it was to achieve quick, decisive victories with the minimum of bloodshed, preferably by setting up flanking maneuvers in which large elements of the enemy force could be mowed down by lesser application of force.

McClellan also supposedly felt strongly for his men and agonized over every death, and thus could not stand to put a single one of them in harm’s way if he could find a way out of it, and thus, he subscribed to the minimalist school of strategy explained above.

Evidence that he did indeed feel this way comes through in personal letters, although that is not proof of his true feelings when he is known to have lied about other subjects in his writings, especially to the president.

Still, if the two points above are accepted, that he believed in the theory of maneuver versus hard fighting, and was deeply concerned about protecting his men, the question must be asked: why then did he agree to set forth on a course, toward Richmond, which almost certainly would require hard fighting if it were to be successful? Under the best of circumstances, as he neared Richmond, whether by the Urbana approach or up the Virginia Peninsula, at some point the Confederacy would manage a stiff resistance, and at least one horrific battle would have been virtually unavoidable, yet McClellan set forth for Richmond nevertheless. Some say he panicked after one or another of the Seven Days Battles and suddenly decided to escape while his army was intact. Why he did not foresee being caught in such a situation is not clear, then.

Setting that aside for the moment, what are the possible intentions he carried with him toward Richmond? Did he truly mean to take the city as bloodlessly as possible, despite the fact that leaving the Confederate army intact would have meant the war would not end with the capture of the city?

That leads to the more profound question, indeed the most profound questions possible revolving McClellan’s conduct of the war: did he intend to lose the war? Or did he wish to prolong it to a certain point? And in either case, after proclaiming to Lincoln and others his desire to preserve the Union, why would he want to carry out either option, lose the war or prolong it?

Why would he enter battle against the Confederates at all if he did not intend to win?

If the supposition were true, the answer to that could be that only he could personally see that the huge army Lincoln had given him was deliberately misused to such an extent that Richmond would in fact not be taken and/or the Confederate army would not be defeated for as long as McClellan remained in command.

Absent the evidence of what had been exposed to Lincoln by Baldy Smith, it would seem unfair and excessive to actually suggest McClellan did not intend to win the war, but based on his dealings and his discussion of “impressing” the South as part of his presidential plan, the worst must be at least considered. More evidence still exists, however, regarding this desire to keep the war in play without the Confederacy being defeated.

The following is another anecdote from a little later in the war but it is better brought out at this point to illuminate certain attitudes about prolonging the war.

Among McClellan’s staff was a Colonel Thomas Key. Working on Halleck’s staff was his brother, John Key. Speaking in a private conversation, Key was quoted as saying, in answer to the question, Why was not the rebel army bagged immediately after the battle near Sharpsburg?

“That is not the game...the object is that neither army shall get much advantage of the other; that both shall be kept in the field till they are exhausted, when we will make a compromise and save slavery.”

Those words seemed to summarize very well McClellan’s philosophy. It particularly fit the model matching the Crittenden Compromise in the hands of McClellan, were he elected president, in 1864.

Lincoln got wind of that statement and offered Key the chance to refute it and when he did not, Lincoln cast him out of the army, for the purpose of making an example of any member of army staff who believed that way.

If Key represented McClellan’s attitude, then coupled with the accounts of Baldy Smith and Hay as told by Lincoln, it seems possible or even likely that McClellan wanted the war to still be under way when he was elected president. This has already been hinted but what he indicated in his letters and his attitude on “impressing the rebel masses” must be re-analyzed in light of Smith’s words, “had written them a letter... giving his idea of the proper way of conducting the war, so as to conciliate and impress the people of the South with the idea that our armies were intended merely to execute the laws and protect their property &*c., & pledging himself to conduct the war in that inefficient conciliatory style.”

By this theory, McClellan would have wanted to conclude the war with a thin victory for the Union, but under conditions very favorable to the South in the aftermath, by all means including the preservation of slavery for as long as it would hold up on its own as an institution.

It is not possible or even necessary to say McClellan was pro-slavery. Certainly he was anti-abolition, but those two issues are not mutually inclusive. More likely, because the South desired slavery and he desired good relations with and even status quo for the South, that meant allowing the South to determine the future of slavery. That does not directly mean he supported slavery itself. At the same time, it does not mean he did not. What seemed most important to him was the protection of the “property” of Southern plantation owners, and that of course meant insuring that they kept their slaves. It would be hard for a man who opposed slavery to act so as to preserve it for political reasons, which suggests he had no qualms about slavery per se. Yet on the other hand, Lincoln opposed slavery and was willing to leave it in place if he must in order to prevent Southern independence, so the case against McClellan as actually supporting slavery is not made.

This idea explains another part of McClellan’s activities during the war, and his admonishment to Lincoln on the subject. He went well out of his way to protect private property of Confederates in the areas through which his army passed, to the degree of wasting officers and men to guard fences on the land of Confederate solders and officers who were off to war...against McClellan’s own men.

A point not fully explained by this assessment of McClellan’s operations, the theory that he did not intend to lose the war but only prolong it, is his seemingly deliberate failures to protect Washington from capture by Confederate forces, particularly early in his operations on the peninsula, when he was discerned to have overstated by wide amounts the number of forces he had left as protection for the city.

When, however, this is coupled with his comments to the Judge Advocate, and to others, and comments of his key allied generals, a more sinister explanation may be proposed. If Washington were taken by the rebels, and the federal government with it, or on the other hand, forced to flee, and McClellan’s army could retake the city, he would have it in his hands to institute a military dictatorship if he so desired, and apparently enough of his sub-commanders would go along that it might have succeeded.

In that case, McClellan would occupy the role of Caeser who swept into Rome and saved all, and placed the olive leaves on his own brow as the only man who could lead the government to victory, or to...whatever he desired as a resolution to the war and the Confederacy. Whether he then intended to leave the nation in the condition of a military dictatorship permanently, or allow the election of 1864, with himself as the only viable candidate reaches too far into the realm of speculation to approach. Suffice it to say, he was not the only key general to mouth the word “dictatorship” in the course of the war.

A theory of McClellan’s ultimate purpose was put forward by none other than the well known editor of the New York Tribune, Horace Greeley, he of “go west, young man,” fame:

“It was hard for one who had long been arguing and voting that, in our current politics, Slavery was not the aggressor, but the innocent victim, to unlearn this gross error in a year; and Gen. McClellan is essentially slow. But, in the high position to which he had been so suddenly exalted, it was hard also not to see that, in order to save both Slavery and the Union, there must be little fighting and a speedy compromise—that fighting must be postponed, and put off, and avoided, in the hope that financial embarrassment, a foreign war, or some other complication, would compel the mutual adoption of some sort of Crittenden Compromise, or kindred ‘adjustment,’ whereby the Slave Power would graciously condescend to take the Union afresh into its keeping, and consent to a reunion, which would be, in effect, an extension of the empire of Jefferson Davis to the Canada frontier, and a perpetual interdict of all Anti-Slavery discussion and effort throughout the Republic. On this hypothesis, and on this alone, Gen. McClellan’s course while in high command, but especially during that long Autumn and Winter, becomes coherent and comprehensible.”

The Crittenden Compromise had been an attempt to save slavery without secession, maintaining the agreements in place for fugitive slaves to be returned to their owners, with the “compromise” part being an arrangement by which slavery would be forbidden north of the 36° 30’ parallel, while it would remain in place below the line. Apparently Greeley suspected McClellan hoped to act so as to bring this compromise back into favor and into force as president, and needed to keep the war up and running until he was elected, after which he could bring the Confederate states back into the country under that arrangement. It seems, as a theory for his actions, as good as any other and better than most.

If one threw out that theory, one must return to the question of why McClellan failed in the field. Certainly one explanation entertained: that he was wonderful at preparing armies for battle but when operations away from his base began, he was terribly inept at actual leadership. This theory still cannot be discounted. Perhaps he truly mismanaged the placement of armies to protect Washington and truly miscalculated the number of men his enemy possessed in every case. Perhaps in a fight, he had no idea how to manage operations, how to move men where they were needed, and when this was combined with his fear of putting his men in harm’s way, this theory seems plausible.

Yet his mistakes in using his forces to best advantage usually led to more rather than fewer casualties than if he hit the enemy hard with his superior numbers and achieved a powerful but rapid victory. The capper to this theory would be the coming battle of Antietam. More on that in its proper place.

It is preliminary to hazard an assessment of McClellan’s intent because at this period, when his army still gathered at Harrison’s Landing on the James River, much key evidence had yet to appear. To that point, the incompetence theory could still be given precedence over the prolong-the-war, or even the lose-the-war theory.

McClellan’s conduct that followed his army’s retreat from before Richmond would tip the balance in the latter two directions. And his manner of fighting the battle of Antietam would add even more fuel the fire of suspected treason.

Chapter Five

It has already been noted that Winfield Scott had wished for Halleck as his replacement in the position of General-in-Chief in the first place and he had been foiled by Lincoln’s choice of McClellan.

At the time that Pope was transferred from the West to take over the secondary force in the East, the Army of Virginia, Lincoln made the decision to in fact bring Halleck over as general-in-chief. This finally took place on July 10.

This must have been Halleck’s great desire, the last step in his climb up the military chain of power. Certainly, short of becoming president, no one could go higher in a military uniform than the position of general-in-chief, which matches the modern day position of chairman of the joint chiefs of staff. It was surely the ultimate goal for which Halleck had carried out all his machinations and self-promotion in the West, taking as much credit and glory for himself while despising the recognition that fell upon his subordinates, who actually achieved the advances.

Halleck would not lead from the saddle, as McClellan had tried to do, any more than he had done out in the West. He would be strictly a desk general through the remainder of the war.

Provided he did not do too much damage from behind his desk in Washington, Halleck’s promotion could be considered a positive step, but only because it removed him one level farther from Grant and the other generals in the West, allowing them to operate much more freely. At the same time, also a positive development, anything that took away even a scintilla of McClellan’s power to do mischief was to be applauded. As long as Halleck held the position, McClellan could not be re-elevated to it.

The downside was having Halleck himself, in such a key position. He shared with McClellan the maneuver theory of warfare as opposed to the fighting theory of warfare. One could be unkind by defining the philosophies of both men as that of wanting to achieve great military successes while causing the enemy the least inconvenience possible—such as fighting and beating them.

That was on the field. Off the field, Halleck had already clearly revealed that he was more concerned about what would be good for Henry Halleck than what would be good for the war effort. Hopefully, in the high seat of supreme desk command in Washington, he could do less damage than he could do—and had already done—down nearer to field level. After all, Lincoln had check-mated him once, in the Grant affair, and perhaps he could do so as needed in the future.

With these changes, the arrival of Pope and Halleck in Virginia/Washington, and McClellan’s coming withdrawal from the region of Richmond, the major emphasis of the federal effort in the Eastern Theater would shift to the Pope-Halleck axis, at least for the time being.

The Union leadership could figure out that soon as he was rid of McClellan in his own back yard, Lee would turn his attention toward Pope, now hovering in the area of Virginia northwest of Richmond but not terribly close to it yet. Halleck authorized Pope to prepare his army to face off with Lee when the Army of Northern Virginia turned his way. This was not, however, carte blanche for Pope to undertake any major offensive yet, with good reason, in theory.

Because McClellan had insisted his army was too small and weak to defeat Lee now, Halleck prescribed that the two armies, Pope’s and McClellan’s, must be combined before the next big confrontation with the Confederates would occur. This was another case of Halleck using McClellan’s own claims against him, and it would eat at McClellan enough that he would rebel against the idea of cooperating.

Waiting for McClellan’s army to arrive and join him did not mean that Pope must hunker down and do nothing in the meantime, however. He was first authorized to move as far as Culpeper, a town only fifty miles from Washington, southwest of his current position and about ninety miles from Richmond.

Whatever Halleck, Lincoln, Pope, and/or McClellan could devise, Lee could figure out. If Robert E. Lee was a past master at one thing, it was in divining the likely moves of his enemy. He could look at a map and figure out the same formula, that Pope would wait for McClellan’s army to transfer back, and join with him in an even more massive force than had been used in the Peninsular Campaign. Then, this bigger army would sally forth again against Lee. That was the obvious assumption. That, however, was reckoning without the will of McClellan.

Lee’s best hope would be to lure the elements of this potential behemoth of an army out and begin beating them in detail. So far ahead of the curve was Lee that even while McClellan began the return to Washington, Lee prepared to transfer what forces he dared over to positions to intercept and begin damaging Pope.

This shift would be led by Stonewall Jackson, with 24,000 men, leaving the rest of the Army of Northern Virginia to insure that McClellan completely evacuated the area of Richmond before moving more men. The next stage would be for Longstreet to join Jackson, and after that, the rest of the Army of Northern Virginia would complete the move into the area threatened by Pope once McClellan was well and truly gone from the area around Richmond.

On August 8, Pope occupied Culpeper without any kind of opposition. Lee’s forces, under Jackson and Longstreet, gathered at the nearby town of Gordonsville by the Fifteenth of August.

The sad fact of Pope’s operation is that originally, he had intended to act so as to cause Lee to divert some of his forces to stop him, which would have been expected to open a direct lane for McClellan to attack Richmond. The sadness, of course, was due to McClellan’s utter failure to follow through on his end of the arrangement.

Now, with McClellan leaving the picture, Pope would convert his diversion into a prime offensive of his own when he received reinforcements from McClellan. On paper, the situation was favorable to the Union: the opportunity to bring Lee out of his defenses for a fight in the open against, indeed, the combined armies of Pope and McClellan.

In 1864 an entire campaign would revolve around attempts to draw Lee’s army out on open ground, away from defenses, so the more massive Union army could beat him outright. If in 1862, McClellan’s entire army flowed into place along with Pope, Lee ought not to have ever gained another foot of ground forward, and should have either been defeated outright or driven back to Richmond for a last-ditch stand. By all means, the huge Union army ought to have been able to lock Lee up south of the Rappahannock...forever.

Even in his restricted operations around Culpeper, Pope could not yet begin in earnest to confront Lee. Directly available to Pope were 44,000 men, too few with which to challenge Lee head-on. That was all right—when McClellan’s army fell in with him, the time for major offense would be more than ripe, in theory.

Still, some action developed.

Among the combined armies making up Pope’s main force was that of Nathanial Banks, who had been operating with his army up in the Shenandoah Valley against Jackson until the latter joined Lee nearer Richmond. On August 9, Banks led an advance force for Pope, from Culpeper, but eight miles out, came under artillery fire from a nearby height called Cedar Mountain.

Although Banks, one of those politicians turned general, like Benjamin Butler and others, was eager to carry on the attack, he led only 8,000 men and he knew he was against Jackson and his relative hordes. As willing as he was to be aggressive anyway, unlike certain professional generals, he also understood the concept of higher command and would not defy his boss, Pope, by attacking on his own authority; a messenger arriving from Pope resolved Banks’s dilemma by delivering the authorization to carry forward.

Initially, the assault by Banks against outliers of Jackson’s force found success, but Jackson arrived in person and through his charismatic power over his men, he rallied them; some say he went so far as to draw his sword for the only time in the war. In any case, his counter-charge sent Banks in reverse. The Jackson who had failed so many times, for whatever reasons during the Seven Days Battles had been replaced by the Jackson who would be Lee’s admitted right hand for as much longer as he lived.

Aware that Banks was only an element of a larger force, Jackson contented himself with chasing him back toward Culpeper. That was fine because Jackson, and Lee, had bigger things in mind.

The next day was Sunday and being extremely religious, Jackson preferred not to attack on the Sabbath, and no action occurred that day. On August 11, representatives of the Union army under white flag asked for an armistice while both sides removed the wounded and dead from the recent action around Cedar Mountain. With Pope lurking nearby leading an army larger than his own, Jackson was eager to accept the lull, which presented him with time to prepare a daring counter move of his own that would soon be initiated.

After dark, leaving campfires burning to convince the Union side that he was still present, Jackson evacuated his men south of the Rapidan River, a tributary of the Rappahannock flowing into the larger river west of Fredericksburg roughly in a V shape laid on its side, the open end facing west.

Pope shadowed Jackson at a distance, uncertain what was developing, careful not to fall into a trap, and in so doing, he fell into the trap.

Robert E. Lee, over the course of the war, would again and again violate a military maxim: one should not divide one’s forces in the face of a larger enemy army. Counter to that philosophy was the fact that if one did dare to defy the maxim, such an unexpected and unorthodox move might well surprise the enemy, and the chance existed of maneuvering a smaller force into a situation by which the larger force would fail to observe its presence. That was a recipe for a defeat of an element of the larger force by detail. Lee would develop this tactic to a T.

The problem, of course, was the fact that while the smaller element of the army that was divided conducted its surreptitious maneuvers, the rest of the army would be reduced by the amount of the force that had been subtracted for the special operation, which made the main army all the more vulnerable to the enemy before it.

In the present case, the gamble for Lee was all the greater because he knew Pope was in position to receive massive reinforcement before long from McClellan’s recently retreated army, lurking over nearby at Aquia Creek.

As for those reinforcements, up to August 25, the only ones that that reached Pope’s vicinity was a detachment from Burnside, 2,500 at Kelley’s Ford, a crossing on the Rappahannock, and Kearney’s division of 4,500 from McClellan who arrived at Warrenton Junction.

Directly with him, Pope still had that original 44,000 men. Just by himself, Jackson now had 30,000 men at Gordonsville. Pope could also draw 11,000 men from McDowell’s army, which had ultimately never been released to go join McClellan and thus was in the vicinity of Pope’s operations now.

This raised Pope’s army to 55,000 men, nearly double the size of Jackson’s division. That being the case, even while waiting for massive reinforcements from McClellan, Pope could now reasonably begin to undertake forward action of his own against Jackson, as long as the rest of Lee’s army was not within striking distance, as they were not, as yet.

Now began a drawn out process conducted by McClellan to avoid reinforcing Pope by a single man if he could avoid it. When pressed to move faster, to bring his army into place to at least protect Washington, before sending it in with Pope, McClellan responded,

“If Washington is in danger now, this army can scarcely arrive in time to save it; it is in much better position to do so from here than from Aquia.”

By “here,” he meant the jumping-off base of Fortress Monroe, far out on the Virginia Peninsula, at least three times as far from Washington as Aquia Creek. How he considered his army more able to protect Washington from so far away, rather than just downstream on the Potomac is not easy to imagine.

Of course, no logic existed in this response. Yet a reason did.

From McClellan’s point of view, Pope was a rival. He had come from the West, he had taken over a huge chunk of forces that had once been under McClellan’s command before he was demoted, and now, he was the man who would run the next offensive against Lee. A couple of points stand out which may explain the next phase of McClellan’s bad conduct.

One, he was being asked to relinquish “his” men in large numbers to this rival, who might achieve a major victory if he received them. If Pope did win the coming battle and it proved the beginning of the end for the Confederacy, it was Pope who would go down in the rest of American history as the great general of the Civil War. In that case, McClellan would receive not one scrap of recognition or glory.

Two, for McClellan to combine his full army with Pope’s would greatly endanger the chances of keeping the war going until the election of 1864, and if McClellan truly desired to delay the war that long, he must not help Pope defeat Lee now.

August 18, Pope withdrew north across the Rappahannock, aware that Jackson had moved away, but unsure where he was located; Pope had to put Jackson out of his mind for the moment, seeking instead to slow down the advance of the remainder of Lee’s army over the river. Skirmishes broke out along the Rappahannock but nothing that led to a general battle.

On August 22, Jeb Stuart’s cavalry rode around and behind Pope, capturing Pope’s headquarters wagons and papers, including personal items of the general himself, a humiliating loss for the Union commander.

It became clear to Pope that Lee was pressing forward against him in the same general direction Jackson had disappeared and he set himself the task of resisting this advance, still waiting for help from McClellan. Fitz John Porter did in fact join him, having arrived at Aquia then moved forward. Porter had not been sent to Pope by McClellan, he had been ordered there by Halleck, orders he would have been hard put to refuse. Still, Porter would not prove overly cooperative with Pope.

While leaving a force nearby at Warrenton, Pope began backing his main force to a position to continue blocking the forward movements of Lee’s army, waiting for what he was led to believe would be another 30,000 from McClellan. To extend his front against the potential onslaught, Pope called for Franklin’s corps, still with McClellan, to be sent to Gainesville; Heintzleman’s corps, who had also arrived from McClellan, were held temporarily at Warrenton Junction, with plans to go to Greenwich. Additionally, Pope wanted a division of McClellan’s men at Manassas Junction.

Other dispositions were made, all to either keep an eye on the elements of Lee’s army or to block their progress toward Washington, until Pope was reinforced to a level that would allow him to undertake forward, aggressive action of his own.

It need be borne in mind that Aquia Creek, where McClellan’s unused army remained, was not on the far side of the moon, relative to the operations ongoing under Pope. It was only on the order of thirty miles away and many of the movements by Pope’s own army, and those of Lee covered greater, and more difficult distances.

Pope believed he had set up his army in such a way that at minimum, he could stop Jackson cold, and defeat him and then Lee’s other elements in detail. Realizing instead that McClellan was not going to back him up, he decided to hit Lee where he could with what he had. At that time, Pope had 54,000 men.

What had Jackson done during this time? What was his game? Jackson had first disappeared behind the Blue Ridge Mountains, then emerged again over a pass called Thoroughfare Gap. Most of the remainder of Lee’s army had similarly slipped away, following the same route, which carried them west of Pope and then north of him, shielded by the mountains both from sight and from potential attack.

After returning through the gap to the same side of the Blue Ridge as Pope, the east side, on August 26, Jackson broke up the railroad six miles east of Warrenton Junction and the next day, Hooker, of McClellan’s army, fought Ewell, part of Jackson’s army, at Bristow Station, and Ewell was the loser.

Continuing on, Jackson had worked his way south of Pope’s main army again, entering the area around Manassas Junction.

Pope believed the situation was favorable to him, with Lee and Jackson separated from each other, ripe for defeat one at a time. What he failed to recognize was that he had placed himself between two good-sized armies, a situation known as an envelopment, a severely dangerous situation even for a larger army. Another way of looking at the problem was that Pope was partially surrounded.

To Pope’s view, however, he had Jackson south of him and Lee still on his way by way of Thoroughfare Gap. This seemed to Pope to be a set-up to defeat Jackson in detail

before Lee arrived, and he intended to dispatch Porter, at one in the morning, to Bristow Station, to close the net around Jackson.

For reasons which at the time appeared to be sheer disobedience, but which could be explained later as due to better judgment, Porter held back for hours before proceeding. At the same time, Kearny was likewise ordered to the same position, along with Hooker, and both complied with Pope’s orders.

(Hooker’s men were almost out of ammunition. It will be recalled that Halleck specifically ordered McClellan to ensure that the units sent to Pope were well supplied and he announced clearly that he had carried out the order, but in fact, he had not.)

Hooker was sent to pursue the beaten Ewell, toward Manassas Junction.

During the march that brought Jackson south of Pope, after having passed through Manassas Junction, Jackson had come across one of Pope’s base of supplies. While they were there, the Confederate force “appropriated” everything of use belonging to Pope and burned the rest, including rail cars.

Union General Franz Sigel had also been sent to intercept Jackson at Manassas but failed to react rapidly enough, and the Confederate general made a clean getaway. So close was the call that Pope reached Manassas Junction an hour after Jackson’s last men had pulled away, heading northeastward to Centreville. The ruins of their demolition activity were still smoking.

Pope sent Hooker, Kearney, and Reno in pursuit.

McDowell had also been on the move toward Manassas but now he was diverted by way of Gainesville also toward Centreville. McDowell was also apprised of the state of affairs, and ordered to recall his troops advancing on Manassas, (as directed before Jackson’s retreat was begun,) and to move out the road from Gainesville toward Centreville.

Having led Pope on this merry chase, Jackson had already turned westward, back to an anticipated rendezvous position with the rest of Lee’s army, near the town of Groveton, but Pope believed he had turned north. Pope now dispatched his forces also toward Groveton, unaware he was moving head-on into Jackson’s trap.

Jackson hit Pope’s advance forces under Gibbon but the latter held his own while the rest of Pope’s army came on to enter the fray. To Pope, it appeared that rather than springing a trap, Jackson intended to escape to the west.

Groveton was no more than a crossroads just outside the combat zone of the first Bull Run battle by under a mile. Less than another mile north of the town, a grade which had been prepared for train tracks that had never been laid ran through the area, with an excavated area cut through the terrain where the would-be rail line crossed a road, producing a defensive position behind which Jackson’s men waited for Pope.

Pope ordered the attack on August 29, initially by Sigel, while divisions under Hooker and Kearney hurried on from nearby Centreville, along with McDowell and Porter.

Sigel went into action at dawn of that day, and Jackson at first fell back, with the job of holding off the Union attack until more of Lee’s army could fall in with him and complete the trap. Initially, he suffered damage, taking refuge at the railroad cut, and low enough in ammunition that his men at one point defended themselves by tossing heavy rocks down at the nearby Union soldiers.

Pope’s attacks were poorly coordinated and did not result in Jackson’s retreat. Lee’s army came on quickly, filling in around Jackson, with Longstreet off the left of the Union army, his forces almost entirely screened by a line of trees.

At one point, Pope ordered Porter to attack but the latter had dispatched scouts who knew full well that Longstreet, not yet detected by Pope, was in position to shatter any attack that Porter might make, so he held fast. Later, he would be court-martialed for this and his other cautious avoidance of destruction when he refused to attack at Bristow Station.

Like Porter, on the other side, Longstreet was also ordered to attack directly, but he sensed that the best time had not come, and he held off, restricting his activity to using his artillery to break up Pope’s formations until he judged the perfect moment for the attack arrived. Only when he was satisfied that perfect moment had arrived did he make his move. Once that began, Jackson chimed in, attacking from the other wing, and the two forward assaults broke Pope’s line; the Union army sagged rearward on both wings, rallying for a time on Henry House Hill, the same place where Jackson had turned the tide in First Manassas.

Although Pope did conduct a strong fighting withdrawal, the result was another Union defeat at Manassas. This battle was to be known as Second Manassas/Bull Run.

Although he did send some forces to Pope, if McClellan had unleashed his entire army, Second Manassas would have been a major bit of revenge for the North. Despite Halleck’s best efforts to cause McClellan to fully assist Pope, however, McClellan still managed to hold back the divisions of Franklin and Sumner until it was too late.

Amazingly, or perhaps not so amazingly, given the author of the perverse masterpiece of non-support, McClellan went so far as at one point to send a communiqué expressing his preference to protect Washington and let Pope “get out of his scrape.” It seems at best an interesting time for McClellan to suddenly feel the need to protect Washington, especially when the force he considered a threat to the capital could have been beaten outright if he had sent the two divisions, and even more curious, given that Pope himself was physically in position between the enemy and Washington, so that in reinforcing him, McClellan would still be protecting the capital.

The evidence that McClellan indeed desired that Pope should be defeated, in order for McClellan to be seen as the savior of everything, existed in the form of a letter to his wife written August 23,

“I take it for granted that my orders will be as disagreeable as it is possible to make them―unless Pope is beaten, in which case they will want me to save Washington again. Nothing but their fears will induce them to give me any command of importance or to treat me otherwise than with discourtesy.”

At this juncture, McClellan’s actions in this episode fell into intense scrutiny in Washington and elsewhere.

Another letter from McClellan to his wife is revealing:

“I fancy that Pope is in retreat, though this is only a guess of mine...I don’t see how I can remain in the service if placed under Pope; it would be too great a disgrace...”

Stanton invited Lincoln to dinner and expressed the opinion that “nothing but foul play could lose us this battle & that it rested with McC. and his friends.”

When Lincoln learned of McClellan’s opinion that Pope should be left to extricate himself from his situation, he described it as a bit “crazy.”

Despite knowing Pope had been betrayed by McClellan, after losing at Second Manassas and retreating, Lincoln lost his enthusiasm for Pope. Rather than put the loss on McClellan, it was Pope who Lincoln construed as the greater failure because of Second Bull Run.

True, Pope was a braggart and he had made key mistakes, thus his defeat at Bull Run seemed to indicate he could not follow up his braggadocio with action, but he had fully anticipated complete support from his brother general. Whether a complete, war-changing victory was possible at Second Manassas if McClellan had cooperated cannot be said, but Lee was vulnerable at times during the overall campaign, and could have been broken in detail if hit with a stronger Union force.

With Pope’s army retreating, Washington fell into another panic of fear that Lee would march in and take the city. Major actions were taken to protect the city and people fled. Lincoln was downcast, but Stanton was upbeat.

In the aftermath of Second Manassas, revoltingly, it was McClellan who was rewarded just as he had anticipated in his letter. Against the wishes of most of his staff and the government, but sustained by Halleck, the president restored McClellan to command of the entire army in the field. Again, indeed, McClellan was being called upon as the “savior.”

Pope, on the other hand, would be relieved of command and sent to a far less important job, never to figure heavily in the war again. McDowell would be likewise sidelined, but the man who bore the brunt of Washington’s displeasure over Second Manassas was Fitz John Porter. While men in the field, and some officers, in yet another parallel to First Bull Run, labeled McDowell and Pope as traitors in the way they handled Second Manassas, before he was dismissed, Pope managed to prefer charges against Porter for insubordination, making the case that he refused to charge twice during that campaign.

Pope had not believed, until the situation was too far gone, that Longstreet was in place to the left, at Second Manassas, as Porter tried to tell him at the time. Porter had been sustained by reports of several other officers but Pope had not agreed. He insisted upon construing Porter’s refusal to charge against Jackson at the railroad grade as actionable and eventually, a court-martial found Porter liable and he was dismissed from the army.

(After the war, based on evidence which included the testimony of the enemy commander who had triggered the controversy, Longstreet himself, Porter was retroactively vindicated, but not until 1889.)

As an afterward to Second Bull Run, in describing his overall conduct, McClellan claimed,

“The troops composing the Army of the Potomac were meanwhile ordered forward to reinforce the army under Gen. Pope. So completely was this order carried out, that on the 30th of August I had...under my command only a camp guard of about one hundred men. Everything else had been sent to reinforce Gen. Pope. In addition, I exhausted all the means at my disposal to forward supplies to that officer, my own headquarter teams even being used for that purpose.”

This was, under the best light, an exaggeration of mythical proportions. Nevertheless, McClellan was restored to overall command and given another chance to play the glorious hero despite again having avoided taking the action necessary to end the war while it was still relatively young.

A final word on this scenario is telling and will be continued in the aftermath of the next battle in Virginia.

Lincoln related to Gideon Welles, Secretary of the Navy, who recorded in his diary Lincoln saying, “I must have McClellan to reorganize the army and bring it out of chaos. But there has been a design—a purpose in breaking down Pope, without regard of consequences to the country. McClellan has the army with him.”

Welles added in his own words in the diary, “My convictions are with the President that McClellan and his generals are, this day, stronger than the Administration with a considerable portion of this Army of the Potomac.”

This line of reasoning matched Lincoln’s words, after Antietam, that the army was essentially McClellan’s protective service.

In short, there seems to have been some fear of McClellan and his army, that he might take Washington and the government in a military coup if he was crossed. Such a possibility, raised in McClellan’s own words, has been presented already. McClellan was the subject of much debate among Lincoln’s cabinet after Second Manassas. They argued among themselves but shielded the president from much of it. Some of them wrote a letter of protest but they would not all sign it.

Stanton and Chase wanted McClellan removed and disgraced, with Chase believing McClellan should be shot as a traitor.

Nothing of the sort happened, and McClellan carried on, leading into the final episode of his time in command.

Part V: War in the West Continued

Chapter One

Prior to the elevation of Henry Halleck to general-in-chief, he still commanded the huge army he had assembled after Shiloh, now in possession of Corinth as a result of Beauregard’s strategic withdrawal.

The opportunities lying before this army were almost unlimited. Southwest of Corinth, the back door to Vicksburg seemed wide open, while the front door to Chattanooga was beckoning in the other direction. Mobile, Alabama, to the south, was a sitting duck and even Atlanta was ripe for the picking, or would be soon. In an open, straight-ahead fight, the Confederate forces would seem to stand little chance against Halleck’s juggernaut, so he could have succeeded in taking on any new target he chose, and upon winning it, another and another, thus rolling through the Deep South in perhaps a year.

The comments and/or official dispatches from three perspectives illustrate the possibilities before Halleck at this juncture. The first, from Grant’s memoirs:

“After the capture of Corinth a movable force of 80,000 men, besides enough to hold all the territory acquired, could have been set in motion for the accomplishment of any great campaign for the suppression of the rebellion. In addition to this fresh troops were being raised to swell the effective force. But the work of depletion commenced. Buell with the Army of the Ohio was sent east, following the line of the Memphis and Charleston railroad. This he was ordered to repair as he advanced—only to have it destroyed by small guerilla bands or other troops as soon as he was out of the way. If he had been sent directly to Chattanooga as rapidly as he could march, leaving two or three divisions along the line of the railroad from Nashville forward, he could have arrived with but little fighting, and would have saved much of the loss of life which was afterwards incurred in gaining Chattanooga....”

(Personal Memoirs by Ulysses S. Grant [Charles Webster and Company, New York,] p. 201)

From Virginia, in a patently self-serving way, even McClellan made what was at least a halfway practical suggestion, through Secretary of War Stanton:

JUNE 10, 1862—3.30 p.m.

Hon. E. M. STANTON,

Secretary of War.

I have again information that Beauregard has arrived, and that some of his troops are to follow him. No great reliance—perhaps none whatever—can be attached to this; but it is possible, and ought to be their policy.

I am completely checked by the weather. The roads and fields are literally impassable for artillery; almost so for infantry. The Chickahominy is in a dreadful state. We have another rain-storm on our hands. I shall attack as soon as the weather and ground will permit; but there will be a delay, the extent of which no one can foresee, for the season is altogether abnormal. In view of these circumstances I present for your consideration the propriety of detaching largely from Halleck’s army to strengthen this, for it would seem that Halleck has now no large organized force in front of him, while we have. If this cannot be done, or even in connection with it, allow me to suggest the movement of a heavy column from Dalton upon Atlanta. If but the one can be done, it would better conform to military principles to strengthen this army. And even although the re-enforcements might not arrive in season to take part in the attack upon Richmond, the moral effect would be great, and they would furnish valuable assistance in ulterior movements....

GEO. B. McCLELLAN,

Major-General, Commanding

The laudable suggestion in this was not the idea of detaching troops from Halleck to McClellan, but rather the notion of going for Atlanta. He probably selected Atlanta on the notion that once there, if not overly damaged by Confederates trying to defend it, a force could move north in a similar way he had proposed for Buell to pass the mountains through the Cumberland Gap and come up on Richmond and Lee from behind. This is in fact the formula ultimately employed much nearer the end of the war and had it been tried now, while the Confederate army still had some power in the Deep South, such an attempt on Atlanta would probably have failed. But at least McClellan had made the point that something worthwhile toward the resolution of the war ought to have been undertaken at that time.

John Nicolay, who worked day in and day out with the president wrote the following opinion, referring to Halleck, in the time before he was removed from the West and installed as general-in-chief,

“Nor were the general’s plans and actions any more fruitful during the following six weeks. He wasted the time and energy of his soldiers multiplying useless fortifications about Corinth. He despatched Buell’s wing of the army on a march toward eastern Tennessee but under such instructions and limitations that long before reaching its objective it was met by a Confederate army under General Bragg, and forced into a retrograde movement which carried it back to Louisville. More deplorable, however, than either of these errors of judgment was Halleck’s neglect to seize the opportune moment when, by a vigorous movement in coöperation with the brilliant naval victories under Flag-Officer Farragut, commanding a formidable fleet of Union war-ships, he might have completed the over-shadowing military task of opening the Mississippi River.”

(Nicolay, p. 275)

The last part of the final sentence referred to the potential taking of Vicksburg.

To analyze the various possibilities for Halleck’s huge army, it is arguable that Chattanooga was the best choice, the most doable mission, as the army’s next objective, for a few reasons. It was a key railroad nexus, and it has already been made clear why such locii were of prime interest in controlling the Deep South. Secondly, if Chattanooga could have been taken so early in the war, the Confederacy would be forced to rally all available men to prevent the successful Union army from indeed turning the corner of the mountains and threatening Richmond from behind. All other missions for the Confederate army would almost have had to be suborned to that, leaving smaller forces on the federal side the opportunities to slip in, for instance, and seize Vicksburg much more easily than would be the eventual case.

Sending Buell to weasel his way to Chattanooga, rather than to blast forward and possess it immediately, was one of the great mistakes of the war and rests forever on Halleck’s head.

If Buell had secured a base at Chattanooga and more divisions were sent in behind him to solidify then challenge the Confederates, Braxton Bragg, (who succeeded the ailing Beauregard in overall command of the main Eastern army) would have almost been forced to abandon the entire Deep South and throw in with Lee for one grand all-out battle to save Richmond and what remained of the Confederacy.

This might seem preposterous, to think that most of the Confederate fighting power in the Deep South would evacuate to Virginia, but what good would they have done scrapping with just portions of the huge Union Army while the core of their nation was in dire threat from two great forces, north and south of Richmond?

It is difficult to see how the war would have lasted more than a year had Buell managed to take Chattanooga ahead of Bragg, and with help of other federal forces available, to hold it.

It is also difficult to understand why the brain-trust in Washington could not perceive the truth, that the war was already being won by the actions of the Union forces in the West, not in Virginia, in 1862.

This point cannot be overemphasized. One could say that all the leadership in Washington had to do was feed as much manpower into the West as possible and let that army take control, which has already been discussed based on Lincoln’s notion of finding 100,000 more men for McClellan, instead.

As an alternative to Chattanooga, Vicksburg, which would soon come into focus as a target, could have been taken easily after Corinth if the full power of the army had been turned in that direction. After taking Vicksburg, that army could have left a garrison and still directed its force on Chattanooga.

After Farragut’s magnificent success against New Orleans, he followed up by continuing on to Natchez, taking that city on May 12, and six days later, first attempted to seize the bastion of Vicksburg.

Because Vicksburg sat on a bluff over the Mississippi, and artillery could fire down on ships in the river, it seemed apparent that a land force would be required to dislodge the defenders and neutralize the guns from the east. With no land forces to do the job, Farragut withdrew, but the new commander of New Orleans, Benjamin Butler sent a force north to explore possibilities against the cities along the Mississippi. By now, however, under Earl van Dorn, the Confederate garrison at Vicksburg was too large to be beaten by the force Butler had dispatched, commanded by Thomas Williams.

The Mississippi River, as previously described, makes a loop at Vicksburg, creating De Soto Point, a peninsula-like strip of land. The shape of the point presented an inviting possibility for bypassing the guns based in the city. If a canal could be cut across the western end of the point, ships could sail past beyond reach of Confederate guns and the river would be open to the Union again, and the Confederate army in the city could be isolated and left to run out of food or abandon the post without a fight.

Williams set his men the task of digging such a canal but did not get far. Weather and other conditions of the area drove him away and he withdrew to Baton Rouge.

Farragut returned on June 28, and shelled the shore defenses at Vicksburg, but could not dent them. In the process, however, he was able to make a successful run past the city on the bluff, demonstrating that at least some shipping could make it through, even under the gun. Memphis had been captured from the north by Flag Officer Charles Davis’s gunboats on June 7, so when Farragut reached that city now, he had in fact demonstrated that it was not entirely impossible for Union ships to navigate the entire length of the Confederate-held Mississippi, but it was not a practice that could or should be attempted often, and certainly did not mean the river was open to the Union in a practical way. Not until Vicksburg was neutralized would that be true.

Vicksburg did not remain long the only defense for the Confederates along the Mississippi. They would plant another fortress at Port Hudson in Louisiana, and at the same time, in secret, they constructed a primitive ironclad ship they called the Arkansas and on July 15, it carried out a sortie against Farragut’s ships, inflicting severe damage to three of them. After Farragut made the return passage to New Orleans, he shelled the Arkansas where it was moored, but the attack scarcely rattled the ironclad, and for the time being, with the shore guns and the Arkansas in place, that entire stretch of the mighty river was declared off limits to the Union.

In coming months, tremendous efforts would be brought to bear in an attempt to neutralize the guns of Vicksburg but the first opportunity, the window that had opened immediately following the capture of Corinth, quickly closed again.

The 80,000 men at Corinth under Halleck did not represent the entire strength of the Union in the West, any more than those under Beauregard, now at Tupelo, exhausted the Confederacy’s lists.

When Buell, commanding the Army of the Ohio, had joined with Grant at Shiloh, before April of 1862, he had left two divisions behind, one of which was commanded by General George W. Morgan. This force was tasked with blocking the northern exit of the Cumberland Gap, in the area in which Zollicoffer had operated before being routed by George Thomas, prior to Grant’s taking of forts Henry and Donelson.

Morgan’s presence meshed with Lincoln’s continued dream of providing succor to the Unionists in that area.

Those Unionists had not remained idle while waiting for help from the outside. Early in the war, Union agents had smuggled weapons and supplies into Eastern Tennessee and Unionists in that area, believing they were supporting an invasion by federal forces, attacked Confederate outposts and burned five bridges. When no federal armies showed up to protect them, several of these saboteurs were rounded up and five of them hanged, while more were imprisoned by the Confederates.

Certainly, these Unionists had conducted themselves in the manner that Winfield Scott had predicted, but when they were not protected, nothing came of their heroics and many suffered for it.

Their continued presence was one of the reasons that the taking of Chattanooga had a high priority for Lincoln.

While holding the city would allow incursions into Georgia, the first interest of Chattanooga was to serve as a base from which help could be extended to the Unionists of Eastern Tennessee. If by federal pressure from Chattanooga, Confederate forces in the Unionist regions could be cleared out long enough, Morgan would be ready to pounce on Knoxville. Until that opportunity opened up, however, Morgan must wait because the natural lay of the land would make it impossible for him to penetrate the gap while fighting enemy forces at the same time.

The second detachment from the Army of the Ohio that was operating in the area had split off from Buell’s main force while it was still approaching Pittsburg Landing, before the battle of Shiloh. The separation of this small army had led to the belief that was passed off on Beauregard that Buell would not be coming to Shiloh.

By now, this unit was operating independently in northern Alabama, having reached Huntsville, alarmingly close to Chattanooga. Soon, this division, under astronomer-general Ormsby Mitchel, had bagged Bridgeport, Alabama, almost walking distance from Chattanooga. From there, that is, from the south, Mitchel menaced not only the railroad/river city itself, but Knoxville as well, exactly as Morgan’s potential operation required.

If Mitchel proved enough of a threat, the Confederate forces protecting the southern opening of the Cumberland Gap would surely have to turn on him, handing that window of opportunity for Morgan to punch through to Knoxville. Between the two alliteratively named Union generals, a pincer movement might chase the area clear of Confederate fighters entirely, and deliver, at least for a time, security to the Eastern Tennessee Unionist who lingered in the president’s thoughts.

Out of Mitchel’s presence in the northern Alabama-Southern Tennessee-Western Georgia region comes one of the most intriguing, and in a way romantic, if hopeless operations of the war. About a hundred years later, a movie would be made roughly based on the ill-fated expedition. The first Medal of Honor winners would be those involved in the operation.

Forming the expedition, twenty-one hand-picked soldiers from Ohio were led into Atlanta by a mysterious civilian named James Andrews. Several of the twenty-one had backgrounds as railroad engineers, and at the town of Big Shanty on the rail line from Atlanta to Chattanooga, they commandeered an engine called The General, and releasing all but three freight cars, ran an almost comical rail chase miles to the north, with the aim of destroying bridges and tunnels in the approaches to Chattanooga, in support of Ormsby Mitchel’s operations, which he hoped would land him Chattanooga itself.

The commando team never succeeded in destroying so much as a single bridge, however, and all were eventually caught and eight hanged as spies, but their daring and bravado gained them grudging admiration and respect from many people in the South, even some of their pursuers and civilians in two cities, Atlanta and Chattanooga.

Indeed, after the war, survivors of the escapade eventually met some of those on the Confederate side who had played a part in the pursuit. The fact that the whole thing came to nothing never seemed to detract from its allure as a true tale. The Medal of Honor, often erroneously called the Congressional Medal of Honor, had just been devised, and these men were the first to receive it, except for the leader, Andrews, who was a civilian and thus not qualified.

Many of the twenty-one, during their frantic escape, made contact with Unionists in the hills around Knoxville, who aided them as much as they were able.

In the larger picture, however, Mitchel had placed too much confidence in this wild-hare of a mission, expecting the men would succeed in blocking the rail lines into Chattanooga from Georgia, which would have somewhat isolated the town until the damage could be repaired.

When the sabotage mission failed, Mitchel was forced to abandon his own attempt to take Chattanooga, and the entire expedition ground to a halt.

As has been indicated, during his tenure in command in the West, after taking Corinth, Halleck broke the grand army into four parts. It was during this time that Pope was summoned to the East to take command of the Army of Virginia, replaced in the West by William Rosecrans.

Halleck held back Rosecrans’s army to serve garrison duty in Corinth for a time. With Buell and his Army of the Ohio, of four divisions, on their way to Chattanooga, as Grant described in his memoirs, Halleck dispatched Sherman to Memphis with two divisions, while General McClernand—like the aforementioned Butler and Banks, a politician-turned general—received orders sending him to Jackson, Tennessee, partway between Memphis and Nashville, also with two divisions.

Sherman and McClernand formed part of the Army of the Mississippi, and their commander was Grant. Sick of operating right under Halleck’s thumb, Grant had obtained permission to make his headquarters in Memphis. When he was suddenly recalled back to Corinth to meet with Halleck, he must have been thinking “what now?” Surely Halleck had found yet another reason to level some new tirade against him for some new transgressions Grant was unaware of having committed. Perhaps in the worst case, he would be yet again yanked out of command and derailed.

Instead, the news he did receive must have been stunning: in that meeting, Grant learned that Halleck was leaving to become general-in-chief and Grant would take command of the District of West Tennessee. In the same strange way he had snubbed Grant for so long, Halleck had avoided, for as long as possible, informing Grant of the changes and the promotion.

Despite his petulant final act in the West, at least Halleck would no longer be breathing directly down Grant’s neck. Perhaps he would find a new way to continue sniping at Grant, from his mighty new position as general-in-chief, but that would be less onerous than having him so close by, and perhaps with all his new duties, Halleck would not be able to vent his phlegm as often at least.

And as general in chief, Halleck ought to have no further reason to be jealous of Grant’s success, since he had reached the highest military position that existed in the Union and ought to be content with that.

In parting, Halleck had one more insult for Grant. The position of commander of a district did not carry the authority equivalent to the head of a department. Halleck could have elevated Grant to the higher level but instead, he left the position open, unfilled.

Insult to injury, while not receiving the promotion to commander of the West, all the orders and responsibilities that would have devolved upon the higher position still fell into Grant’s hands. In other words, he was burdened with all work load of a department/theater commander, but without portfolio, so to speak. This could be construed as a parting backhanded slap by Halleck, but hopefully the last such. Ultimately, Halleck held back the higher promotion for Grant until October 25, of that year, 1862, but in the last part of the war, Grant would enjoy the last laugh, by far, at Halleck’s expense.

In Tupelo, Beauregard, while still in command, had been reinforced with 40,000 men from van Dorn and Price, after they had pulled out of Missouri and Arkansas following their battle at Pea Ridge in the latter state.

In his memoirs, Sherman made the point that the Union Army now held a three hundred mile long front in upper Mississippi, Tennessee, and Alabama, and Beauregard had his choice of places along that line to hit. Had Halleck kept the larger army together, Beauregard would not have dared make any such move.

In considering this Union defensive line, it is worthwhile to examine Buell’s progress across Mississippi and Alabama, bound for Chattanooga. As Grant pointed out, Buell was tasked with maintaining the railroads as he went. Buell was one of those commanders who moved his forces slowly, even in good circumstances. When he must slow down even more in order to repair railroads, he was hardly faster than if he were stopped.

Buell’s chief tormentor was a cavalry general named Nathan Bedford Forrest, a former slave trader with no military background, who had taught himself how to fight, and very well. His name has already appeared in these pages with regard to his alarm over the arrival of Buell’s men late on the night of April 6 at Pittsburg Landing.

Forrest would soon be reckoned one of the great and feared generals in the war. He used his cavalry in every conceivable way, much of it unorthodox, but highly effectively, conducting operations almost as if his army was a uniformed guerrilla outfit. Beside his maxim of getting to the point of battle with the most men, he was also famous for calling on his forces to “put the skeer [scare] on ‘em.”

In be-devilling Buell now, Forrest tore up rail lines behind the Union general as fast as Buell could repair them, making all the extra work utterly worthless. By all means, Buell ought to have followed Grant’s advice and made all speed to invest Chattanooga and worry about the railroads when he could, but no, he lollygagged his way and as a result, Braxton Bragg, replacing Beauregard, beat Buell to the goal.

If Buell had rushed forward and seized Chattanooga, the defensive line Sherman had described would have been anchored at both ends, Corinth and Chattanooga, providing bases from which the Union forces could operate while holding the Confederates mostly south of the rail lines.

This would have gone a long way toward preventing Confederate forces from ever re-entering Tennessee and Kentucky and soon what Confederate forces still operated in the area would have been the ones who were isolated and would have soon either surrendered or must make their escape to join with the rest of the Confederate forces south of the long defensive line.

Instead, due to Buell’s slow progress toward Chattanooga, a genie would be released that would take months to contain again.

Separate from Beauregard/Bragg’s main army, and Forrest’s cavalry, three other fairly significant secondary Confederate forces operated in areas that menaced the Union presence. Any one of those elements, or even the entire combination could have been heavily damaged, if not wiped out by Halleck’s grand army if it had remained intact, but since it had not, they were magnified in relative importance.

Among those lesser outfits, hanging on in the area north of Knoxville was an army under Edmund Kirby Smith. This was the force that kept Morgan from crossing the Cumberland and capturing Knoxville and one of those describe above as being a candidate for isolation if Chattanooga was secured. If Buell had taken Chattanooga, an expedition could have been dispatched to assist Morgan in defeating Smith, opening Eastern Tennessee entirely to Union forces.

A second Confederate force was one of 16,000 men under Earl van Dorn, who still hovered around Vicksburg, defending its eastern approaches; a third force of the same size operated under Sterling Price. Currently, the latter army was serving as an adjunct to Bragg’s main army at Tupelo, but it was easily detachable to conduct other duties as needed. These formed elements of the additional 40,000 man reinforcement of Bragg’s army mentioned earlier.

Had Halleck allowed Sherman and McClernand to remain at Corinth, they could have neutralized Price and van Dorn, with practically a flick of their wrists, but they were not there now, so the small, pesky Confederate armies were free to stir up mischief, when released from Bragg’s direct command and sent forth on their own.

The movements that broke up Halleck’s grand army began on the June 10 of 1862. It was on the Twenty-Seventh of that month that Beauregard suddenly absented himself from his own army on medical leave, to be replaced by one of Davis’s favorites, Braxton Bragg. Throughout his life, Beauregard had never been a well man for long at a time and the stress of the last several months caught up with him now and he disqualified himself, temporarily, from war.

(It will be remembered that he had still been recovering from throat surgery when he joined Sidney Johnston in the lead-in to Shiloh.)

Bragg had run smaller armies in the periphery of major actions up to this point, beginning in Pensacola, Florida, then contributing at Shiloh. Now he had command of the major Confederate army of the West.

Initially, Bragg offered no plan to save Chattanooga, Knoxville, or any other place that was threatened by the Union in the West. His first job, as he saw it, was to put the army he was inheriting back on its feet, after the fighting at Shiloh and illnesses contracted by so many in the unhealthy climate of Corinth. In this project, Bragg hunkered down there at Tupelo, fifty miles or so south of Corinth, and concentrated on rejuvenating his men using the strong medicine of discipline.

Edmund Kirby Smith, popularly known as Kirby Smith, had been shot through the neck at First Manassas but he was back in the saddle, and he knew that Buell was approaching from the west; with Morgan hovering close by in Kentucky, drooling over the chance to take Knoxville from the other side of the Cumberland Gap, Smith could perceive the threat of a pincer move against him, by Morgan and Mitchel, exactly what those two wished to carry out. Smith put in a plea for help, but from Tupelo, Bragg initially responded by telling him there would be no way he could help Smith, due to a drought in the northern part of Mississippi that would make it impossible for his armies to advance without losing too many men and animals to thirst.

If the Union high command was blasé about the West, the Confederate leadership was almost criminally neglectful of it. Neither a campaign to defend that region, nor to undertake offensive operations was in the works, in Richmond. Davis essentially handed Bragg carte blanche to do what he could, to hit the Union forces whenever and wherever he could, but that was it. No massed plan, no master scheme to use the four armies operating in the region existed.

In search of a plan of his own, Bragg sounded out Beauregard in a letter on July 21, laying out his alternatives: remain in place at Tupelo, doing nothing; attack Grant at Corinth; move into middle Tennessee, essentially crossing through Buell’s wake as he approached Chattanooga, with the purpose of disrupting supply lines between him and Grant; or attack Buell outright and claim Chattanooga.

When the four possibilities were considered, Bragg believed only the last was reasonable. After having proclaimed to Kirby Smith that he could do nothing to alleviate Smith’s situation, Bragg suddenly announced to Jefferson Davis on that same date of July 21 that he was moving out against Buell. Bragg believed that by use of cavalry, he could hide his actual whereabouts until he was before Buell, ready to fight. What he offered Smith was an opportunity to participate in at least stopping if not defeating Buell. That offer and plan, however, would balloon into something much bigger, if ultimately disastrous.

Bragg was capable of some of the same species of grandiose notions of glory that would have done justice to Beauregard himself. Under his circumstances, it ought to have seemed ambitious enough merely to try and keep Buell from capturing Chattanooga. Instead, Bragg and Kirby Smith discovered they both entertained the idea of taking back all of Tennessee, and that not being enough, Kentucky. To Davis, Smith elucidated his own thinking: “My advance is made in the hope of permanently occupying Kentucky. It is a bold move, offering brilliant results.”

Once again, major military strategic planning and policy was being formed by the generals in the field, not the supreme leadership in the capital, with the information flowing uphill rather than down. At this stage of the war, the leadership in Richmond, as far as the West was concerned, was little more than a rubber stamp committee.

What Bragg and Kirby had agreed to attempt is described in most accounts of the war as part of a grand two-pronged advance by Confederate armies into the North, a double-barreled, coordinated effort designed to gain so much ground as to turn the tide of the war. That makes for a dramatic idea, but the problem with it is that is not true.

What is true is that by sheer coincidence, generals in the two theaters of the war saw reasons to conduct separate raids northward, and instead of those raids being designed and ordered by the Confederate government, the government was informed of the plans and offered the veto if they chose to put a kibosh on either raid. With nothing better in mind, Davis and his staff accepted the plans and wished the generals luck, in effect.

One of those raids would be led by Robert E. Lee, aimed at Pennsylvania. The raid now planned by Bragg and Smith was aimed at Louisville and then Ohio.

The latter operation could not be opened up immediately. First, a major bit of transportation wizardry had to be conducted by Bragg, and in so doing, he had to beat Buell to Chattanooga and the city at his back, before setting out on the northward raid. The raid itself would so wildly divert Buell that he would not muster any attempt to defeat Bragg at the doors of the railroad city.

An attempt ought to be made to understand the mentality of the raid plan by Bragg and Smith. Their words were bold, that they would change the whole character of the war in the West, would produce “brilliant” results—a popular phrase of the day—and they hoped to produce something glorious out of very little, by retaking both Tennessee and Kentucky, and even menacing Ohio.

The truth of the matter is that Bragg and Smith were freelancing, finding themselves facing depressing odds and in need of something spectacular to turn the situation around. It was clear that by sitting in place, in Tupelo and north of Chattanooga, while the Union held the gap between, and had the manpower to keep them isolated while taking more and more territory, they would achieve nothing and soon, their armies would wither as military forces. Yet it cannot be said, however, that their idea was without at least some basis in logic, up to a point. If Bragg and Smith fought Buell head on, it ought to have seemed reasonable that Grant would have pulled together larger forces to reinforce Buell than Smith and Bragg could combat, even if they were initially successful. If they held Chattanooga and kept Buell out, then focus would turn on that city and Grant would no doubt throw larger forces at them. If they carried the fight away from Chattanooga, but in front of it, using their operation as a screen, they stood a better chance of cornering Buell alone, at least initially, before they must face Grant’s response. That would be a classic defeat of detail not in a local way but in a theater-wide manner.

Two major ideas powered their plan. In the first idea, Buell still maintained his supply line all the way down from upper Kentucky, at Louisville, through Tennessee, and if it were disrupted, he would have to stop where he was and even retreat, not back to Corinth along his lateral line, but northward, toward Louisville, by way of Nashville.

The second idea was less concrete: Bragg and Smith both believed that the men of Kentucky were largely latent secessionists, and surely, the theory ran, that upon seeing the approach of Confederate armies, the suppressed secessionists of Kentucky would join up in droves, raising the armies to grand new levels of manpower, large enough to whip everything the Union could send after them. By the theory, the reason the Kentucky men had not joined the Confederates was out of fear of retaliation against their families by federal forces. If Confederate forces were present, the men would be protected and free to join with the South, Bragg and Smith reasoned.

With this huge new army, Bragg and Smith could easily defeat Buell and after polishing him off, they could turn in triumph and rampage against Grant’s armies.

Surely, the theory ran; as to the actual process, it seemed reasonable from the point of view of Bragg and Smith that while they made their foray into Tennessee, Chattanooga would be left alone because all Union attention in the West would be drawn to them as they threatened Louisville, and even possibly Cincinnati. One can go so far as to argue that Bragg and Smith really had little enough to lose and if their expedition should go the right way, the Confederacy would be back in the game in the West, at least for awhile.

That is the best that can be said about their planned excursion up into Kentucky.

The worst is that it appeared to be a Quixotic escapade offering not “brilliant,” but on the contrary, quite dubious possibilities.

It is difficult to deny that in a dark way, an almost romantic element swirled around the zany plan shared by Bragg and Smith, almost a mirror image in that way, of the railroad chase of Andrew and his little band. This theory, however, that secessionists lurked in large numbers in a once-neutral state and would rally to the Confederate flag when it passed before them, wasn’t confined to only those two generals. Lee’s coming offensive northward, designed to carry into Maryland and even Pennsylvania, was supported by the same theory, that the men of Maryland, evidenced the year before by the riots against the Union army in Baltimore, would, in the same manner as the Kentuckians, join the Confederate army and swell its ranks beyond what McClellan could handle.

Only if this proved true and as a result, they were drastically reinforced, did Bragg and Smith ultimately stand a chance of success, however. Without the massive influx of new recruits they imagined, the armies available to Grant could contain them, and if their immediate enemy, Buell, conducted the campaign against them correctly, they should never survive as an army to return to Mississippi and Alabama. While they were engaged in Tennessee and Kentucky, Grant’s other armies could contain van Dorn and Price.

The basis for the campaign revolved in the beginning around luring Buell away from Chattanooga. That was not wishful thinking. Buell did indeed still, after having joined Grant at Shiloh, then carrying on with Halleck to Corinth, and now, crossing the upper tier of the Gulf States toward Chattanooga, maintain his supply base at Louisville. That meant his arms and other supporting equipment and food had to be moved through most of Kentucky and Tennessee. Buell was similar to McClellan in refraining from living off

the land by taking from the local economy to sustain his army. Thus no matter how much distance he covered and what actions in which he became engaged, Buell depended on that supply line from so far away. This insistence on maintaining such a long supply line made him vulnerable. If Bragg and Smith could disrupt his line, Buell might feel he must give up on Chattanooga and turn north, to defend his supply route. Doing so would put an end to his entire Chattanooga mission.

To prevent Grant from immediately reacting, in the first stage of the great operation, Sterling Price and his 16,000 man force would keep Rosecrans, Grant’s immediate subordinate commander on the field busy at Corinth, while Bragg made his getaway from Tupelo.

To even attempt this great campaign, Bragg must first reach Tennessee from his base in Alabama, without being hit prematurely by Buell’s army on its leisurely way toward Chattanooga. He must do so and reach Chattanooga before Buell. If he plunged north from Tupelo, he would be bringing about just what he designed to avoid, fighting Buell in the vicinity of Chattanooga. He needed to reach Chattanooga without encountering Buell, or any other federal army on the way.

In order to carry this out, Bragg devised an amazing itinerary for his men, using trains to first turn south, from Tupelo to Mobile. No rails crossed the wide bay on which the city rested, so he would move his army across by water, then take up a different rail line, finally heading north, and continuing by train up through Alabama, to West Point and Atlanta, both in Georgia, reaching Chattanooga from the east.

The ground track of the entire journey roughly described a huge U.

The last stretch of this massive transfer would make use of the very same rail lines traveled by the Union men who had hijacked The General. That being the case, it is clear what a huge crimp in this operation the daring expedition run by Andrew would have presented if the train line in Georgia had been disrupted by the destruction of bridges.

Despite the complexities of the expedition for Bragg’s army, Buell’s snail-like progress toward Chattanooga was handing Bragg the time he needed. The route had the further benefit of allowing Bragg to disappear from Union eyes for much of the way.

Although trains would obviously move men faster than they could travel on foot, the use of rails on this maneuver was not as simple as it might sound. Not merely two but six different rail lines and thus several transfers would be required, in order to move 31,638 men. Each change of train was a logistics nightmare of its own, and would not happen in only a few minutes. Still, the process by train presented far greater advantages than disadvantages.

By July 29, all of Bragg’s divisions had set out on their grand tour to Chattanooga.

Van Dorn’s initial mission of protecting Vicksburg came to nothing once Grant demonstrated no interest in that objective at the time. This had the advantage, however, of freeing up van Dorn’s army to join with Price in his contention with Rosecrans, who was leading Grant’s army as the on-the-field commander while Grant.

Unfortunately, the two generals, van Dorn and Price, still did not work well together on a personal level. They squabbled over the same issues, about rank and authority, that had made them a poor team during the earlier operations in Missouri and Arkansas.

Bragg directed Price to try and insert his army between Buell and Chattanooga to slow down the latter’s advance even more. To reach the necessary position, Price must work past a small force under the Union’s Eighth Wisconsin at the town of Iuka, Mississippi, about twenty-one miles east of Corinth near the Alabama border.

The Eighth proved no match for Price and it fell back to Corinth, leaving supplies behind in its rush. Rosecrans, however, moved across from Corinth and ousted Price from the town. Finally, van Dorn came to his senses and agreed to cooperate with Price, to form a joint effort to throw the remaining Union forces out of Corinth, before taking part in Bragg’s and Smith’s grand Tennessee campaign, with Bragg.

On October 3, Price and van Dorn approached Corinth.

Rosecrans’s immediate force was down to only twenty-one thousand, while van Dorn and Price together had thirty thousand. They planned to circle around Corinth and come at Rosecrans unexpectedly from the northwest, but Grant sped reinforcements to Rosecrans from other locations, and this made van Dorn and Price vulnerable to being flanked.

On the Third and Fourth of October, van Dorn attacked Rosecrans repeatedly. Rosecrans had his men outside their breastworks and van Dorn actually broke through into the city streets for a time on the Third, but he believed he could finish the Union forces off early the following day and did not press the advantage. That next morning, fighting centered on two Union batteries, during which, in bitter hand to hand fighting, the Union held position. Eventually the Confederates were forced to pull out but Rosecrans did not pursue until October 5, when he defeated van Dorn at Hatchie Bridge in Tennessee, then let him get away.

While it was important in its own right, the fighting around Corinth was only a sideshow to the struggle for Chattanooga, Tennessee and even Kentucky. The significance of the fight for Corinth was the demonstrated inability of van Dorn and Price even to hold their own, never mind to take back territory in Mississippi while Bragg and Smith were fighting a war of diversion outside the region.

Chapter Two

While waiting for Bragg to make his long-way-around approach, Kirby Smith must divide his forces, both to hold off Morgan at Cumberland Gap, and to intercept and block Buell from seizing Chattanooga ahead of Bragg.

Fortunately for the Confederates, Bragg was able to rush units ahead of his main army to help Smith, with the result that by the time Buell approached Chattanooga, Bragg was able to combine his men with 9,000 Smith had forwarded, creating an army large enough to hold Buell at bay outside of Chattanooga. This of course was preliminary to the maneuver to threaten Buell’s supply line and draw him even farther from Chattanooga.

As Grant had dreaded, Buell’s creeping progress to Chattanooga had cost the Union that city for now.

Bragg, upon his arrival, conferred with Smith and suggested the latter should concentrate on Morgan at the Cumberland Gap while Bragg moved out in front of Buell. This would force Buell to deflect his route away from Chattanooga in order to defend the territory in Central Tennessee that he had taken in the earlier operations before Shiloh. This comported with the notion that if Grant sent forces to help Buell, then van Dorn and Price could reclaim territory abandoned by Grant/Rosecrans, beginning with Corinth.

It has been seen how well that plan, van Dorn and Price against Corinth, worked out when it was put into action.

Confederate cavalry raids into Kentucky returned information reinforcing the belief that the men of Kentucky would indeed join the Confederacy and grow their combined army as Bragg and Smith dreamed.

Balanced against that news were reports that reached Smith telling him that Union General Morgan was so well supplied on his side of the Gap that getting rid of him would take longer than Bragg might want Smith to spend. He wrote on August 9 to Bragg suggesting he bypass the Cumberland Gap, make for Lexington, Kentucky, and as a result, “invest” the Gap from the other side, which was to say, from behind Morgan.

Bragg preferred to play it more cautiously, asking Smith to leave 5,000 men to deal with Morgan. By that, he meant men were to be stationed on the Tennessee side of the Cumberland Gap to discourage Morgan’s going through from Kentucky. He did not choose to believe that Morgan was as well supplied as Smith indicated and thus would be unable to challenge Smith’s men on the Tennessee end of the pass. Bragg was not ready for Smith to leave the vicinity and venture so far into Kentucky until the former had a bead on Buell and knew he could deal with him.

Despite his cautious note, Bragg almost gleefully speculated that van Dorn and Price would be able to blast their way into Tennessee and all four armies could come together...in Ohio!

In compliance with Bragg, Smith dropped off 9,000 men to entertain Morgan and slipped through another gap in the Cumberland Mountains, and occupied Barbourville on the Eighteenth of August. The first glitch in the overriding theory of the invasion came when the Kentuckians refused, in flocks, to join the Confederate army. Never mind, Smith would make up for the lack of volunteers farther in the heart of Kentucky. He thought.

Still not yet deterred from aiming at Chattanooga, Buell moved along the rails to Huntsville, then Bridgeport, where his own man, Mitchel, had thoughtlessly destroyed a bridge that Buell needed.

When he received a message through Halleck from the president complaining of his slowness, Buell was astonished and expressed his dismay to Halleck, who commiserated with him, claiming to understand his problems and promising to assuage Lincoln. This exchange took place in the June 12, 1862 time frame.

Buell had 46,000 men, not even counting Morgan’s force at the Gap, but subtracted were 15,000 which had to be dispatched to protect his supply lines from Nashville, the same supply lines that ultimately extended all the way from Louisville, which Bragg had designs on threatening.

The job of repairing the Mitchel-wrecked bridge stalled Buell for two weeks. If this were not enough, several other unhelpful events conspired against Buell. While his supply line from Huntsville to Nashville was protected, raiders indeed broke the upper segment, from Nashville to Louisville. This forced Buell to live off of what he had with him, and meantime, reports reached him that 15,000 Confederates had departed Knoxville for Nashville, (not true, it was Smith going north,) and again, he was threatened by Halleck with being fired for not moving fast enough; all this came down upon him while the rest of Bragg’s men piled into Chattanooga on the rail lines north from Atlanta.

Just as all his troubles were multiplying, it seemed, so was the enemy before him.

In better days, when all had seemed well, Buell had promised that if Bragg emerged from Chattanooga, Buell would attack him. Lo and behold, Bragg was doing just that, but now, due to the worries over his supply line, Buell must instead be content with holding on to what he already had, which was Nashville, rather than taking on a battle at that time. Therefore instead of confronting Bragg now, Buell turned northward to the town of Dechard, a move which discouraged everyone on the Union side who was watching his progress and hoping for something better.

The final, almost comic act Buell carried out before he left the front door to Chattanooga was to destroy the new bridge he had spent two weeks reconstructing, in order to deny its use to the Confederates.

To the Confederacy, Buell’s huge northward, left hand turn, was more than the cause of a sigh of relief, it was treated as victory, because Chattanooga had been saved, and so far, without a shot fired. Ironically, achieving Chattanooga by outmaneuvering the enemy without a fight, a process carried out by Bragg, was exactly the kind of strategy that Buell himself espoused.

September 2, after a skirmish at Richmond, Kentucky, Kirby Smith occupied Lexington. The townspeople welcomed his army joyfully and the next day he rode into the capital of Frankfort, intent on capturing the government, only to find that the pro-Union, legally endowed state legislature had evacuated to Louisville, some distance to the west of Frankfort.

Smith consoled himself by menacing Louisville itself and even Cincinnati, while waiting for Bragg to join him.

Except for the lack of volunteers from among the Kentuckians, the program established by Bragg and Smith seemed to be proceeding swimmingly. On top of everything else, Buell was in Nashville and appeared to be retreating.

After all, Louisville was his own base and now Kirby Smith appeared to be ready to take it.

While Buell had been derailed from his great mission of taking Chattanooga, to characterize his presence in Tennessee as a retreat would have been a false impression. While he defended his supplies, he also intended to fight and defeat the pesky Confederate armies that had dared to invade northward. Given that those were the only large armies available to defend Chattanooga, after defeating them, he should be able to return south and take it...without much of a fight.

The day Bragg reached Glasgow, Kentucky, Buell arrived in Bowling Green, thirty-five miles west, and he was not running away. With reinforcements sent from Grant, Buell had 56,000 men. He thought Bragg had 60,000 when in fact it was more like half his own number, and still, he set off in pursuit, something, one must admit, that McClellan, for instance, would never have done.

On September 13, Bragg made contact with a cavalry squad under Smith’s command and sent back a communiqué that he had completed a “junction” with Smith, although the main armies were still physically far apart. At Mundfordsville, Bragg captured 4,000 men of a small Union garrison and turned to confront Buell, who had just arrived at nearby Cave City, named after the Mammoth Caves just to the north.

Bragg attempted to trigger a battle on his own terms but Buell would not rise to the bait and rather than forcing a battle under conditions not to his liking, Bragg moved on.

Buell suspected Bragg was bound for Louisville, and he trailed him, looking for a situation in which he could face off with a portion of Bragg’s army rather than the whole thing, and defeat the smaller piece in detail. Bragg, however, never reached Louisville, peeling off to the east, cutting through the neighborhood of Lincoln’s birth, making for Bardstown instead.

The warm welcome Smith had enjoyed at Lexington had not translated into many volunteers for the army. To console themselves, Bragg and Smith concocted the theory that surely the locals wanted to join with the Confederacy but were too afraid of reprisals if the Union should regain the ground.

Worse, Bragg learned that a volunteer force had been collecting at Louisville, not to fight for the Confederacy, but rather for Buell.

Bragg did not dare take on Buell alone, but neither would he ask Smith to abandon his position at Frankfort. He did have something up his sleeve, however, that should result in an influx of volunteers after all. It will be recalled that early in the war, when his long defensive line through forts Henry and Donelson still existed, Sidney Johnston had created a provisional Confederate government of Kentucky. Certainly, when his defensive line ruptured and he totally evacuated Kentucky, that rump government had gone into exile, much the way the Claiborne Jackson government had been forced to do in Missouri.

Now, it was the legitimate, pro-Union government of Kentucky that had fled, abandoning Frankfort ahead of Bragg’s arrival. Into the vacuum created by this move, Bragg intended to recreate the bogus Confederate government of Kentucky; this one, however, would not be brought forth in far away in Bowling Green, but right in the capital itself. To lend some sense of legitimacy to the process, Bragg sent for the man who had been named lieutenant governor of Kentucky under Sidney Johnston’s faux Confederate government, in place of the “governor,” who had been wounded at Shiloh. Thus it was that one Richard Hawes was to be installed as official governor of the Confederate state of Kentucky, in Frankfort.

While this drama was being produced and directed at Frankfort, Buell arrived in Louisville, hailed as the savior who would keep Bragg and Smith away. Ironically, at this point, orders reached Buell relieving him of command, to be replaced by his long-time deputy, George Thomas, who was directed to act vigorously in prosecuting the campaign against Bragg and Smith.

The promotion came as an embarrassment to Thomas, however, who argued that the transfer of command was untimely because Buell’s preparations were already in place for a move against Bragg and Thomas recommended that Buell be left in command long enough to carry out his own operation.

This was a rare act of selflessness and Lincoln and Halleck agreed to the arrangement, but not entirely for the reasons Thomas cited. From their point of view, it would be a bad message, and appear unseemly if Buell, the man currently being hailed as the savior of Louisville, were sacked while still acknowledging the cheers of the grateful citizens. Thus George Thomas was instructed to consider the order replacing Buell as suspended for the time being. This would prove an all around mistake.

The date of this activity was September 30, 1862.

With his combined force of army veterans and the newly joined Kentucky recruits, Buell had an army 75,000 strong, which ought to have been reckoned another super-army that could have cut through anything before it. Again, that magic number arose, the number of men Lincoln had called for to form the entire army of the United States at the outset of the war, 75,000, yet here the number represented only a subsidiary element of the overall collection of Union forces operating in the West. Such had the war grown that a 75,000 man army was no longer unquestionably an unbeatable force.

With Bragg currently at Bardstown, Kentucky, and Smith remaining in Frankfort, Buell intended to insert his army as a wedge between the two so they could be beaten one at a time. His initial move was to make a show of turning his attention upon Smith, by conducting a feint, or “demonstration” using that group of 15,000 recent volunteers from Louisville, while with the remaining 60,000 he headed for Bragg, ready to fight.

During the interval when Bragg personally visited Frankfort to participate in his travesty of creating a Confederate government of Kentucky, he left Leonidas Polk in charge of his army at Bardstown. Ironically, it was Polk who, in capturing Columbus, Kentucky, months ago, had soured the legitimate Kentucky government against the Confederacy.

The demonstration by Buell’s 15,000 against Frankfort succeeded so well that Bragg bought into the notion it that he was up against Buell’s main army. From Polk came word that other Union forces were on their way against him at Bardstown, and that Polk would back up, watch them, and count on merging the two Confederate armies, which he thought too far apart.

Bragg agreed with that assessment; in the midst of his sham inauguration ceremony, he heard the guns of Buell’s demonstration unit and made ready to fall back to Harrodsburg, where Polk was now waiting, to pull the two armies together as Polk had urged.

The situation was nearly farcical. Each Confederate commander now believed he was the one facing Buell’s main army and responded accordingly.

Across that part of Kentucky, a drought had fallen, causing many creeks to dry up, which meant water was scarce. This was the same situation which had caused Bragg to hunker down when he had taken over this army at Tupelo, Mississippi before concocting the scheme to come up here into Kentucky with Smith.

Rumor circulated that water was to be found at the town of Perryville, and correctly assuming that the Union forces would be no more immune to thirst than his own, Bragg calculated that elements of Bragg’s army would be drawn there to the source of water near that town, and he intended to take them on. Already, units of the army under Polk had already made their way in that direction seeking to reach and control the water first.

Indeed, divisions of Buell’s army spread out in search of the now precious liquid; they found what they sought at a stream called Doctor’s Creek, but unfortunately for their needs, Polk’s advance men had already arrived, setting snipers in place to attack the incoming Union soldiers.

The commander of the first federal unit to reach within smelling distance of the stream was a captain temporarily raised to the rank of general, by the name of Gilbert.

The overall focus of the major Kentucky operations, Union as well as Confederate, now zeroed in on this trickle of water, where Buell surmised Bragg’s entire army would soon concentrate if it had not already. He directed several columns on his own to that place, aiming for a convergence the following day.

A grand sense of confusion fell over the entire region, in which neither side knew exactly what they faced. Buell believed now he had the whole army of Bragg and Smith before him, while Bragg believed he had only a smaller, weaker element of Buell’s, still working under the assumption that the 15,000 man decoy had in fact been Buell’s main army.

As a result, the Union army in nearly its full strength hit one of the weaker units of Bragg’s army. The attack did not come from any order by either side, it simply broke out on its own. The action opened up when a newly minted brigadier general under Buell, named Philip Sheridan decided to seize control of the water source from the snipers. When the smaller force of Confederates reacted, Sheridan brought in the rest of his brigades, and his commander, the temporarily graded major general named Gilbert sent in two more divisions.

In this time, much of the rest of Buell’s force was filling into place, north of the action, a matter of 55,000 men strung out on an eight mile front, two miles short of Perryville.

Nothing of substance came out of the exchange of fire between the Sheridan/Gilbert forces and the Confederates, and the confrontation there petered out for a time. Still, the overall situation teetered on a knife-edge of tension, needing very little to push it into a full-fledged battle.

This lull bought Bragg time to gain a fuller understanding of the situation; he moved more of his men up to support the small number who were standing off Buell’s 55,000, managing to keep most of them hidden by screening trees.

Polk, the commander who was actually present on the field and thus exercising immediate command, finally dispatched his men on attack in the northern sector of the arena, in an assault that staggered the recently arrayed Union forces on the other side.

The two armies had aligned themselves along an eight mile front, yet the only section of that line where they became fully engaged was this northern section in which Polk attacked. Other skirmishes broke out with give and take in both directions. At one point, Sheridan drove his opposition into the town of Perryville, while south of him, Confederate cavalry managed to screen off the Union forces, which never truly entered the battle.

What did not happen was a coherent focus of forces in one dramatic explosion of battle. Despite the mismatch in size, the Confederate army held its own by inadvertently dispatching larger forces against smaller elements of Buell’s army.

The explanation for the odd situation, in which battles in one sector were not known in others resulted from acoustic anomalies. Anyone who has hiked through hills and up canyons would recognize the situation. One moment, one may hear a river flowing nearby and the next, just rounding a corner, a silence suddenly develops, because the sounds of the water skip over an area, creating a dead zone.

This was the effect of the terrain at Perryville. While accounts exist of people dozens of miles away from a battle hearing it clearly, at the same time, people only thousands of yards away did not hear anything at all. Even so great a phenomenon as the detonation of Mount St. Helens, in Washington State well over a hundred years later exhibited this same sound-skipping phenomenon.

Buell was among those who did not hear the battle. Bruised from having been recently thrown by a horse, he sat out the early stages of the fight convalescing in a tent in the rear, unaware of the action until late in the day.

The battle dribbled to a stop as dark came on, but now that he was aware of it, Buell desired to continue it. This time, the confusion that developed revolved not around acoustics but the passing of orders, with the result that no one learned their commander wanted the fight to continue, and some time after midnight, aware that once the rest of Buell’s forces jumped into the picture, he would be defeated, Bragg withdrew his army from the scene while the getting was good.

The next day, Bragg assembled with Smith’s army near Harrodsburg, and Buell came on, but the two armies hunkered down almost eyeball to eyeball, each waiting for the other to strike.

Information reached Bragg, now, that van Dorn and Price, attempting to take back Corinth had failed, as had Lee in his own northern advance into Maryland. If this were true, Bragg was now commanding the only major Confederate army that was not in jeopardy, and home suddenly seemed a long distance away. Rather than risk another major battle and the possibility of defeat or entrapment far up in Kentucky, Bragg made the decision to disengage and withdraw while he was able.

Thus Buell soon found that his enemy was gone, off to Bryantsville. Buell pursued but was not yet ready to attack again, although his subordinates begged him to stand and fight. He only sent out skirmishers, who jousted with Bragg’s rearguard but no general battle resulted.

Receiving word that again, Confederates were moving on Nashville, Buell turned off his pursuit at Mt. Vernon and returned, believing Bragg would go there. He was wrong.

A term for the position an attacking army reached before falling back was “high water mark,” of course based on the notion of an incoming then ebbing tide. The raid by Bragg and Smith that carried their men as far as Frankfort, Kentucky was the high water mark for Southern forward thrusts in the West. That was the last and greatest chance of a Confederate master stroke outside of Virginia that might conceivably change the momentum of the war.

With Lee’s defeat, however narrowly, in Maryland during his own campaign north, the Confederacy would fight the rest of the war on essentially a defensive strategy, despite the fact that Lee would lead another raid northward the following year. As will be seen, that raid was less a hopeful master stroke than it was a desperate bid to slow down the overall Union advance. After Perryville, certainly in the West, the Confederate armies would struggle merely to hold what they had, while watching even that trickle away, or in many cases, disappear in a torrent.

What cannot be said, however, is that the Confederate armies would go down easily or willingly, and they would have enough courage and tenacity to hold up the war for over two more years.

Buell only held onto command through the Perryville debacle due to the loyalty of George Thomas. Buell had actually been living on borrowed time since his failure to take Chattanooga but after letting Bragg get away in a draw at Perryville, when he had him dead to rights must have surely sealed his fate, and he invited Halleck to get it over with and make the move to replace him now.

One could sympathize with the soldiers on both sides in this entire sorry affair that culminated in Perryville, a campaign in which their respective commanders had fumbled away excellent chances to win a major coup, and instead, led their men into totally useless battles and death. The soldiers of the North and South all deserved better commanders than Buell, Bragg, and Smith.

It is intriguing if fruitless to imagine the results had Thomas indeed taken over when the job was offered to him. He would in due time prove he could and would fight, and surely something better would have resulted than the outcome at Perryville as it was actually fought. Thomas would have been unlikely to leave Bragg’s army alone so as to escape Kentucky intact.

Still, the Union had been the beneficiary of the campaign in Kentucky, if by no more than the continued whittling away of Confederate manpower. If indeed Bragg and Smith had recruited a few more thousand men for their trouble in Kentucky, the operation would have been somewhat worth it. They had taken a gamble and lost, and while they had not lost much in a substantial way, such as Chattanooga, in their absence, they had gained nothing.

Yet that is not entirely true, either. They had bought time leading to the election of 1864, in which, unknown at the time, McClellan might win and end the war more favorably to the South’s desires.

After receiving orders to move back into Eastern Tennessee, Buell finally fell to the blade of the administrative axe, replaced, however, not by Thomas, who remained deputy, but by Rosecrans. That decision would prove to be a faulty one.

George Thomas was a commander who would not move until he felt conditions were as perfect as they could be made. Once he was satisfied, however, he would fight, and fight well. Had Thomas taken the reins after Perryville, instead of Rosecrans, it is likely that Chattanooga would have fallen into Union hands far sooner and with far less suffering on both sides. One would reckon that a chance to end the war much sooner had again been lost when Rosecrans was named commander of Buell’s army instead of George Thomas.

Part VI: The War in the East: After Second Manassas

Antietam and Beyond

Chapter One

Again, McClellan’s conduct in the Second Bull Run affair presented Lincoln with a major decision. The cabinet and many others believed McClellan had, in modern parlance, left Pope hanging out to dry by doing all he could to see that he lost and failed at Second Manassas. There hardly seemed any secret to it. Indeed, by any reasonable consideration, if Fitz John Porter could be cashiered over his inaction at Manassas, McClellan, at the very least, ought to be in the stockade. Most other generals who had carried on the way he had would have been there long before now.

Instead, Lincoln gave McClellan yet another chance and Nicolay makes what passes as an explanation:

“Under such conditions, Mr. Lincoln saw that it was necessary for him personally to exercise at the moment his military functions and authority as commander-in-chief of the army and navy. On the morning of September 2, therefore, he gave a verbal order, which during the day was issued in regular form as coming from the general-in-chief, that Major-General McClellan be placed in command of the fortifications around Washington and the troops for the defense of the capital. Mr. Lincoln made no concealment of his belief that McClellan had acted badly toward Pope and really wanted him to fail; ‘but there is no one in the army who can man these fortifications and lick these troops of ours into shape half as well as he can,’ he said. ‘We must use the tools we have; if he cannot fight himself, he excels in making others ready to fight.’”

(Nicolay, p. 313)

In the Eastern Theater, the initiative for action was being left clearly with Robert E. Lee. The fact that no plan existed for a forward thrust by Union armies at that time would have been deplorable but for the great successes that had occurred in the West.

This would have been a good juncture at which to simply deploy the Union armies across the Rappahannock River as a cordon sanitaire to seal Lee inside, and send every other available force to the West. A defensive line not unlike Lee’s in upper Virginia earlier in the war would have sufficed, and plenty of railroads and surface roads were available for use as interior lines.

This would have allowed Lee to fester, or else to be forced into fighting under conditions more favorable to the Union, something that would be dearly desired in 1864. Certainly, if nothing could be gained now by fighting Lee on an aggressive level, nothing could be lost simply by containing him, while the war continued to be won in the other theater.

The Union army was set in the mode of merely reacting to whatever Lee should do instead of carrying the fight to him. Grant would have a comment on this mindset in 1864; suffice to say, he did not think much of it, but Grant was not present in Virginia in late 1862.

The fact that the Union army, so much larger than Lee’s when the elements in Virginia was combined, allowed itself to be bottled up inside the defense of Washington, lacking the spirit to become pro-active should have been difficult for the nation to swallow.

At last, by remaining idle for awhile, Lee was actually conducting the strategy most favorable to the Confederacy’s chances of survival, that was to say, avoiding loss of men while waiting for the election of 1864 to approach. The problem for the Confederacy was that this scenario did not sit well with Lee and he would not permit the status quo to reign for long.

In fact, it was not entirely to the best interests of his army to hold place for very long. Reasons have already been presented to explain why an army occupying the same place for long periods of time was an army in decline.

If Lee felt an imperative to move his army, where could he go? Left or right, east or west would achieve nothing and if he sidled too far one way or another along the Rappahannock River, the Union might be roused from its lethargy, under some new general, and make a run at Richmond or even try to flank Lee’s army.

If he moved his army much farther south of the river, he would be potentially ceding precious Virginia turf to the Union. What direction did that leave?

The obvious answer, if not the most reasonable one, was north.

The concern about keeping an army on the same ground, plus Lee’s mentality which cried out for action formed two of three solid reasons for a move and the third reason strongly advocated that the move should indeed be northward.

Lee’s armies depended in large part upon the farmers of Virginia to support men and animals in provender. This was a situation that plagued all the Confederate armies, in that they, unlike the intruders in blue, had no choice but live off the land. The Southern land was in fact their supply base, as long as they fought inside their own borders. While this appears obvious, it meant that although Union commanders such as Buell and McClellan were generous in not burdening the base of their enemy by drawing supplies, the Confederate army had no choice.

As a result of the continued operations by the Army of Northern Virginia in the region, nearly anything that was edible by man or beast had been picked clean. Lee saw the need to reverse the situation and live off the land of the enemy for awhile, leaving Virginia agriculture the chance to rebound and become able to support the war again.

The state of Maryland sat only a river crossing from Harpers Ferry, by way of the Shenandoah Valley. Despite the fact that the state had remained in the Union, elements in Maryland were strongly secessionist, as was made clear by the sorry actions of the Baltimore citizenry and the government early in the war when they tried to block the arming of Washington.

Just as Bragg and Kirby Smith had anticipated a wave of secessionist recruitments in Kentucky, Lee anticipated the same thing in Maryland. A “raid” into that state, and possibly beyond, could thus have “brilliant” results, as the popular phrase went, taking stress from the Virginia farmer for awhile, putting a considerable scare into the Northern population, and hopefully reaping a bonanza of new men as soldiers.

Even more factors, however, entered into Lee’s plan. Up to that point, while dim, the hope that France and England would recognize the Confederacy had not yet gone away. If Confederate armies could thrust far into the North and actually threaten northern cities, such a success might convince the French and English that the Confederacy was in fact a viable nation and so the European states might yet come around, despite the thorny problem of slavery and other issues, and make a move in the Confederacy’s behalf.

Finally, the Congressional elections of 1862 were still ahead and if they took place with a Confederate army active in Northern territory, a tide of change could be voted in that would force Lincoln to concede the war and leave the Confederacy independent, two years before the previous “drop dead” time period of the presidential elections.

When taken as a whole, all these points converged for Lee as a ringing answer to the question, “What next?”

Lee wrote to Jefferson Davis on September 3, 1862, describing and defending his plan. Lee offered Davis the opportunity to put a stop to the plan, but he took the precaution of setting the operation in motion before Davis could receive the message and call off the operation if he wished. This puts an end to the notion that the two raids north, the one by Bragg and Kirby Smith, and Lee’s, were coordinated in Richmond. Lee devised his own raid and sprang it upon Davis with as little warning as possible before he started moving, leaving no time for Davis to have participated in the decision or to coordinate Lee’s raid with Bragg’s. When connected to the fact that Richmond provided neither input nor particular encouragement to the Bragg/Smith raid, it is clear both operations were more on the order of wildcat plans by commanders exercising no direct correlation with each other.

As to the raid itself, Lee shrewdly considered the pace at which McClellan tended to act, which was somewhere between the speed of molasses and lava on flat ground, and from that, calculated that he ought to be able to not just reach Maryland, but all the way past that narrow neck of the state and already penetrate into Pennsylvania by the time McClellan could catch on and mount an effort to intercept him. Perhaps in the process, his army might meet and destroy smaller columns of the Union army as a whole, employing tactics not unlike those Jackson had carried out in his masterful Shenandoah campaign earlier in the year.

And indeed, Lee had Jackson with him, and perhaps Stonewall could weave his magic again. It was a long time since Jackson had failed Lee, as he had done in Virginia early in the Seven Days Battles. Jackson was now Lee’s top deputy, and with him, Lee seemed to feel almost invincible.

By all means, this aggressive operation blew to pieces the concept of a defensive war that Davis had originally developed. And undoubtedly it was risky, but something big had to be tried and this was it. Given the way the war was unfolding in the West, and with that, the dwindling prospects that the Confederate army could otherwise hold out until the next presidential election, this appeared to be the sublime moment to go for a killing blow, while any element of the overall Confederate army was still capable of it.

What would be the ultimate goal of such a raid? Certainly when it was over, the Army of Northern Virginia must return to its home base. It could not actually occupy or hold land in the North. There would still be fighting to do when this expedition was over. Probably, Lee would have thought, the best result would be to sack some key northern city or perhaps wreck a key bridge that carried rail lines over the Susquehanna River in Pennsylvania, and perhaps, for a time, actually capturing and holding a Union capital, which in that case would be Harrisburg. With a healthy helping of luck, by the time he must take his army back to Virginia, the US would have been scared out of the war and his return would be triumphant.

On the negative side of the ledger, in assessing such an operation, Lee’s main concern was a supply line, and how much ammunition he would be able to bring along. He must string that line through the Shenandoah Valley, making use of the screening Blue Ridge Mountains to protect against Union attempts to break the line. To make that happen, one of the first moves must be the neutralization of the Union garrison holding Harpers Ferry, the town having been left to federal control after Jackson’s Shenandoah campaign. Lee meant for his supply line to pass through Harpers Ferry, and obviously it could not do so if the place remained as an enemy base.

Lee saw no cause to believe Harpers Ferry could not be seized. He need only threaten the supply and communication line between Washington and the river town and federal forces would have to abandon it. If they put up too much of a fight, he could persuade them to leave by placing artillery on the three high points above town and threatening to rain “metal” down upon them.

Lee’s penchant for dividing his forces has been discussed previously. Often, these divisions were part of detailed operations counting upon precise timing for coordinating attacks, scenarios which had not always worked out perfectly, if they worked at all, for most commanders. More often, the tactic had been successful for Lee, and it would be even more so in the future. When those tactics did succeed, they presented the greatly desired “brilliant” results, as at Second Manassas.

In the operation Lee devised to seize Harpers Ferry and carry forward into the North, the choreography among the separated units would be far more complex as well as more crucial than anything he had tried yet. Indeed, what he planned now seemed to teeter on that knife edge between insanity and genius.

Lee intended to separate his army into three distinct elements that would move in intricate, far-reaching columns in order to seize Harpers Ferry, while preventing any intrusion by outside federal forces in the process. After taking Harpers Ferry, the columns would recombine in Maryland, before preceding on into Pennsylvania, hopefully all before McClellan became aware and could even begin to mount a response.

It is unlikely even Lee would have dared this gambit against most other generals and he was gambling, as it was, that Lincoln would not come to his senses and suddenly replace McClellan with someone more interested in stopping Lee.

The key to Lee’s plan was the line of mountains that began with the Blue Ridge and extended across the Potomac, all the way to Chambersburg, Pennsylvania. His columns would move in and out through passes in those mountains, appearing and disappearing in short pulses, most of the time remaining invisible from the Union, on the inner, or west side, which in Virginia represented the floor of the Shenandoah Valley.

Because of the complexity of the plan, in which columns must travel vast distances out of touch with each other, then reconvene at a precise time, to ensure that all the key commanders knew their timing and routes, Lee wrote up detailed instructions which he issued as Special Order Number 191.

On September 4, Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia set out by marching to Leesburg, Virginia and fording the Potomac into Maryland on the Sixth and Seventh.

The first hitch developed when thousands of Lee’s men stayed on the Virginia side of the river. Some refused to cross, claiming they had signed on to defend the Confederacy, not to invade the North, while others were too sick to physically wade the river, and the feet of some were too tender to withstand the harsh surfaces of macadamized roads in Maryland. More still had needed to recuperate from the campaigns of summer, at Manassas, something Lee had not been willing to allow them and they could not go any further without a rest, so they stopped at the river, and all along the road leading to the crossing at Leesburg.

This represented a considerable loss in crucial manpower for the Army of Northern Virginia.

The next disappointment was the almost utter disdain of the Marylanders for the Confederate army. The feelings of Baltimore citizens for the Union was apparently not shared out in the countryside after all. Most of the men in Maryland who were ever going to join the South had evidently already done so, and those in the region where the army crossed were not slave holders to any extent, and did not sympathize with the Confederate cause.

Indeed, such were the feelings for the Confederates that the Marylanders would later describe how the odor of the filthy army announced its arrival ahead of it.

Because of the fall-out of manpower at the Potomac River, from the sixty-six thousand with whom Lee had set out on this expedition, it was now down to around fifty thousand.

The columns would be separated for the Harpers Ferry operation in the Maryland town of Frederick, a few miles north of the Potomac. On September 7, Lee occupied that town.

On that same day, now aware that Lee had broken out and was moving north, McClellan set forth from Washington, also bound for Frederick, but obviously several days behind Lee.

It is a sad commentary on McClellan’s intelligence system that an entire army could have left Manassas and reached into Maryland before the general became aware of the fact. Nevertheless, now he knew and he set his army in pursuit.

Unlike Lee, who was so adept at outguessing his own enemies, no one could outguess the unorthodox Confederate general himself. The most frightening possibility as far as the denizens of the national capital were concerned would be for Lee to lead his army northward across a stretch of Maryland and turn south, attacking Washington from the north. (An adjunct of Lee’s army would actually attempt this in 1864.)

Fortunately for the Union, that threat would be neutralized by the fact that McClellan’s army, by its default position in trailing behind Lee’s, would automatically form a protective shield between Lee and the national capital, preventing any such attack.

James Longstreet was conservative from a military point of view, and served as an excellent counterpoint to Lee. Longstreet disapproved of Lee’s plan to divide the army into columns. On the other hand, the aggressive and some might say flamboyant Stonewall Jackson was delighted with the idea.

Under any circumstances, given the makeup of the Army of Northern Virginia, an operation such as that of seizing Harpers Ferry by separated columns would have been handed over to Jackson to perform. The disapproving Longstreet was handed the job of protecting the more vulnerable secondary columns during the time they were separated from all others. Had Lee made those kinds of decisions, placing the right men in the right positions in other future operations, particularly where Longstreet was concerned, far better outcomes might have resulted.

Using gaps in the diagonal line of mountains that formed the Blue Ridge, south of the Potomac, then their extension, the Catoctin Mountains in Maryland, Lee and Jackson moved the columns into the Shenandoah and Cumberland valleys, with one column swinging well up the Potomac to the northwest, as far as Hagerstown, then down through Martinsburg, driving any Union forces “out there” into Harpers Ferry, where they were to be gathered up like ripe grapes.

The reason that three separate columns were required had to do with the topography of the area of Harpers Ferry.

Three high vantage points overlook Harpers Ferry, each separated from the others by a river. None of these positions could be reached and occupied from any single rendezvous point in the vicinity, necessitating separate columns to arrive from far-flung directions in order to appear over the town with artillery in hand.

Since the purpose for seizing the town was to hold open the supply line for the advancing army, once Harpers Ferry was in Confederate hands, a garrison would be left behind, while the main columns would re-form in Maryland.

(It need be noted that in actual fact, Lee’s army was separated not into three but four columns, the last being Longstreet’s, held back to the north as a reserve to block off gaps in the mountains against Union interference. )

By September 12, Lee’s army was well beyond Frederick, Maryland, when McClellan’s trailed into town. The following day, soldiers of McClellan’s army discovered a copy of Order Number 191 wrapped around three cigars, apparently dropped unknowingly by one of the Confederate commanders who had been privy to the secret communications, while Lee had been camped at Frederick.

It takes little thought to imagine the impact that such a discovery should have created. There it was, before McClellan’s eyes, the details of Lee’s intricate operation.

Such intelligence—offering the chance to know ahead of time that the Confederate army was divided so widely, and being able to know their targets and re-assembly points—should have presented a golden opportunity for McClellan to hit one of those columns with full power and destroy it, before turning on the next one, and the next. “Brilliant” results would have fallen out of that scenario. At the very least, Lee’s master plan would be disrupted. Even if only one column could be attacked and destroyed, Lee’s army would receive a crippling, possibly fatal blow. Better yet, McClellan should have been able to insure that Lee never returned to Virginia, trapping his army by cutting off his routes out of Maryland, or at least cutting him off from the main part of the state, his base, south of the Rappahannock River.

For almost any other general who was not McClellan, except perhaps Buell, this windfall, the discovery of Order 191, would have been a formula that might end the war.

To make use of this intelligence coup, however, what would be required was rapid reaction, something Lee had predicted would not happen if McClellan remained in command.

Indeed, even with such a fabulous opportunity in his hands, McClellan seemed incapable (or disinterested) in moving with sufficient “celerity,” to borrow another term in vogue at the time, to take advantage.

When word reached Lee of the information leak, although he undertook precautions designed to block the Union army from crossing the mountains to disrupt his plan, he did not abort the operation. Indeed, the plan carried on with all the results Lee had desired, up to the point of re-assembly. Jackson still had time to drive out the Union garrison at Martinsburg, back to Harpers Ferry as Lee had intended. There, much sooner than anyone anticipated, on September 13, after enduring only an opening round of shelling, Major General Dixon Miles surrendered. Some suggested treasonous intent on Dixon’s part in giving over Harpers Ferry so quickly, but whether the allegations were true or not, Dixon himself was killed in the final volley from Loudon Heights.

With the first phase of his campaign successfully complete, Lee began gathering his army back together for the continuation of his march north, but now he knew that even with McClellan as his opponent, it was likely to be impossible for him to penetrate much farther into Maryland, before he must stand and fight. Still, Lee had such little respect for McClellan that he believed he could win the coming battle even being outnumbered.

On September 16, Lee gathered his forces across the Potomac at the Maryland town of Sharpsburg, on the west side of a little stream called Antietam Creek, and prepared to face his enemy.

Perhaps Lee was too certain of victory, but for some reason, he made what ought to have been a fatal mistake in choosing this place to wait for McClellan. He had actually positioned himself in a trap of his own design, by placing his army with its back to the Potomac River, in an area where only one adequate crossing existed for his army to escape back into Virginia.

Lee was willing to gamble that McClellan was weak enough in generalship and his soldiers still in such poor spirits after their failures back in Virginia, that they would not take advantage of the favorable position. No matter that the enemy commander was McClellan, one can argue that Lee had all but handed the proverbial head of his army on a plate. And if Lincoln, while Lee was out of touch with the rest of the world, had replaced McClellan with someone more aggressive at that point, the situation for Lee could have been disastrous.

The idea that Lincoln would finally rid himself of McClellan at first seems far fetched, given how long he had allowed the general to go in failing to carry out his duty. In fact, it was not as unbelievable as it seemed at first blush, because, despite his continually professed belief in the worth of McClellan, in July Lincoln offered the command to the one man anywhere east of the Union armies in Mississippi who had won much in the way of victories, successful in his operations on the coast in the Carolinas. This general was Ambrose Burnside.

Rather than embracing the offer, however, Burnside urged Lincoln to give McClellan another chance. A friend of McClellan’s, Burnside did not feel comfortable replacing him. The situation was not dissimilar to Thomas’s demurral in the Perryville campaign.

Not being yet satisfied that he must demote McClellan, Lincoln had accepted Burnside’s refusal, and although he renewed the offer in September, Lincoln again found reasons to continue with McClellan in command. Thus it is clear that although no change had yet been made, Lincoln had now reached the point when he would at least consider it. That being the case, Lee’s gamble that he would not suddenly face a more aggressive commander was graver than it would have otherwise seemed: when the time came for a change, Burnside would prove to be almost the polar opposite of McClellan with regard to aggressive actions.

Had Burnside suddenly assumed command at Sharpsburg, despite his shortcomings, which would soon be exposed in that very action, Burnside might well have ended the war in the coming battle: if Lee were mauled at Sharpsburg, only Bragg’s army, caught up in his wild chase in Kentucky, would remain to defend the Confederacy, and as has been seen, when Bragg came to realize that possibility, he broke off all forward actions against Buell after Perryville.

If Burnside had taken over before the attack at Sharpsburg, and succeeded in annihilating Lee’s army up against the Potomac River, the Union army could have essentially walked on into Richmond in a matter of days.

None of that happened. Lee’s luck held and McClellan remained commander of the army in his front.

One must wonder what now ran through McClellan’s thought processes, finding himself in a situation in which it would be difficult not to prevail, not to almost utterly defeat Lee. All his plans, his presidential run, his need to keep the war going until 1864, all could go up in smoke, if he were not careful here. Given the way the looming battle was conducted, it certainly appears that McClellan did find a way to avoid obliterating Lee at Sharpsburg.

Here, the question truly arises: was he simply such an abominable commander that he botched this great chance, or did he “throw” the battle to the extent that he could to let Lee off the hook?

One theory about McClellan as a general was that he feared too much for his men’s lives to conduct a major battle that would kill or maim many of them. This theory would be severely damaged at Sharpsburg, because the manner in which he ran the battle only increased the slaughter among his own men.

The question still stands: whether he threw the battle or simply had no real understanding of how to fight in the modern era, against Lee.

Upon learning of the separation of Lee’s army into three components, McClellan reacted so sluggishly that he barely caught the tail end of one column, at Turner’s Gap in the Catoctin Mountains, where he barely “defeated” the Confederates as they disappeared over the ridge to join with the rest of Lee’s army at Sharpsburg.

According to Daniel Harvey Hill, one of Lee’s most aggressive generals, who held onto Turner’s Pass long enough for the column to reach Sharpsburg, “If it [the battle at Turner’s Gap and South Mountain] was fought to save Lee’s trains and artillery, and to reunite his scattered forces, it was a Confederate success.” The implications of what might have been were clear in this assessment.

McClellan of course sent back glowing reports of victory and Lincoln responded, “God bless you and all with you. Destroy the Rebel army if possible.”

On the first day of confrontation at Sharpsburg, September 15, McClellan found Lee with only part of his army re-constituted, to the tune of 18,000 men.

This was the moment, the chance to defeat the Army of Northern Virginia in detail. Instead, McClellan waited to set his forces in place. The next day, more Confederates arrived, but only about 7,000 more, and still McClellan waited.

The day after that, having completed his successful operation at Harpers Ferry, Jackson re-joined Lee. Still missing was A.P. Hill’s division, on its way at the hot-foot from Harpers Ferry.

McClellan arrayed three corps on his right, which were to hit Lee’s left flank hard, and another on the Union left, to move toward the position where Lee must cross the Potomac. A reserve corps in the center would hit whatever opening the Confederate offered for further damage, probably on the Union right.

At dawn on September 17, General Joseph Hooker initiated the action by attacking Lee down the Hagerstown Turnpike on the Confederate left as planned. Initially the attack succeeded in driving Jackson, who commanded in that flank, back toward a church, until a counterattack by John B. Hood’s Texas Brigade stabilized the situation.

The Union forces yielded ground through a feature that gained fame as simply The Cornfield, but Union artillery hit Hood’s onrushing forces almost point blank. Back and forth fighting seesawed in this area with one side then the other holding sway.

McClellan had not articulated his plan well enough for his commanders to carry it out in a coherent form. In the interest of fairness, it must be pointed out that major realignments of the command structure of the army had been under way when Lee had set out on his raid, so there had not been enough time to sort it all out, resulting in confusion in McClellan’s army in the midst of battle.

For whatever reasons, it is known that Sumner’s corps was not sent into the fight in such a way as to supplement Hooker soon enough and when it finally went in, it was to the wrong position, walking into a maelstrom of cavalry artillery.

As part of the result of the confusion, during this time, the only attack that had opened up was this one on the Union right, which left Lee the freedom to utilize interior lines to concentrate on that one area first, instead of facing stress all the way across his front in Sharpsburg. The effect was one of offering Lee the opportunity to fight and possibly defeat an army directly in his front by detail, a situation not totally unlike Bragg’s case when his army fought only one wing of Buell’s at Perryville.

In the action, part of Sumner’s unit was chopped to shreds, forced to pull out, and the fighting in this sector withered, all this by nine in the morning.

With that initial attack deteriorating two divisions also belonging to Sumner veered away from that fighting, into the center of the Confederate line, finally opening a new outbreak of fighting for Lee to contend with. In this vicinity, D.H. Hill’s men waited behind fences along another sunken roadway where they found some protection. Hill’s men hit the incoming Sumner corps and again, advances seesawed back and forth, leading to such horrific carnage along the sunken road that it became known as Bloody Lane.

Miscommunications caused a Confederate brigade to retreat from the scene, opening up an advance by the Union but they were too exhausted to pursue.

On the other side of the field, the Union left, where a breakthrough was supposed to be attempted while the stiff fighting occupied on the right, an almost insane episode unfolded, under the auspices of Burnside.

Antietam Creek flowed through the area, somewhat as Bull Run had in the first battle of that name. A low stone bridge, again reminiscent of a similar structure at First Manassas, crossed the stream where Burnside was to force his attack. Burnside became obsessed with seizing that bridge and using it to mount his attack, despite the fact that the creek would prove to be easily forded. From the opposite side of the creek, a few Confederates were able to keep Burnside off stride and unwilling to send in the attack despite McClellan’s urgings to carry forward the advance.

With the action in that precinct slowed by Burnside’s preoccupation with the bridge, more of Lee’s men were freed to defend first their left then the center, as the fighting shifted.

Finally, winning control of the bridge, after three in the afternoon, and by fording Antietam to the south, Burnside’s men burst across, 12,000 strong, routing the few defending Confederates on the other side. Once finally on the move, his men advanced on the town of Sharpsburg and pushed Lee back in that sector.

A.P. Hill had come on fast with his 5,000 men from Harpers Ferry, so fast that about half of them fell by the wayside exhausted, and when they reached the battle, those who had come all the way were thrown right into the fray. Joining with those already fighting, this new infusion of not-exactly-fresh and not exactly numerous reinforcements nevertheless stopped the Union advance on the left.

While McClellan and his commanders can be excused to some extent due to the confusion of their recent reorganization, what cannot be forgiven is McClellan’s failure to commit an entire wing of 25,000 fresh men, under two of his favorites, Franklin, and a temporarily restored Porter, who together could well have shattered Lee’s army. Let no less an observer than Longstreet explain the significance of this failure.

“We were so badly crushed that at the close of the day ten thousand fresh troops could have come in and taken Lee’s army and everything it had.”

General George Sykes appealed to McClellan to allow him to finish the job, to knife through the center, where D.H. Hill’s men were on the verge of caving, and in so doing, to split Lee’s army in half, leaving it to be finished in detail.

McClellan gave the idea thought, but Porter, present when Sykes urged the attack, pointed out to McClellan that his army was the “last reserve of the last army of the republic,” and as ridiculous as the comment was, given all the forces operating in the West, Porter thus convinced McClellan to call off the assault.

That ended the day’s fighting, and should have ended the battle, but Lee met with his sub-commanders and despite the horrific losses his army had suffered, resolved to fight on in the morning.

McClellan, however, waited for reinforcements and did not fight. In fact, no more fighting developed and Lee slipped away, but of course his own invasion north, like that of Bragg and Kirby Smith in the West, had come to nothing.

Technically, Antietam was a victory for the Union, only because Lee was forced to abandon his Northern Campaign and retreat to his base in Virginia. Strategically, for the Confederacy, however, it was even worse than that, because Lee had achieved nothing of his goals, had fought a huge battle for no gain, and had lost over ten thousand men to death and wounds, altogether a disaster, and had not bought the time he hoped for in order to help the harvests come in, back in Virginia.

Yet when faced with the opportunity to destroy the Confederate army, McClellan avoided a grander victory.

Nicolay sums up the failure of McClellan, in this latest episode, this way:

“On that day there fell into McClellan’s hands the copy of an order issued by General Lee three days before, which, as McClellan himself states in his report, fully disclosed Lee’s plans. The situation was therefore, as follows: It was splendid September weather, with the roads in fine condition. McClellan commanded a total moving force of more than eighty thousand; Lee, a total moving force of forty thousand. The Confederate army was divided. Each of the separate portions was within twenty miles of the Union columns; and before half-past six on the evening of September 13, McClellan had full knowledge of the enemy’s plans.

General Palfrey, an intelligent critic friendly to McClellan, distinctly admits that the Union army, properly commanded, could have absolutely annihilated the Confederate forces. But the result proved quite different. Even such advantages in McClellan’s hands failed to rouse him to vigorous and decisive action. As usual, hesitation and tardiness characterized the orders and movements of the Union forces, and during the four days succeeding, Lee had captured Harper’s Ferry with eleven thousand prisoners and seventy-three pieces of artillery, reunited his army, and fought the defensive battle of Antietam on September 17, with almost every Confederate soldier engaged, while one third of McClellan’s army was not engaged at all and the remainder went into action piecemeal and successively, under such orders that coöperative movement and mutual support were practically impossible. Substantially, it was a drawn battle, with appalling slaughter on both sides.

Even after such a loss of opportunity, there still remained a precious balance of advantage in McClellan’s hands. Because of its smaller total numbers, the Confederate army was disproportionately weakened by the losses in battle. The Potomac River was almost immediately behind it, and had McClellan renewed his attack on the morning of the eighteenth, as several of his best officers advised, a decisive victory was yet within his grasp. But with his usual hesitation, notwithstanding the arrival of two divisions of reinforcements, he waited all day to make up his mind. He indeed gave orders to renew the attack at daylight on the nineteenth, but before that time the enemy had retreated across the Potomac, and McClellan telegraphed, apparently with great satisfaction, that Maryland was free and Pennsylvania safe.”

(Nicolay, p. 315)

There would be yet two more devastating fallouts from Antietam, the results of which would not be seen for some time, but which weighed heavily on the future for Lee. In the first, McClellan was no longer Lee’s patsy. Soon, Lincoln would finally have enough and replace him.

The other result of Antietam was the issuance of the Emancipation Proclamation.

Chapter Two

Despite claims to the contrary, claims still being made even into the Twenty-First Century, the Civil War was not fought to free slaves. That was emphasized in Volume I of this work, concerning the causes of the Civil War.

That is so, that the war was not fought to end slavery, despite the fact that much about the South’s decision to seek independence revolved around slavery and Southerners’ fear that in time, the federal government would force an end to the institution if the slave states remained part of the Union.

All one needs to point out, in arguing that the Civil War was not fought over slavery or to free slaves is the fact that slavery was not ended in any states which remained in the Union and still permitted slavery. One must assume that were the war fought to end slavery, the first act to be undertaken, or attempted by the Lincoln administration, would have been to eradicate slavery by law all over the country, then deal with the ramifications that fell out of it, which might have meant that states remaining in the Union, including Maryland and Kentucky, would have “gone out” along with the other eleven.

Before hostilities began, however, no attempt was made to end slavery anywhere by the Lincoln administration. No proclamation, bill, or other legal process was undertaken to end slavery in any state. If the Civil War had been fought to end slavery, a blanket attempt to end it everywhere would have been the first step. No such attempt was made.

Thus when the war began, slavery continued in states that had not rebelled and which fought on the side of the Union. Lincoln could not afford to alienate any loyal state, including those continuing to permit slavery.

Frèmont had tried to free slaves by fiat and had met severe resistance by Lincoln out of fear that doing so would drive Kentucky out of the Union. David Hunter, a general from Virginia, in command at a Union base in South Carolina confiscated slaves and declared them free, and extended the declaration to include Georgia, Florida, and South Carolina. Chase supported this act but Lincoln portrayed himself as infuriated, insisting that, “No commanding general shall do such a thing upon my responsibility without consulting me,” and he made clear that such a question was that only he could resolve.

Other Union generals freed slaves in the wake of their movements into Confederate territory. One of those was Benjamin Butler, a committed Democrat who himself opposed abolition at the outset of the war, then found himself freeing slaves, declaring them to be contraband property of advancing Union forces, which resulted in the term “contraband” ultimately being employed even by slaves to describe themselves.

In stopping these acts of conscience and/or necessity, Lincoln faced a problem with his “base” constituency, which was the abolitionist element of the nation standing behind the Republican party. He suffered under hot pressure from that constituency to end slavery. Then again, he was under hot pressure to do nothing about slavery, and he was famous for saying that if he could prevent war by freeing all the slaves, he would do so, and if he could prevent it by freeing none, he would do the same, or if by freeing some and leaving others alone, he would do that instead.

Indeed, where the Union army passed through the South, slaves were freed, more by default than any order. Only a commander like McClellan would demand that slaves be kept in bondage after his army had freed a region.

Many blacks who found themselves behind the lines were free, yet often remained in place and continued to work, because they had no other home, and to survive, they had to keep working the same land even if they were no longer owned by the white people they lived among, while the Union army was present.

Others, even early in the war, were put into the army, primarily as unarmed worker details, then more and more as armed units of their own, and they fought well when given the chance.

Without a specific law, or an amendment to the constitution, which Lincoln believed was the necessary avenue to total abolition of slavery, the very question of his right to make a blanket enforceable statement of emancipation was unclear. An abolitionist and lawyer, William Whiting, had written a pamphlet laying out grounds for Lincoln to do so and afterward Lincoln made him solicitor of the War Department. Whiting convinced the president that war powers gave him the right to seize enemy property when it was used in a rebellious or military way against the United States, and this certainly included slaves. On that basis, once seized as a result of war, slaves need not be returned to their owners despite the runaway slave laws still on the books.

Unwilling to push the thorny issue of a blanket order releasing slaves, out of fear of upsetting the still loyal states such as Maryland, while the war was still in the balance, Lincoln would only claim to free slaves in the rebellious states. And of course the only means by which they could be freed came when federal forces gained control over the land where they lived. In other words, any emancipation order issued by the president would do no more than to codify what was taking place by default where the Union army triumphed. Yet Lincoln resolved to issue such an emancipation statement.

The reasons Lincoln decided do so are more complex than a few lines can explain. Several issues folded into the idea, part of which were the urgings of abolitionists since even before the war began. Some of the reasons were totally practical. Slaves were being used by the South to augment their military, not by fighting but by doing work that supported armies. Likewise, slaves helped keep the economy going by making up to some extent for the men who left farms and plantations to fight.

In other words, slaves, not by desire, aided the Southern war effort. That was a sufficient excuse for the Union to declare all slaves in the enemy territory to be free.

Another cause for such a statement, which would be issued in the form of a proclamation, concerning emancipation, was the need to unite the nation behind the war effort for a reason beyond preserving the Union, as well as a need to energize Lincoln’s abolitionist base. At the same time, he truly desired to do something toward ending slavery despite the fact that slavery, in his own eyes, was not the cause of the war. Beyond that, he felt the nation needed something to raise the level of discourse and improve the national state of mind after what was perceived as a series of military losses. (The mindset of the Northern people remained rooted in the misguided notion that because the war was not going well in Virginia the war was not going well, period. )

Yet another good reason for some form of emancipation statement was the fact that if made in the form of a federal edict, whether it was feasibly enforceable or not, the effort would catch international notice, further eroding support of the Confederacy by other nations.

Lincoln hoped that if he hewed to the strictly military-necessity argument in declaring slaves freed, the loyal states that still maintained slavery would not feel threatened.

Obviously, any declaration of freedom for slaves in the war zone of the South stood in vivid contrast to so much that McClellan had called for in his meeting with Lincoln at Harrison’s Landing.

Up to the point when he began to seriously consider a proclamation on military necessity, Lincoln had pressed the notion of “compensated emancipation,” that was to say, a buyout of slaves by the government, especially in the still-loyal states, which would give something to the owners and free those slaves sold to the government. This somewhat matched McClellan’s notions of paying the South for any slaves taken by any means during military operations.

(Along with this notion of compensated emancipation was a more odious one of “colonizing” slaves by sending them out of the country to places where they could be free but would not take American jobs in the North. Cuba and Africa, especially the new nation of Liberia, were considered prime candidates as locations for colonization.)

The proclamation to come must be worded so that the war did not appear to suddenly be about freeing slaves, after Lincoln had denied that mission all along. And he feared that if it appeared that the war was being turned to a one of emancipation, many soldiers would quit on him, not willing to fight for blacks, something of which McClellan had warned him at Harrison’s Landing, and in the same context, perhaps as many as three more states would secede even as late as 1862.

After considerable negotiation, several Congressional acts were set into play. Congress revised war regulations to forbid any officer of the army or navy to use forces to capture and return fugitive slaves to their owners. Slaves of anyone convicted of treason or rebellion would be free, and slaves who escaped into Union Army lines, or slaves found in areas abandoned by enemy forces would all be freed.

Notably, no slaves owned by Unionists or neutral individuals in war zones were forfeit when Union armies arrived and gained control of the locations where they lived and held their slaves.

Out of these acts emerged a document to be called the Emancipation Proclamation. Lincoln mulled all this in the period prior to Antietam but Secretary of State Seward counseled him that the time was not ripe to release it while the nation continued to be despondent over the unsettling military state of affairs resulting from McClellan’s ill-fated operations near Richmond.

It would be wisest, Seward urged, not to issue the proclamation until the next victory in the East, if one were to ever be achieved. Otherwise, the proclamation and everything it represented would appear to be a measure of desperation rather than a strong statement of the Union’s serious intention of ultimately ending slavery and making that ending official policy.

As for the details of the proclamation, obviously, those states that were outside the authority of the Union government would not abide by any order freeing their slaves. Such an order was meaningless where they were concerned, as meaningless as all other federal laws they ignored in their condition of rebellion. And again, where federal armies were victorious and held their ground, it did not require a proclamation to free the slaves when they were freed by default.

None of that actually mattered. The point of the proclamation was a clear statement of national intent. It’s main thrust was to essentially verify what Congress had already codified in its recent, earlier acts. Or one could say, the president in releasing this proclamation, was endorsing what Congress had called for.

For those who were wearying of the war, however, the effect of the proclamation was to give the war a new purpose, that of moving forward and freeing slaves, on top of its other mission of ending the rebellion by defeating the military power behind it and retaking land. The effect of the proclamation on slaves still in the hands of their masters was powerful. Those slaves who heard of it were imbued with a new spirit, a new hope, and would feel empowered to act for their freedom, to escape and place themselves within the protection of Union armies when and where they could, and to support the army that was coming to free them.

Wonderfully, the Northern people took on this new mission as something that made the war even more worth fighting than it had been.

For the South, the emancipation proclamation, while obviously a hateful notion just on the surface of its meaning—the first true declaration of the Union against slavery—was an even greater setback in a political way.

Europe on the whole, and France and England, the two great hopes for the Confederacy, had given up slavery and their populations were heartily opposed to the institution. It had always been a problem to the leaders of those nations to support the South in any way because of the slavery, but they could have set their qualms aside for other reasons, such as the slap in the face it would be to their rival, the young but economically threatening United States, which needed a comeuppance of the kind that the permanent loss of eleven states would have represented. And they could have used the intercourse with the South in the realm of cotton, despite having developed new sources in the Middle East.

The Europeans had still hovered nearby, in political terms, ready to recognize the Confederacy if the time was right and if it appeared the entity might be able to hold its own as a viable nation.

Antietam had shaken the underpinnings of that notion, when it was clear the Confederacy could not actually threaten the Union by invading and doing any damage. When Lincoln determined that the thin margin of victory at Antietam was just enough to allow him to issue the Proclamation, the Europeans could not ignore it. To side with a nation that still proudly held human beings in bondage against one which had now clearly begun the process of ending slavery would be almost impossible. And the Confederacy saw this and cringed.

Certainly, Southern firebrands issued even more fiery rhetoric against the Union, among other things claiming the proclamation would cause slaves to rise up and murder whites in their beds, a long-standing fear at all times in the South. Dire threats were bandied about, such as hanging all Union prisoners, but in time the heat ran out of even the most volatile in the South.

The Emancipation Proclamation aside, realistically, one could suggest that the Confederacy was already living on borrowed time even before Antietam. Realistically, it was only McClellan’s misconduct of the war that had kept the Confederate army in a viable state so far. So much that had taken place since First Bull Run should have already turned defeats on the Union side to major victories under a general other than McClellan. By all means, the possibility had been very real at Antietam to destroy Lee’s army entirely, as Longstreet had recognized.

As great a general as Lee is credited with being, he had made mistakes that could have and should have cost him everything. Certainly, he had become what one could call cocky or perhaps complacent because he was aware of McClellan’s inability to do what must be done to defeat him. Whether Lee would have fought the war up to this point in a different way against another general is easily answered, with a resounding Yes, however, because he would continue to fight it the same way the rest of the war.

One day, near the end, Lee would finally admit he had never actually expected the Confederacy to survive. Whether that affected his mode of operations all along or not is unknowable. Whether he had believed all along he ultimately could not win or truly came to face it at the end is likewise unclear. If he had faced long before that the war was un-winnable, yet expended lives of his own men at the rate he did do, his legacy should have suffered at such callousness.

On the other hand, one might ask just what Lee could have done otherwise. His choices were to always attack, to keep the Union army both at bay and off stride, or to hunker down somewhere safe and ride out the war with the tiny hope that the Europeans would enter the issue in some way, or that Lincoln would lose the 1864 election, which would mean a Democrat, almost certainly willing to end the war would be elected, because the only reason a Democrat would be elected was if the Northern people grew tired of the war.

Surely Lee recognized that his weak antagonist, McClellan, might be the savior of the South if elected president, an irony of high degree.

Ironically, one might suggest, it was Lee who ought to have conducted his side of the war the way McClellan and Buell believed in fighting, which was to use maneuver to avoid battle as long as possible then strike a hard but quick blow at a key place to achieve a key victory. In doing so, he would have preserved Confederate lives while getting the most out of his army with regard to protecting the Confederacy.

At the same time, Lee could not leave the entire offensive to the North, because the day might come that Lincoln woke up and realized he only needed to cordon off the Confederate army and it would rot where it was. As long as Lee kept the pressure on, Lincoln would have to respond to his attacks, and that was the formula Lee continued to follow into the middle of 1863 when that great offensive mindset ran Lee into his greatest failure.

One thing is clear. The gamble he had taken with the Antietam initiative had not scared Lee out of further such adventures because he would try virtually the same thing the following year, and make it farther.

In one way, because of Antietam, Lee would run out of luck in a certain area: he would soon be deprived of his patsy on the other side of the line. Whether that would lower his overall chances over the rest of the war, or offer different kinds of opportunities to win would depend upon who the next victim—that is to say, the next Union commander in Virginia—would turn out to be.

Chapter Three

As to McClellan’s own reaction to the hated Emancipation Proclamation, while his soldiers expressed a willingness to support anything that damaged the Confederacy and its war effort, McClellan wrote to his wife that he could not easily fight in support of “such an accursed doctrine as that of servile insurrection.”

Not surprisingly, McClellan’s friend and sub-commander Fitz John Porter called the plan an “absurd proclamation of a political coward.”

Aware that the attitudes of those who were seen as being his political allies was putting McClellan in a dangerous situation, and after consulting fellow Democrats in New York, on October 7, he issued an edict that his men were to maintain their place on the issue of the military’s position of subordination to the civil government. He added, however, that if the people did not agree with the actions of the government, they could vote out those who displeased them, finding “remedy” at the polls.

McClellan’s own opinion was soon not to matter, given that he was being replaced, however. Still, although Lincoln now offered command of the army to Burnside, Lincoln maintained concerns about removing McClellan, on at least two fronts. He knew the men of his army revered McClellan and might lose their zeal if he were dismissed, and too many of his commanders were, like McClellan, Democrats.

That led to the second point, the effect that ridding the army of McClellan might have politically for the administration. This was not a small matter, and firing McClellan could stir up unwanted rearguard action against the war by that party. All this tied in with the fear than an emancipation proclamation would turn the electorate away from the administration, especially if coupled with McClellan’s removal.

A potential third issue was less clear than the first two, but could not be ignored. Word swirled through murky corridors that McClellan and his Democrat colleagues in commanding positions, especially Porter and Franklin, did in fact actually entertain at least the notion of a coup. This danger had of course been considered by prominent individuals in the Cabinet and Senate in earlier circumstances.

If the federal army in Virginia turned its attention on Washington, nothing could stop it. If the Union armies of the West must come fight those in Virginia to rescue the government, something far, far worse than the initial rebellion by the South would develop. A civil war inside the Civil War would have broken out that the nation might not have recovered intact.

Nevertheless, the slim danger that McClellan and his generals would turn on Washington rather than allow the purpose of the war be transformed into freeing slaves could not be dismissed out of hand.

Is there basis for even discussing the possibility that the Union army under McClellan might in fact seize the government or was that only paranoia on the part of individuals in that government?

To answer one need only cite a letter from McClellan to his wife, in which he wrote, “I have commenced receiving letters from the North urging me to march on Washington & assume the Govt!!” He also used the word “coup” and hinted that in such a case, afterward, “everything will be changed in this country so far as we are concerned & my enemies will be at my feet.”

Such talk has to be taken with some reserve, because McClellan was so very well known for highblown rhetoric that ultimately signified nothing. Still, it was enough that he even voiced such ideas more than once, to more than one person to cause some shivering in the capital.

Of course those sentiments, expressed to his wife, were not known until long after the war. Nevertheless, they revealed his own thinking or at least his own speculation concerning possibilities before him.

Other rumors did reach Lincoln and his cabinet that talk had been heard hinting of McClellan intending to put “his sword across the government’s policy,” while the quartermaster general, Montgomery Meigs, a trusted friend of the president, indicating concern that “officers of rank” in McClellan’s army spoke openly of “a march on Washington to ‘clear out those fellows.’”

While nothing came of all that rhetoric, either in action or in the government’s punishment of it, the point was clear, that those Democratic officers of McClellan’s army must be feared and handled carefully, especially over the issue of emancipation, as well as McClellan’s dismissal.

The incident described previously, in which Lincoln, at Antietam, remarked that the army was McClellan’s bodyguard must be taken as a sign that Lincoln at least even in jest reflected some of the concern about McClellan’s power and intentions.

Setting aside the Emancipation Proclamation and the paranoia surrounding McClellan, it is important to return to an analysis of the situation in the aftermath of Antietam.

A discernible pattern had emerged from the series of campaigns in the Eastern Theater that did not hold in the West. So far, whichever side, North or South, that carried the offensive lost the coming battle. This might be a weak argument with regard to Second Manassas, as to who had initiated the offensive, given the way it ended, but Pope had been sent forward initially to take on Lee when McClellan fizzled out, and had lost.

Lee had moved into the North on an offensive raid, his first bona fide all-out offensive, and had lost. If Lee had noticed that, on one hand he should have taken heart from it in a way, and recognized a clue: in order to prolong the war without losing it, he should swear off further offensives and let the Union bring the war to him.

If he were to retreat across the Rappahannock River and take up strong defensive positions, in such a way that the Union could not simply go around him and carry out their seeming obsession with taking Richmond, he should be able to hold out until the next presidential election in 1864, if the developing situation in the West were ignored.

That of course did not alleviate the problem of subsistence for his men and animals, which he had sought to deal with during his raid into Maryland.

And worse, the situation in the West could not in fact be ignored, because the Union armies out there were slowly but inexorably winning against the Confederacy, gobbling up ground mile by mile and not giving back. The great raid in Kentucky that had been a counterpart to Lee’s own in Maryland had also miserably failed, leaving the state of the armies there worse than when they had begun, if for no reason than the loss of irreplaceable men. And it had become manifest that no more soldiers would be obtained from border states. The rest of the war must be fought with what men could still somehow dragged out of the population of the South.

As he prepared to evacuate the area of Sharpsburg, Lee must have clearly felt the heat from the direction of the south, through the Carolinas, the route by which, if the war continued as it was moving now, Union armies would in time come marching against Richmond, having swept their way all the way across the rest of the Confederacy.

The point with regard to that situation was that if Lee did hunker down behind the Rappahannock, he might be unassailable for now, but while his men starved, Union armies would eventually close in from behind. Indeed, few options appeared favorable for Lee. Offense or defense both presented small positives and greater negatives. What he would decide was that he must make his offensive lunges where they seemed most likely to do damage, and on the other hand, let the Union attack where he could put up a defensive front that would likewise do the most damage, which happened to correspond to Longstreet’s favored strategy. And Lee would continue, for some time to prove a master at both modes of conduct.

First, he must get away from McClellan at Sharpsburg, and regroup. For now, he could take comfort from the fact that it was still McClellan on the other side of the line. That scenario was bound to buy him more time.

McClellan did in fact hold off the killing blow, while Lee led his army across the Potomac and back into home territory. By October 4, McClellan had not even pursued; his own army still remained in Maryland.

Lincoln saw what was developing. Given the route Lee was taking, McClellan had the interior lines to cut him off from Richmond, and like grapes left to wither on the vine, the Army of Northern Virginia would be ripe for the picking.

McClellan did not budge. As always, he reported again and again that he would move any minute, but he simply did not. More than ever, he appeared now to be following exactly the prescription John Key had laid out for the conduct of the war.

Lincoln’s almost infinite patience was beginning to reach its limits now.

Having escaped the trap at Sharpsburg, Lee’s army rested around Winchester, up in the Shenandoah Valley, a position physically farther from Richmond than McClellan’s own. This was the point when McClellan should have interceded his army between Lee and Richmond, sent a garrison to seize the city, and destroyed Lee when he attempted to save the Confederate capital. Given that, Lincoln set a deadline. If McClellan, in this scenario, allowed Lee to get past him, and move closer to Richmond than the Union army, Lincoln would fire McClellan.

Unsurprisingly, the Union commander wasted nine days in merely crossing the Potomac and moving decidedly southward. He pointed his army toward Warrenton, where he would consolidate his columns after the marches. In those nine days, however, Lee had given his men their rest then picked up the pace and reached Culpeper, which positioned him ahead of McClellan with respect to Richmond. All the advantage gained by Antietam, except the direct wear on Lee’s army, had been lost. Lee was back in effective control of the war in the East.

Still, while having made up his mind to remove McClellan, Lincoln took the precaution of waiting until after the 1862 congressional elections, to be held on November Fourth.

Ambrose Burnside had of course twice avoided accepting command of the Army of the Potomac. In those previous instances, not then yet certain he wanted to replace McClellan, Lincoln had accepted Burnside’s decision. This time, he presented an ultimatum.

Cliques abounded among the officer corps of the army, as in most armies. The Porter-Franklin-McClellan cabal existed in parallel to others which included Joseph Hooker.

Burnside tended toward the McClellan camp, one reason he had preferred not to face the embarrassment of replacing his friend earlier. (Burnside also appeared to suffer something of an inferiority complex, denying he was of sufficient quality to rise to the highest levels of the army. In that, he would prove astute.)

Nevertheless, it was Burnside whom Lincoln desired as McClellan’s replacement. The next in line was Hooker. Burnside and Hooker were antagonists, and to pressure Burnside into accepting, Lincoln made clear that Hooker would be named if he were not. This time, under this threat, Burnside reluctantly accepted.

The nervousness about McClellan’s reaction to dismissal, as well as that of his men, continued to prevail. Having conducted negotiations with the Democrats over future political roles, all the way to contention for the presidency, and having grown so disgusted over the emancipation proclamation that he actually considered resigning from the army, McClellan was not nearly as concerned about losing his position as the White House imagined.

Unaware of this, Lincoln transmitted the orders relieving McClellan by way of a non-combat general named Buckingham. Lincoln recognized that it would have been a dangerous slap in the face to McClellan if he were delivered orders relieving him at the hands of anyone less than the rank of general. Such an insult might incite McClellan to the overreaction many feared. Thus Buckingham was selected to deliver the message.

Buckingham may have been nervous about this task. He asked Burnside to accompany him, in large part because Burnside was a friend of McClellan’s and also because he was far less volatile than the man he was to supercede. Buckingham must have recognized in Burnside a calming influence in a potentially explosive confrontation, and hoped he could soothe McClellan into accepting the demotion.

In the event, all such precautions proved unnecessary, due to McClellan’s growing disenchantment with his position in the wake of both the emancipation proclamation and the growing opportunity to run for president in 1864. So true was this that McClellan shocked Buckingham, and perhaps Burnside as well, by calmly agreeing to turn over command. Not only, in fact, did McClellan accept his removal without an argument, he offered to work with his replacement during a period of transition, from November Eighth, when the change became official, until the Eleventh.

And so, the long nightmare of the McClellan era was over.

Chapter Four

Having a commander of the Army of the Potomac who would actually undertake forward movement would seem a miracle, after McClellan’s tenure. Like a breath of fresh air, Burnside set the army in motion quickly toward the town of Falmouth, on the Rappahannock River.

Falmouth had been employed before as a base, especially by McDowell while waiting for orders either to join McClellan or Pope during the Peninsular Campaign. In that vicinity, the Rappahannock took a north-northwesterly turn, with the town of Fredericksburg on one bank, facing the river almost due east, and Falmouth lay on the opposite shore and a little to the north. Up the road from Falmouth was Aquia Creek, on the Potomac, also used often as a base.

With him, Burnside had an army of around 110,000 men and by November 17, two corps had arrived at Falmouth. The plan in mind was to cross the Rappahannock and shoot toward Richmond, forcing a showdown with Lee along the way.

The first problem would be crossing the river, which in that stretch, was too wide to ford. The Confederates had destroyed the bridges in that area, so in order for the Union army to cross, pontoon bridges must be laid over the river. Burnside did not want to meet Lee until his army was over the river and able to make a fight on neutral terrain, outside the town. Thus the need to bring in the pontoon bridges as soon as possible was crucial to Burnside’s plan.

If Lee had time to arrive and prepare a defensive position, the usual case of a smaller force being able to neutralize much of the advantage of a larger one would apply. Lee could bring in 75,000 men, thus Burnside’s advantage was not nearly great enough to overcome any kind of substantial defensive works that Lee might be able to throw up.

The decision on Burnside’s part to pass through Fredericksburg revolved around his choice of supply line for his coming operations. He had the option of the Orange and Alexandria Rail line or the Potomac River, to reach the territory south of Fredericksburg. Once in that area, he could continue to employ rail lines all the way to Richmond.

Already, from the point of view of the leadership in the White House, a flaw appeared in Burnside’s plan: the new supreme commander had turned back to the notion of targeting Richmond on an equal footing with targeting Lee, or perhaps even leaning toward concentration on Richmond.

True, Burnside still hoped to draw Lee out on flat ground to use his superior numbers but whether that developed or not, he was still zeroing in on the Confederate capital.

This idea was a bit alarming to Lincoln, who had returned to the line of thinking that the army’s proper job ought to be attacking and defeating Lee. Yet Burnside seemed so enthusiastic that Lincoln was excited to have a general willing to do something proactive. Rather than discourage Burnside from aggressive action, Lincoln accepted the plan, provided Burnside would act in a hurry. Burnside complied, setting forth on November 15, moving smartly to carry out the operation.

With the decision made, that once again it was on to Richmond, Lincoln desired to know more about the actual details of the operation and dispatched Halleck to meet with Burnside in person and get the straight information. Somehow in this dialogue, Halleck misunderstood what he was told. He came away with the belief that Burnside intended to cross the river farther west, in an area well known to be fordable in many places without much support in the way of bridges. If that were so, the army could splash across quickly and have a hope of getting “behind” Lee in good time.

That was what Halleck took back and presented to Lincoln as Burnside’s plan, and Lincoln accepted it.

If that plan were the case, pontoons would not be needed. For that reason, when Burnside sent out a call for pontoons, Halleck was in no hurry to dispatch them, thinking it was a contingency need for some future purpose.

Burnside had believed Halleck understood his plan to entail crossing the Rappahannock at Fredericksburg; when he received the message that Lincoln concurred in his plan, he assumed that referred to the Fredericksburg plan. Lincoln, understood otherwise, that Burnside would use the fords west of Fredericksburg, bypass the town, and speed forward toward either a collision with Lee on open ground, or on to Richmond, whichever came first.

The result was that when Burnside arrived on the Rappahannock opposite Fredericksburg, the pontoons he expected were not there. His men now sat across the river from Fredericksburg and could not cross. And continued to sit.

By November 19, the floating bridges still had not arrived and on that date, Lee’s army entered Fredericksburg and set up in impregnable defensive positions behind the town.

Given the situation, Lincoln pressed Burnside to break off his plan to enter Fredericksburg and instead, to go around, or to challenge Lee elsewhere, but Burnside intended to assault the Confederates there and could not be shaken out of his plan. And Lincoln would not order him to change it.

Only a couple of thousand feet outside the main collection of structures that formed the town of Fredericksburg, ran a low ridge parallel to the river, a local prominence called Marye’s Heights. It was not named after a woman as it might seem but after a male hero of the area of whose last name was Marye, who still possessed a mansion on the crest.

The “height” was actually little more than a few tens of feet in altitude above the level of the city and the river, but in the minds of combat engineers, Lee included, such an elevation loomed over the terrain before it as a commanding position and Lee was pleased to have control of it.

The pontoon bridges were not available until December 11, thus for nearly three weeks the two armies stared at each other across the river, providing Lee ample time to completely prepare for Burnside, as well as to allow his men to finish recuperating from Antietam.

To be used, the bridges, which consisted of numerous small boats with roadway beds placed across them at right angles, had to be floated out from shore to shore and the sections connected by hardened links to provide a causeway for troops to move across. Along the river’s edge at Fredericksburg, buildings encroached on the water, providing perfect cover for a sniper outfit under General William Barksdale to lay down deadly fire on men out in the river trying to extend the pontoon bridges across.

Burnside attempted to drive the riflemen out with artillery, but aside from destroying a considerable amount of the town itself, the shelling failed to chase Barksdale’s men from their sniper posts. Only after Union infantry worked their way across the river in boats and directly routed the riflemen was the sniper problem alleviated so that the bridge could be completed.

Once the bridges extended the width of the river, the Union army moved into the part of town nearest the waterfront. Although the Confederate forces evacuated town,

collapsing upon the Heights, they did not go easily, conducting what was sometimes house-to-house combat. Not until December 13 did Burnside’s army fight its way to a position from which it could launch an attack on Lee and his so very well-ensconced army on the ridge.

One of the sorrier episodes in the history of the Union army occurred in the process of its occupying Fredericksburg. While coddling of plantation owners could be frowned upon, what took place at Fredericksburg was inexcusable in the opposite way. No matter what one might think of the issue of considering civilians on the rebel side as full-scale enemies of the Union, or that protecting enemy property to the degree of curtailing normal offensive activity was too much to ask, no good excuse could ever be found for deliberate destruction of personal property, and most emphatically, looting could never be condoned for any reason.

Even the issue of shelling a town for military purposes was difficult to defend, and Fredericksburg had been shelled heavily during the attempt to oust Barksdale’s sharpshooters, but what occurred when the Union army under Burnside settled in to prepare its attack was revolting. To state it plainly, the army ransacked the city for the sheer hell of it.

The crimes, and they were unquestionably crimes, were barely suppressed by federal provost marshals. The best that could be said was that happily, most of the citizens had been able to evacuate the town during the period when the invading army awaited the pontoon bridges. As a result, while property was vandalized and stolen, at least no innocent persons were seriously injured or worse.

Obviously, this army, still in heart and mind McClellan’s, had not taken to heart their beloved ex-general’s belief in treating Southern non-slave property gently.

From the military standpoint of the operations at Fredericksburg, General George Meade found a weakness on the right side of Lee’s line, at the position occupied by Stonewall Jackson, and he attempted to exploit it. Had Meade been reinforced, he might have broken through, allowing Lee’s army on Marye’s Heights to be flanked, but Burnside stubbornly insisted upon concentrating a head-on assault against Lee’s middle lines and did not support Meade.

Had Marye’s Heights risen directly much closer to the nearest line of buildings, the federal army would have had a chance, and perhaps better than just a chance, to defeat the Confederates on the hill above. If instead of having to charge across open ground, Union forces could have bulked up among those buildings, and exchanged fire from a distance, the entire cast of the battle would have been different. In that case, had the Union army only needed to emerge from behind those buildings and charge a few dozen yards up the slight uplift in the land, they almost surely would have eventually overrun the Confederate positions before they were mowed down. In that case, their superior numbers would have told, since only so many Confederates could cover the front lines at a time, against far greater numbers of charging blue coats.

Instead, the ground between the buildings making up the town and the crest of the ridge where the enemy waited was not only too far to cover in a single rush, but also too broken up for a rapid charge. The distance from substantial protection to the Confederate lines on the hill was just under a half mile. (The exact distance would actually emerge as a point of contention among Confederate generals in a future battle, when the situation would be reversed and the Confederates would be ordered to attack a similar height.)

The unevenness of the ground caused charging men to move slowly, having to pick their way over and around obstacles, leaving them far too long directly in the gun-sights of Confederate men hiding behind low walls, and as telling, their artillery.

When the time came to assault Marye’s Heights, Burnside dispatched his men in wave after wave directly across this killing field, right at Lee’s entrenched forces looming above.

Waiting for them were lines of infantry able to fire from behind protection, and Longstreet’s artillery under the command of Colonel Porter Alexander, who set up his guns to sweep the entire field. The layout was perfect to turn the ground which must be crossed by Union forces into a nightmarish slaughter pen.

Twelve times, Burnside sent assaults across that open terrain, but not one of the those waves, no, not a single man among them, ever reached even the most forward of Lee’s positions. All along the ridge, from behind stone walls, the Confederates fired with impunity upon the hapless men in blue before them, who presented unlimited targets. The attacks washed forward like the last waves of an outgoing tide, with Union bodies forming rows of piles at a localized “high-water mark.”

This was December 13, and Burnside still had it in his head to continue the hopeless assault the next day, December 14, but his corps commanders prevailed upon him to give it up, in fear that Lee would make an assault of his own from on high and trap the army against the river. That night, Burnside withdrew from the town.

It was in this battle, from his position on Marye’s Heights watching the nightmarish progress of the doomed Union soldiers that Lee was quoted as saying, “It is well that war is so terrible or we should grow too fond of it.”

By December 29, holed up at Falmouth, across the Rappahannock from Fredericksburg, Burnside intended a new advance in spite of the fact that the Army, at that time, by the estimation of its own men, echoing the words of a popular song of the day, was “all played out.” There was no zest for another offensive, especially in the dead of winter. Men were ill, tired, and in a mutinous frame of mind against a combined generalship that seemed, with the tactics employed at Fredericksburg, to be bent on total suicide.

McClellan had displayed an almost psychotic refusal to take the offensive when it would have won the day; now he had been replaced by a man who appeared to display an equally psychotic urge to continue attacking until he had not a man left standing. One day, the great physicist Albert Einstein would be quoted as defining madness as the attribute of attempting the same process again and again, expecting different results. That description could have applied perfectly to what Burnside had proposed at Fredericksburg. And which he had in fact carried out twelve insane times.

When word reached Lincoln that yet another offensive, of which he had no previous awareness, was planned against Lee at Fredericksburg, he telegraphed Burnside, ordering him not to make another move without the president’s explicit agreement. Burnside met with Lincoln to demand an explanation. Coming to no common ground with Burnside on the subject, Lincoln appealed to Halleck to mediate the issue, with a letter on January 1 of 1863.

“General Burnside wishes to cross the Rappahannock with his army, but his grand division commanders all oppose the movement. If in such a difficulty as this you do not help, you fail me precisely in the point for which I sought your assistance. You know what General Burnside’s plan is, and it is my wish that you go with him to the ground, examine it as far as practicable, confer with the officers, getting their judgment and ascertaining their temper; in a word, gather all the elements for forming a judgment of your own, and then tell General Burnside that you do approve, or that you do not approve, his plan. Your military skill is useless to me if you will not do this.”

As Nicolay expressed it, describing Halleck’s response,

“Halleck’s moral and official courage, however, failed the President in this emergency. He declined to give his military opinion, and asked to be relieved from further duties as general-in-chief. This left Mr. Lincoln no option, and still having need of the advice of his general-in-chief on other questions, he indorsed on his own letter, ‘withdrawn because considered harsh by General Halleck.’”

(Nicolay, p. 365)

Burnside immediately cancelled the movements, one of which would have been carried out by infantry on one side of Fredericksburg, and by cavalry on the other side.

After conferring with Lincoln and Halleck, and offering his resignation if they did not support him, Burnside received enough of a backing to convince him on January 19 to begin crossing the Rappahannock to attack Lee from another direction. This operation fell through when rains made progress of any kind virtually impossible and after a failed attempt to cross further west, the army, all the more dejected, returned to camp across the river from Fredericksburg at Falmouth.

This debacle, which became known as the “mud march,” directed even more intense criticism at Burnside. Chief among those condemning him most vociferously was Joseph Hooker, who went so far as to add that Lincoln was an imbecile for keeping Burnside in command and that what was needed now was a dictator.

Fed up with the overall situation, on January 23 Burnside presented what was essentially an ultimatum to Lincoln, that he should fire Hooker and several others who did not support him, or Burnside would resign. On January 25, Lincoln carried out a hybrid response, by firing some of the men Burnside had named, but also by accepting his resignation and replacing him with...Hooker.

So now, the command of the army in Virginia had passed from McClellan to Burnside, and now to “Fighting Joe” Hooker. And still, Lincoln had not found the right man to run the army, and there would be much gnashing of teeth at the results yet to come.

Chapter Five

As an officer, a commander, and an individual, Hooker presented problems of his own and Lincoln was neither deaf nor blind to them. He addressed his misgivings in a frank letter to the new commanding general:

“I have placed you at the head of the Army of the Potomac. Of course I have done this upon what appear to me to be sufficient reasons, and yet I think it best for you to know that there are some things in regard to which I am not quite satisfied with you. I believe you to be a brave and skilful soldier, which, of course, I like. I also believe you do not mix politics with your profession, in which you are right. You have confidence in yourself, which is a valuable, if not an indispensable quality. You are ambitious, which, within reasonable bounds, does good rather than harm; but I think that during General Burnside’s command of the army you have taken counsel of your ambition and thwarted him as much as you could, in which you did a great wrong to the country, and to a most meritorious and honorable brother officer. I have heard, in such a way as to believe it, of your recently saying that both the army and the government needed a dictator. Of course it was not for this, but in spite of it, that I have given you the command. Only those generals who gain successes can set up dictators. What I now ask of you is military success, and I will risk the dictatorship. The government will support you to the utmost of its ability, which is neither more nor less than it has done and will do for all commanders. I much fear that the spirit which you have aided to infuse into the army, of criticizing their commander and withholding confidence from him, will now turn upon you. I shall assist you as far as I can to put it down. Neither you nor Napoleon, if he were alive again, could get any good out of an army while such a spirit prevails in it; and now beware of rashness. Beware of rashness, but with energy and sleepless vigilance go forward and give us victories.”

Whether he took offense to the negatives implied in the letter or did not, Hooker began immediately acting upon the positives and submitted the philosophy of his plan to the president.

“My opinion is that just now, with the enemy directly ahead of us, there is no eligible route for us into Richmond; and consequently a question of preference between the Rappahannock route and the James River route is a contest about nothing. Hence, our prime object is the enemy’s army in front of us, and is not with or about Richmond at all, unless it be incidental to the main object.”

Interesting that Hooker was not saying that the Confederate army should be the target all the time, but that at the moment no reasonable route existed by which to go after Richmond. One might speculate that Hooker could see the time when in fact an “eligible” route to Richmond might open up and change the current paradigm. Still, his provisional interest in targeting Lee first was refreshing.

During the interregnum that was the “mud march,” Lee had held his place, entrenched at Fredericksburg. Now, Hooker also remained in place for a couple of months, concentrating upon upgrading the army and improving its morale. This was not necessarily an unwarranted decision, and would not be the first and only time Union armies would go into winter hiatus, although much of the winter had already passed.

At this time, the Union armies, across the whole face of the war, were recorded as having 918,111 men versus the Confederacy’s 446,622. The relative strengths of the two armies facing each other in Virginia was around 130,000, blue, to 65,000 gray. Of course the larger numbers above were deceptive because units were scattered throughout the entire venue of the war, with no armies larger than the two listed above in any one place. Furthermore, those numbers did not indicate only “effectives,” that was to say men on their feet, armed, ready to fight, but included those recovering from wounds and illness, or on leave.

Still, it seemed reasonable to expect the Union army to mop up on Lee once it ran him to ground. Ah, but that was the rub, and Hooker would find it no easier than Burnside had.

In April, Hooker was ready to move. Unlike Burnside, Hooker would make use of the fords on the Rappahannock to the west of Fredericksburg, obviating the need for bridges.

Sufficient numbers of these commonly used crossings existed that Hooker faced a choice of which to use. Nor did he have to restrict himself to only one. He selected, for the use by the main army, a crossing known as US Ford.

The master plan was to establish the army on solid, open ground south of the Rappahannock, to force Lee out of Fredericksburg into a straight fight where numbers would matter. The problem was that if Lee caught on, he would be again waiting in some defensive position or even be able to chop up Hooker’s large army in detail as it moved into place. Hooker needed to buy time and he had an idea how to do it.

He first would “demonstrate” before Fredericksburg in hopes of freezing Lee there. Meantime, the main army would cross the river in an area where a vast thicket of woods called The Wilderness would screen movement, in essence hiding the army until it popped out beyond the woods west of Lee and even a bit behind him.

It could have been a good plan if it had been carried out rapidly enough to achieve its aim. The one thing that must not happen was for the army to get tangled up in the Wilderness while Lee caught on and brought his forces into place to chop up the larger army as it tried to emerge, similarly to what Lee intended to do to McClellan in his passage through White Oak Swamp.

April 27, Hooker’s army vacated its winter base at Falmouth and set forth. The crossing of the Rappahannock began the next day and on May First, Lee reacted to Hooker’s operation by marching west to intercept him before he could in fact pass The Wilderness.

Lee unquestionably possessed the interior lines in this case, a direct transfer of men on the inside of the curve of the river from Fredericksburg to a position snugged up against the Wilderness but on the outside of the thicket, beautifully arranged to contest each element of Hooker’s army as it emerged from the Wilderness.

As in White Oak Swamp, Hooker’s army must march through the Wilderness in columns, using roads. When Lee had attempted to break up McClellan’s army at White Oak Swamp under similar circumstances, Lee had failed him. Since that time, Jackson had been the rock on which Lee based his operations, and in this coming operation, Jackson would deliver as never before.

Hooker began to come unraveled when he found Lee waiting for him beyond the Wilderness. Instead of pushing through as rapidly as possible, he allowed a small show of resistance by Lee to stop him in his tracks, in the worst possible place, within the Wilderness. His subordinates were shocked, for the Wilderness worked greatly to Lee’s advantage, neutralizing much of the Union’s numerical superiority.

Part of this was the inability of a large army to move in a coherent way through thickets that broke up marching formations, that screened men from each other so that no cohesion existed, that caused men to become lost within yards of their fellows, and which blocked from view the position and movements of the enemy until one was already caught in a trap.

Furthermore, only one column could move past a given point on a given road at a time, when the surrounding forest was too thick to permit additional columns to march alongside. Essentially, such a forest served as a filter, allowing only a thin stream of the army to pass through instead of a massive flow.

From within such woods, a commander could not see the larger movements of his enemy and must proceed blindly if he could not manage to place observers beyond, and Hooker could not.

With Hooker caught in this mess, Lee suddenly had a chance to do better than just hold Hooker off. He saw great possibilities of a major defeat in detail and to do so, he concocted a daring plan. He would once again split his force despite being within a short distance of a far superior army in numbers, taking advantage of the knowledge of local people who directed him to a quiet road that was used to convey ore to a furnace in the vicinity and which did not appear on maps.

By this route, making use of the screening woods to hide his men from view of the Union forces, Jackson would circle around and emerge beyond Hooker’s right flank.

As to that right flank, far from the anticipated point of contact with Lee’s army, off to the west, Hooker had allowed the wing of his army to be unprotected, or “up in the air.” He had perceived absolutely no threat in that area, and even at that, he considered the crazy tangle of woods nearby enough of an impediment to an attacking force to serve as something of an anchor anyway. With no notion that a road existed nearby, over which an enemy unit could reach within the distance of a charge through the woods, he had no worries about this wing of the army.

While it was not reasonable to know of this road, on the other hand, logic ought to have suggested that some similar road could exist because farmers and merchants and anyone on one side of the Wilderness would likely require paths both through and around the outskirts of the forest, and in fact the region was criss-crossed with a confusing network of roads of various sizes and quality, more of them missing from maps than were marked.

To improve the chances that Hooker would not sense the flank attack coming, while Jackson’s 26,000 man force moved along the quiet road through the southern edge of the Wilderness, Lee distracted Hooker by keeping 21,000 more in view.

Jackson marched out May 2, 1863.

When Jackson’s departure from the area was detected by the Union, Hooker interpreted it as retreat. Pope had reacted similarly when Jackson had made his exit to create his trap leading to Second Manassas. Most likely, Hooker was operating on wishful thinking, that Jackson was withdrawing, because if it were true, Hooker would be free to take on Lee’s 21,000 man decoy. Yet, how likely was it Lee would send away part of his army at a time like this, with no thoughts of using it elsewhere? Why would it be reasonable to believe Jackson’s men were marching to no worthwhile destination even if they were attempting to avoid direct confrontation with Hooker? Was it sensible to assume they would not reappear somewhere, and if they would, shouldn’t Hooker be concerned with where?

Apparently not, apparently he dismissed any such thoughts.

On the far flank, the XI Corps, which formed the wing that was up in the air, had recently been taken over by General Oliver Howard. Most of the men were of Germanic background and their former commander had been a political general named Sigel, and not a particularly effective one.

The mission of the XI was to stand in reserve at that far end of the line, safely parked, awaiting a call at need to move forward if another corps was either heavily damaged or achieved such success that it advanced, allowing the XI to fill in behind it, until the progress through the Wilderness had reached the point when the XI was next to proceed beyond.

The first intimation of the surprise attack was a bizarre stampede of wild animals—deer, rabbits, and others—emerging from the woods in headlong flight, having been flushed out of the woods by the Confederate soldiers filtering through underbrush between the road and the Union encampment, in the course of their assault.

Before Howard’s men could make sense of what was going on, the Confederates were on them. With very little resistance, the flank of the XI Corps “rolled up,” or collapsed three miles back toward Hooker’s main army in chaotic retreat.

It was out of this scenario, after dark, that the Confederate army suffered a grievous blow. That night, his marvelous operation a success, Stonewall Jackson rode over that fateful hidden road to personally inspect the positioning of his men in support of the next advance, to be made in the morning. For just a moment, a burst of gunfire erupted, fired by nervous Confederate pickets who mistook the party as Union cavalry. Jackson was hit in the arm, badly wounded, carried from the field, and in days, following amputation of the limb, he would die of pneumonia.

While the Confederacy would suffer for the loss of Jackson over time, Hooker was suffering from the effects of Jackson’s last great operation now. Yet the collapse of Hooker’s right wing, which as noted was not engaged in the battle but was waiting in reserve, ought not to have been a fatal blow. After all, Lee’s army was divided, with Jackson’s men separated from the rest and Hooker between, and had Hooker swung his men into action, he could still have done major damage to one or the other, or even both wings of Lee’s divided army.

Whether it was the cause of his failure or not, at one point, Hooker had been dazed by a nearby explosion from an incoming shell and for the course of the afternoon, he operated in a mental fog, unable to recover from the effects of the blast. For that reason or others, he failed to take advantage of Lee’s divided army, and with the opportunity available, as daring as ever, Lee attacked from both sides, pouring artillery fire in on Hooker’s center from a nearby hill. Completely undone now, Hooker panicked, pulling his army back across the river, unwilling to engage Lee any more in this awful place, let alone try to disentangle from the Wilderness and move forward.

This battle was known as Chancellorsville, named after a plantation located at a crossroads where the Union army headquartered during the battle, and Chancellorsville put an end to Hooker’s offensive.

Once again, Lee had outfought a superior force, taking great risks and getting away with them, but it could also be said that once again, the only reason he had fended off another disaster was due to poor performance by a Union commander.

Again, a golden opportunity for the Union had ended in nothing, yet the Confederacy never escaped its battles unscathed even in victory. Despite his chagrin at how the war was being conducted in the East, President Lincoln noted that if the Confederate army continued to bleed men at the rate it was doing, Jefferson Davis would be the one who eventually ran completely out of men to fight the war, long before the Union would. Each such exchange, even a significant Confederate victory cost men that could not be replaced and if the war continued at such a rate of losses, the Union could fight these losing battles on and on and still win the war, all other factors being equal. That was the basis of Lincoln’s comment about the awful arithmetic. Ghastly as the numbers might be, they continually favored the Union and while that was not a pleasant way to win the war, like it or not, it was a definite formula for victory, no matter how long it might take, if a general emerged who could stomach the carnage and last it out to the final victory.

As far as field commanders in the East were concerned, Lincoln had run through McClellan, Burnside, and now Hooker, and he had not found a good one in the bunch. Still, however, for some time yet, Hooker would remain in command but the countdown clock was already started on him.

Certainly, while the armies in Virginia blundered through, from second Manassas, to Antietam, to Fredericksburg, to Chancellorsville, events in the Western Theater were inexorably separating the real generals from the false, and at length, one day in the future, it would dawn upon the president who should be the Great Man to lead the way to the end of the war, the one could indeed stand up to the awful arithmetic.

By the time Lincoln reached that realization, Lee would have nearly made a fatal mistake.

Part VII: The Union Armies Move On in the West

Chapter One

In the Western Theater, Rosecrans—having replaced Buell as the commander of the Army of the Ohio—and Bragg brought their armies into camp, to ride out the winter.

Buell’s winter camp was near Nashville and Bragg’s at Murfreesboro.

Jefferson Davis visited Bragg in his base, undertaking an investigation into the abortive invasion of Kentucky. In the course of his inspection tour, aware that Grant represented a threat to Vicksburg, Davis ordered Bragg to send ten thousand men to protect the Mississippi bastion.

A Chattanooga newspaper thought nothing of reporting this order, and Rosecrans took note of it. This transfer of men would diminish Bragg’s army to around thirty thousand.

Knowing his mandate was to go after Bragg at the earliest possible time, Rosecrans felt he could not pass up this opportunity. On December 26, he moved on Bragg at Murfreesboro, thirty miles from Nashville.

After skirmishing, on December 31, both generals attempted to attack each other by the right flank. Bragg moved first, and for a time it seemed the Confederates would defeat a weakened Union line that had been left isolated, but Bragg’s men could not finish the job. Ultimately, after failures by supporting officers and mass confusion, Bragg was forced to abandon the fight, retreating to Tullahoma, thirty-five miles away. Worse than failing to pull off a victory over inferior numbers, Bragg lost over eleven thousand in casualties. After this battle, called Stones River, nothing more would happen between Bragg and Rosecrans for another six months as both returned to their winter respites.

Back in Corinth, Grant was not finished with his work for the year.

After van Dorn and Price had made an attempt to take back Corinth and failed, and while meantime, Bragg and Smith had given their best shots in Kentucky and had also failed, Grant was comfortable enough to take on a new mission of his own.

Hopefully after winter hiatus, Rosecrans would return to the mission of seizing Chattanooga, so Grant could set that aside on his list of things to do. Vicksburg, however, was still in play and he was in the best situational position to act on it now.

November 2, 1862, Grant moved 32,000 men to another rail nexus at Grand Junction, Mississippi and after little resistance, he occupied it. General John Pemberton commanded the only Confederate force that now stood between Grant and the Mississippi River and he was currently based on the south bank of the Tallahatchie River, miles below Grant, and putting up no serious resistance.

(Pemberton will be remembered as the Union commander to led fifty regular army men to Fort McHenry in Baltimore when the original Pennsylvanians traveled to Washington to defend against the Virginia militia in 1861.)

On November 26, Grant directed Sherman, stationed in Memphis, to march south and threaten Pemberton’s flank. On December 1, with Pemberton in retreat, Grant reached and crossed the Tallahatchie and the next day, near Oxford, Mississippi, Sherman’s army rendezvoused with Grant’s.

Although the operation against Vicksburg was going well enough, Grant was growing concerned about how long he would eventually have to extend his supply line by the time he reached Vicksburg using this route.

As was seen with Buell, and then again with Lee, the generals of that era paid great attention to maintaining a supply link to whatever base they used to store what they needed for a campaign, from food to ammunition. In this period, Grant was no different.

In consultation with Halleck, now in Washington, Grant made the decision to continue on as fast as possible by land, but to send Sherman back to Memphis to support him by water. Grant thought that with Pemberton occupied against himself, Sherman ought to be able to take Vicksburg by using the river to reach a position upstream, enter the stretch of land east of Vicksburg, the same position Grant was trying to reach, and conduct a direct assault on the city.

If Pemberton went after one threatening force, the other should be able to blast in and defeat him then have the city by default.

Sherman, in Memphis, prepared his move, but in the meantime, Confederate cavalry had raided and destroyed one of Grant’s supply depots, Holly Springs. This was one of Grant’s logistical nightmares; unwilling to carry on even deeper into Mississippi with both his supply line and his communications link to Sherman fractured, Grant withdrew.

Since communications was one of the items disrupted by the raid, Sherman had no way of knowing that Grant had called off his campaign, and thus he carried on with his own, destroying tracks on the Louisiana shore opposite Vicksburg, then he moved up the Yazoo River, which flows into the Mississippi River north of Vicksburg. By means of that avenue, Sherman attempted to directly approach Vicksburg southward by land. This effort was stymied by the rugged terrain and high bluffs in the area, which offered Confederate artillery the angle to fire down upon him.

During December 26-29, Sherman attempted to find a safer way to get past the roadblock and make an advance, but failing that, he pushed too aggressively and conducted a dangerous assault which cost him 1,776 men before he gave up and called off the effort.

This two-pronged operation, Grant’s by land and Sherman’s by water, would later be considered the First Phase of Grant’s campaign to take Vicksburg.

After consulting with Sherman upon his return, Grant was satisfied that despite the futility of this initial operation, he now understood what would be needed to “reduce” Vicksburg as a show-stopper on the Mississippi. It was too late in the year to undertake his actual plan, but he would not sit idle through the winter as others, unlike Rosecrans and Bragg.

Long since, the Union had faced the fact that Vicksburg could not be defeated as an artillery base from the river side, that is, from the west. That would entail braving the guns to bring ships up to the shore, offloading men, and sending them up a sharp set of bluffs, all in the teeth of raging gunfire.

The key to defeating Vicksburg had to be an infantry assault from the land side of town, but the question came down to how an army large enough to subdue Vicksburg could be inserted into that space without the risk of having supply lines severed. Corinth was of course itself in Mississippi, and on east of Vicksburg, but it was also two hundred miles distant from Vicksburg, too far for Grant to string out his army.

Additionally, Jackson, the capital city, was not much more than thirty miles east of Vicksburg and Confederate forces of some level could be expected to fill in there, which meant any Union army that entered the region stood to be threatened from two sides.

Grant’s plans for the winter did not involve direct attempts to plant an army outside and east of Vicksburg. On the other hand, he hated having his men sit in camps in what was a swampy area rife with disease, so Grant resolved to put them to work.

What followed was one of the most misunderstood periods of the Civil War, and certainly of Grant’s activities during the war. In the winter of 1862-63, Grant undertook several projects that were designed to appear to outside eyes as attempts set up an attack on Vicksburg by various means, primarily from boats on the Mississippi. Some of the schemes could have led to placing men in position on the Mississippi shore either north or south of Vicksburg, with the river itself serving as supply line.

In his memoirs, Grant made clear that had any of these projects, which he called “experiments” succeeded, he would have been eager to make use of them as a means of threatening Vicksburg.

In reality, however, he made it clear that he had entertained little hope that any of the experiments would succeed. While the press and other military authorities would deride his seemingly worthless operations, to Grant it did not matter. In fact all the better, the negative attention played into his grander scheme. In the meantime, the work kept his men busy, mentally and physically, rather than leaving them to loll about in festering camps and succumb to disease. The experiments kept them busy, out in the field and active, whether their projects would come to anything or not. Perhaps one could call the whole business the ultimate in “make work,” but it served Grant’s intentions, in more than one way.

One of those additional purposes of those projects was to misdirect the attention of both the Confederates and the world press. While the press enjoyed a field day in ridiculing Grant and his projects, it also amused the Confederates to the degree that they kept their focus where Granted wanted it, on the wrong places.

While all this carried on, Grant was waiting out the weather before carrying off his real plan, the grand scheme he had concocted for moving an army into the space between Vicksburg and Jackson. To succeed, the plan required a dry spell, not in Mississippi but in Louisiana, across the river. While he waited out the winter, Grant kept the experiments under way.

The experiments were not popular. Even Sherman disapproved, because Grant had not confided to him the true plan to come, but it did not matter. By now Grant and Sherman were such good friends that the junior of the two generals cheerfully set aside his qualms and indulged his boss his preoccupation.

Others were not so forgiving.

Cadwallader Washburne was the brother of Elihu, the senator who had interceded for Grant in earlier times of need. Now, Cadwallader turned on Grant over the issue of the experiments, decrying the waste of time and “strength, to no purpose.”

In the same period, even Republicans were condemning Grant and rumors circulated that he was drinking heavily and was perhaps almost non-functional as a result. Among those who stood by Grant, however, was the only one who counted: Lincoln himself. He stated that what was needed was a collection of generals who fought and won, and Grant was one of those few and Lincoln would give him considerable benefit of the doubt.

The question of whether Grant was as much of a drunkard as has been claimed will not be investigated here. Why? Because if Grant drank excessively and the effects upon him were deleterious, he confined such drinking to times when it had no impact on his work. In the past, in his first stint in the army, he had suffered negative effects as far as his career was concerned as a result of drinking, but that time was long over. Apparently his history with drinking had led to McClellan refusing to hire him in Ohio, but McClellan was gone from the army and Grant remained.

It has been suggested that he only drank when he was lonely, missing his wife and children, and the only circumstances, as a general, when he had time to be lonely occurred when nothing of importance was going on. In those times, he was free to get as drunk as he pleased without doing harm. Whether any of the stories about his excessive drunkenness were true or not, the fact was that when he was sober, he was doing the job Lincoln wanted from him.

A story circulated, that Lincoln stated that he would like to know what it was Grant drank and make it available to other generals if it would bring the results seen with Grant. Whether Lincoln ever actually said it or not is less important than the point the story made.

Perhaps to satisfy the naysayers, however, Lincoln did agree to allow a spy to be sent, someone who was to ascertain the truth about Grant’s alleged drinking and how it did or did not affect his work. This man, Charles A. Dana, was a former editor, now an assistant secretary of war. Lincoln dispatched Dana to Grant’s bailiwick on the faux business of clearing up irregularities in the paymaster service of the theater, but Grant got wind of his true purpose and dealt directly and honestly with Dana and with no apparent resentment for the task with which the spy had been dispatched. In so doing, Grant won Dana over to such an extent that the investigator sent rave reviews of the general and the issue of Grant’s drinking withered away.

Still, questions continued over the issue of the experiments involving Vicksburg.

The issue of the experiments and the problem of directly attacking Vicksburg, Grant explained in his memoirs:

“A front attack was impossible, and was never contemplated, certainly not by me. The problem then became, how to secure a landing on the high ground east of the Mississippi without an apparent retreat. Then commenced a series of experiments to consume time, and to divert the attention of the enemy, of my troops and of the public generally. I, myself, never felt great confidence that any of the experiments resorted to would prove successful. Nevertheless, I was always prepared to take advantage of them in case they did.”

(Grant, p. 236)

For some reason, many have chosen to ignore this passage in Grant’s memoirs and call his “experiments” failures and credit the success that follows as if he stumbled upon the idea after trying everything he could think of to reduce Vicksburg. Unless he was justifying in his memoirs what looked like failures after the fact, then his plan was sound. There is no basis on which to call Grant a liar in this passage so it must be accepted that he indeed did not count on these experiments as anything other than what he called them, diversions and time killers while the weather improved for his real plan. And yes, clearly, if one of them by luck succeeded, of course he would have taken advantage of it, but in the event, none of them panned out.

While overall, seven of these experiments were eventually carried out, it suffices to consider only one in order to gain a flavor of the whole set.

It will be remembered that General Thomas Williams, dispatched from New Orleans by Benjamin Butler, had previously attempted to delve a canal across De Soto Point, the peninsula-like piece of land that was caught up in a great bend of the Mississippi. If this canal succeeded, ships could pass Vicksburg out of reach of the guns, and Vicksburg would be neutralized as a blocking point of the river.

As one of his projects, Grant revived this operation, along with a variety of other, similar, canal-dredging schemes in the area around Vicksburg. In no case would the river behave the way it was hoped, always refusing to flow through any of the new channels in sufficient volume to float ships past the guns of Vicksburg.

The notion of actually diverting the course of so mighty a river as the Mississippi was not as insane as it sounds now. Decades earlier, a massive earthquake had in fact greatly altered the course of the river to the north around Kaskaskia, Illinois, swallowing up forever towns on the banks, and that was just one instance of the great river having meandered in an out of its present course. Theoretically, then deliberate action by human beings could have conceivably led to a minor diversion of the flow sufficient to allow boats to navigate around Vicksburg.

The technology of the day was not enough, however and the Mississippi stubbornly refused to cooperate.

So much for the experiments. What then, was the “real” plan Grant had devised to put men east of Vicksburg on the ground? And why was it necessary to wait out the winter to try?

The overall goal was of course to land an army in Mississippi in such a way that a base could serve them for the assault on Vicksburg. The wish was to set this base in the space between Vicksburg and Jackson, which would entail cleaning out Jackson of any Confederate military presence.

Up to this time, the stretch of land south of Vicksburg, into Louisiana, was a dead zone as far as military activity was concerned. With men needed elsewhere, the Confederacy wasted no forces on this stretch of terrain, given that no Union threat existed most of the way from Vicksburg to New Orleans. Grant’s idea was to place men on the Mississippi state side in this area, set up a base at the river shore that would be supplied well enough to make a beginning, then blast north into the space he desired, fighting whatever scratch forces the Confederates could rush to meet him.

Contrary to his modus operandi when he had panicked at the loss of his Holly Springs supply base, Grant had come to appreciate that he could obtain much of what he needed from the civilian economy, aside from ammunition and basic military supplies, and thus did not have to fret about a long line of supply as he had before. At the same time, he could land enough of the indispensable supplies by boat or by other means and make that do inside enemy territory.

Defeating Vicksburg would bring its own reward—a port linked by the river directly to a regular supply base, perhaps St. Louis, or Memphis, to support future operations beyond the capture of the Mississippi port city.

Everything in this plan revolved around planting men on the Mississippi side of the river, along with a minimal supply base, south of Vicksburg. Men and supplies could be marched through Rebel territory that was unguarded, down the Louisiana shore to whatever jumping-off point presented itself, and what would then be needed was ships to carry them and supplies across the river.

Ships, it was known, could pass Vicksburg, if one were willing to accept losses. That was the key, march men down beyond Vicksburg in Louisiana territory, and slip as many ships down past Vicksburg as possible, use them to ferry the men across, along with supplies, create a minimal base there, then march the force to the desired location inside of Mississippi, for the attack on the rear of Vicksburg.

None of that could be done until the ground in Louisiana dried up in Spring. That was the cause of the delay and the need to conduct the experiments.

Thus the beauty of the diversionary experiments: they took the minds and eyes of the Confederates away from the preparations to cross the river below.

Metalized ships—the ironclads—and others protected somewhat by bails of cotton strapped over the outside to absorb shells, could survive the barrages from Vicksburg, in harrowing crossings, and not in large numbers, and certainly not regularly enough to free the river as a shipping route all the way from the Ohio River valley to New Orleans. For Grant’s purposes, however, if only a few vessels out of a large flotilla made it to the crossing point farther south, his operation could be supported.

And if one were going to send ships through that maelstrom at all, it made no sense to send them empty. They might as well be loaded with supplies, for every pound that reached the jumping off point was a pound that did not have to be transported by land through Louisiana. What was lost if ships were destroyed could be made up by being transported on the dry land.

Vicksburg was not the last obstacle to the opening of the Mississippi over its entire length. If it had been, Grant could have simply moved the ships he needed from New Orleans. Unfortunately, a similar roadblock existed at Port Hudson, past the Mississippi border, in Louisiana. Since Grant’s base was north of Vicksburg, to use New Orleans would have meant moving everything he needed twice, somehow to New Orleans, then back up to the crossing point, between Port Hudson and Vicksburg, so Vicksburg was the choice for the ships to try and pass.

Leading to this overall operation, Grant had faced off with the “political general” McClernand over the question of who was in command of the operation. Technically, the latter had a case but he was incompetent and Grant managed to make use of his current good will with Lincoln and yes, even with Halleck, to gain the upper hand, all in the name of the good of the nation.

Nathaniel Banks had taken over command at New Orleans and outranked Grant by time in grade. He was one of those political generals and not especially effective. While he was tasked with taking down Fort Hudson, in the same time frame, it would have seemed logical to bring the dual operations, Vicksburg and Hudson, under one command, but if that were done, Banks would have been necessarily placed in charge. Unfortunately, in Washington, the leadership wished and expected, once Grant had his men on the same mainland as Banks, that the two generals would in fact combine forces and even take Port Hudson first.

From Grant’s point of view, and the point of view of any reasonable military mind who was paying attention, having Banks in command of Grant’s operation would not be desirable. Furthermore, while Grant would always obey orders, he had demonstrated a willingness to avoid having more commanders directly over his head than he could avoid. He had managed to shed McClernand earlier and he was able to do the same thing with Banks now.

To shed himself of Banks, Grant used a stratagem which, unknown to him, of course, had worked for Lee in the past. He sent a message to Halleck in Washington describing his plan to dispatch Banks against Port Hudson on his own, while Grant concentrated on Vicksburg, and if Halleck or Lincoln disagreed, they could certainly call him off and he would obey. Problem was, his line of communications would be so slow that he would be too far along in his chosen route to change by the time Halleck could reply, and Halleck would be stuck with Grant’s plan by default.

All this was still in the future, however. First, Grant must put his army on the east side of the great river. By now, Halleck had bought into the need to take Vicksburg to such a degree that he claimed taking forty Richmonds would not be as important.

The fleet that would run past Vicksburg, under the command of Rear Admiral David D. Porter, consisted of seven ironclad ships, one armed ram ship, three transport ships and a tug. While the flotilla assembled and prepared to make its run, the army marched down through the now drier Louisiana turf to the rendezvous point for the river crossing.

The great operation, running Grant’s flotilla past Vicksburg was carried out in the night of April 16, 1863. When all was done, the great news for Grant was that only one transport was wrecked in this initial attempt, and the items lost as a result were fully replaceable. The operation was off to a roaring start.

Downstream, the first attempt to ferry men across the Mississippi was conducted at a landing called Hard Times, named after a nearby plantation, but only a few men were able to transfer over, using an island as a stepping stone, before Confederate artillery close by at Grand Gulf menaced the operation. Grant moved the rest of his army down to Bruinsburg, even further south, and as men set foot on Mississippi soil, the campaign to take Vicksburg truly began.

By April 30, Grant’s army had arrived at the position he had desired for months, within striking distance of Vicksburg from the east. He moved rapidly north, fending off a few lightly resisting Confederate forces.

As part of this operation, a cavalry raid had been dispatched from the north under command of a General Benjamin Grierson, with a brigade from Tennessee, who carried out some sabotage to railroads and skirmished with smaller units of the enemy on the way. The main purpose of Grierson’s raid, however, was a further diversion of Confederate military eyes and ears away from Grant’s main operation, and in this, Grierson was imminently successful, finally reaching safety at Baton Rouge.

(A fictionalized account of this raid, complete with Hollywood-style love story was turned out in the 1950’s as a movie called The Horse Soldiers.)

Initially, Grant planted 33,000 men on the Mississippi shore, but he would be well reinforced to a much higher number soon enough, in fact, rising to that mystical/magical number of around seventy-five thousand.

On May 9, Joseph Johnston had been ordered by the Confederate Secretary of War to proceed to Jackson, Mississippi and take direct command of the forces there. Up to that time, Johnston, recovered from the severe wound suffered at Seven Pines in the last battle of McClellan’s Peninsular Campaign, served as the equivalent of a department commander, which meant he oversaw operations but not from the ground level.

On May 13, he arrived to discover that two Union corps were bearing down on Jackson as part of the overall plan to capture Vicksburg. The local commander, Brigadier General John Gregg made clear that only 6,000 men were available to hold off the two Union corps and as he had done at other times, Johnston declared the position indefensible and called for the evacuation of the capital.

Gregg was to put up a holding action with his 6,000 men until the evacuation could be carried out. Due to heavy rain, the fighting did not intensify until eleven o’clock the next morning and inexorably, Sherman and McPherson, commanding the two corps as part of Grant’s invasion force across the Mississippi River, pushed Gregg backward. Still, by the afternoon, the evacuation was complete and Johnston instructed Gregg to disengage and follow the northbound evacuation.

The Union forces entered the city, destroyed whatever could be used by the Confederate war effort but deliberately kept non-military factories open and left jobs for the workers intact. A great celebration, attended by Grant himself was conducted, and it was clear to the Confederacy that Vicksburg was doomed, its surrender only a matter of time, although more time than Grant would have wanted to spend on its reduction.

The impending loss of Vicksburg would change much more than the issue of who controlled the Mississippi River. The entire flow of the war as conducted by the Confederacy would be affected by just the threat of losing the port city. Indeed, Halleck’s assessment, that is, the worth of taking Vicksburg in the war effort, had not been as overblown as one might have believed. The Confederate leadership, itself, made that true.

Chapter Two

The high command in Richmond no longer ignored the West. It had been beaten into their heads now that they were bleeding territory on a massive scale, and Vicksburg was one of the very key places they had managed to hold on, but now they realized it was in dire jeopardy.

Meetings had been held over other failures and losses in the west, and by all means, the threat to Vicksburg was a source of meetings now.

A certain course of action was chosen, in an attempt to save Vicksburg, which will be described shortly, but a note must be made first.

The course that the Confederate leadership adopted now is seldom credited as an attempt to divert Grant away from Vicksburg. This operation became so famous and so grand in scale that the source of its genesis is usually overlooked, or more correctly, misunderstood and described inaccurately.

First, it must also be noted that by now, the Confederate leadership, and even those at lesser strata, had entered a controlled panic mode as a result of the way the war was unfolding, and the now dire threat to Vicksburg only ramped up that panic feeling.

It should not have come as a surprise in Richmond that Grant would have found a way to “get at” Vicksburg sooner or later. The Confederate leadership would have known that Grant had zeroed in on the city as a target, and that he and the Union had huge resources for conducting major campaigns in the West. Sooner or later it should have seemed inevitable that with its own armies being relentlessly if slowly boxed into corners, the Confederacy could not hold Vicksburg forever, or even for very long, no matter what drastic measure might be devised to try and save it. After all, the Union had controlled much of the state of Mississippi more thoroughly than the Confederacy had for months.

When it finally dawned on the Confederate power base that Vicksburg was now on the endangered list, debate raged in Richmond about what to do. How could Vicksburg be saved, without using resources that would open up some other key place to the Union?

Already, General Pemberton, commanding at Vicksburg, had been reinforced with ten thousand men taken away from Bragg at Murfreesboro. He had also picked up a few from the Confederate forces on the other side of the Mississippi, but he had not been reinforced in anything approaching the amounts he needed to hold off Grant.

Joseph Johnston seemed to be the highest ranking member of the Confederate chain of command who understood the true state of the war. He had tried to fight it the way it should have been fought by the South all along, preserving men and only giving up position slowly, buying as much time in the process as possible. With the 6,000 men he had found at Jackson, he might have slowed Grant down for a few days, but at the end of that time, Grant would still have Jackson, and would still be in the position of threatening Vicksburg, and the Confederacy would be 6,000 men closer to the end of the road.

It was clear enough now that Vicksburg itself could not be saved by a direct fight between Pemberton’s forces and Grant’s.

Johnston faced up to the fact that Vicksburg should be written off because its loss was inevitable and the more men sent there, the more would die or be captured. In other words, Vicksburg was a sinkhole for resources that ought to be used elsewhere.

That view, unsurprisingly, was not shared by all in Richmond.

Quite the contrary, in fact: the consensus was in favor of concocting some grandiose effort to “relieve” Vicksburg of Grant’s threat. Beauregard, never one to shy away from grand schemes, proposed throwing all the available troops in the West into Bragg’s command and carrying out another, larger all-out offensive through Tennessee and Kentucky. The first step would be to destroy Rosecrans, still holding place at Murfreesboro. This new invasion, Beauregard argued, would force Grant to abandon his offensive against Vicksburg and rush north into Tennessee and Kentucky in the same manner the abortive Bragg-Kirby Smith debacle had been designed to do. And had totally failed.

By this plan, however, with Grant making haste up through Tennessee, Johnston should recruit twenty thousand men in Tennessee and Kentucky and move over to cut Grant off.

For some reason, Beauregard believed that if Johnston caught Grant flat-footed, on ground Johnston chose to his best advantage, he could somehow beat Grant. If this occurred, according to Beauregard, then Johnston would merge with Bragg’s rampaging army, making a force that consisted of a hundred fifty thousand. With Grant finished, half that army could retake the West, and the other would join Lee in Virginia and wipe out the Union army there, and that would be that, game over.

Beauregard proposed this in a letter to Johnston, which the latter never deigned to answer. Yet Beauregard was not the only one thinking in terms of a major reversal in the West. James Longstreet was Lee’s main deputy, having replaced Jackson after his demise, and Longstreet proposed a different kind of grand design. He suggested that Pemberton let Vicksburg go to Grant for now and throw in with Bragg at Tullahoma, and Johnston would also combine with Bragg, making a force strong enough to defeat Rosecrans. From that point, similarly to Beauregard’s theory, he believed Grant would be forced to let Vicksburg go to rush north and contend with this super-army. None of this seemed to take into account that Grant might take part of the bait, yet drop off enough men to hold Vicksburg with a garrison force, an eventuality which would have defeated the whole idea of the grand Confederate operation.

Prior to the May 14 evacuation of Jackson, Mississippi, Confederate Secretary of War Seddon had taken a different view, wanting Johnston reinforced at Jackson for a powerful strike against Grant in hopes of drawing him off of Pemberton’s back at Vicksburg. Lee opposed this strongly.

With these ideas flying around in the wind, on May 14, with Jackson, Mississippi being evacuated, Davis and Seddon called for a high level conference to put together a strategy on the fly to save the situation at Vicksburg, if one could be found. At question was the possibility of dispatching Longstreet with a major portion of Lee’s army in Virginia, to save Mississippi. Lee was aghast, believing that to give up the kinds of numbers being bandied about, he could not win in Virginia. Instead, Lee pushed the idea of carrying out another raid into Maryland and beyond. This, if successful, Lee said, would be the stroke that forced Grant to abandon Vicksburg and come to the defense of the North.

Lee reduced the situation to a simple equation: either carry the war into the North, with its attendant dangers but also potential awards, hopefully bringing Grant into the East, which would save Vicksburg and the West in general, or give up the West to Grant and withdraw Lee’s Virginia army back to Richmond and wait for the inevitable siege that was sure to come, and which could have only have one ultimate result.

Those who tended toward wild schemes for some reason persisted in believing that they could once and for all create a super-army in Tennessee and with it, defeat all the forces of the Union in the west. But the sober thinkers were ready to face the fact that the Confederacy was already in the early stages of ultimate defeat and that such desperate need called out desperate but actually feasible measures.

Of all the workable ideas presented, it was more and more Lee’s scheme that rose to the fore, the idea of another raid north. The theory behind it was that if one or two key positions in Pennsylvania or elsewhere could be taken, such as the state capital of Harrisburg, or even Baltimore or Philadelphia, and some key railroad bridge were destroyed, the Northern population would feel terrorized and at the same time, the Europeans still might recognize the Confederacy as viable and impose a negotiated settlement on Lincoln. Even if that failed, hopefully the danger to Northern cities would cause Lincoln to summon Grant and his army to abandon Vicksburg and come to the rescue in the east.

Three separate polls were conducted among five members of the leadership group in Richmond. Each time, the vote came out with three in favor of Lee’s plan to again invade through Maryland, and two against.

That was the genesis of the operation that would lead to Gettysburg. With that decision made, Lee returned to his troops at Chancellorsville, to begin moving north.

The perspective on this decision from Longstreet’s viewpoint, from his memoirs, as to the reason for the raid that would end at Gettysburg:

It was the object of and excuse for the invasion as a substitute for more direct efforts for the relief of Vicksburg.

Meantime, Grant carried on his campaign to finally seize Vicksburg.

With Johnston’s retreat away from Grant, leaving Pemberton at Vicksburg essentially on his own, the Confederacy was giving up most of Mississippi, and had no choice about it. They had pinned their hopes on Lee’s second great raid north and had to live with it. Let Grant take Vicksburg now, but he would hopefully have to let it go when Lee had done his work.

Having been all but abandoned, Pemberton’s only choice if he wanted a chance of saving Vicksburg and his army was to fight Grant out in the spaces between Jackson and Vicksburg. Skirmishes had occurred all along the way as Grant had advanced from his base at the river, but nothing had slowed him down. Grant’s army was subsisting so well off the land that even if Pemberton cut his supply line to the river, Grant would not have been stopped this time.

After further skirmishes with Grant, Pemberton’s resistance culminated on May 16 in a battle at Champion Hill, a site located between Jackson and Vicksburg. The Champion Hill fight did nothing to stop Grant, and May 17, after another skirmish, Pemberton completely holed up inside the defenses of Vicksburg. Failing to catch and defeat Pemberton on the way, Grant arrived before the city and as he put it, resolved to “out-camp” the Confederate garrison inside.

Grant had not wanted to win Vicksburg by siege, a time-wasting process, but if that was what must be, he would do it.

Uncertain whether Johnston might come back and attempt to save Vicksburg, Grant dispatched Sherman with a force to be planted in the way, near Jackson, but Johnston never returned to put up a threat.

The siege of Vicksburg lasted until the Confederates inside were essentially starved out, surrendering on the Fourth of July. It was not a coincidence that Pemberton gave up on that date. He hoped that in honor of the good feelings that Independence Day would engender in the North, Grant might offer better terms than he would have otherwise. In fact, despite his reputation as Unconditional Surrender Grant, the victorious general was quite generous, and when the hostilities ended with surrender, his men rushed forward into Vicksburg to share their food with their starving counterparts, and the likewise hungry civilians of the city.

By now, Lee’s gambit into the North had already reached its high water mark, and clearly, had not caused Grant to even glance over his shoulder to the East, let alone abandon Vicksburg and rush his army in that direction to save the Union.

Seeing the inevitable, besieged by Banks, the commander of Port Hudson surrendered on the Seventh of July. With that, the Mississippi was now not only open to the Union, it was controlled by the Union, severing any physical link of importance between the section of the war called “The West” and that known as the “Trans-Mississippi.” So the Confederacy was severed into two great pieces.

Lincoln in his typical way expressed it most poetically, stating that now, the Father of Waters flowed “unvexed” to the sea. Sherman wrote in his memoirs that from that point on, the Confederate troops in Texas, the west part of Louisiana and Arkansas were of no consequence, entirely cut off as far as usefulness was concerned from the rest of the Confederacy. Some fighting would continue “over there” but it would do nothing to help the overall plight of the Confederacy.

Now, the Union armies in the West could totally focus on Chattanooga, a key position for both sides, and one more major step in squeezing the territory and the armies of the Confederacy into a corner.

By then, Lee’s last raid into the North had fallen into disaster at Gettysburg.

Part VIII: Gettysburg

Chapter One

Taking lessons from his first foray into the North, Lee intended to be more stealthy in this advance, using the Blue Ridge as a screen behind which he would disappear from the eyes of the Union army for as long as possible. Certainly, he must also secure his intelligence, safekeeping it out of enemy hands, for with any general except McClellan, he could not hope to survive a repeat of the infamous Order 191 debacle.

After Chancellorsville, Hooker was at a loss over what his next move should be. He had proposed making another run at Richmond and Lincoln had turned it down. The president wanted Hooker to fight Lee, the very thing Hooker himself had emphasized before Chancellorsville. After all, the only goal and target for Hooker should be Lee’s army, period, no questions asked. As difficult as it had been to get that notion into some heads, it had always been a central fact that when the Army of Northern Virginia was beaten, the Confederacy was beaten, and the occupation of Richmond, and all other key points, would occur at will, or in different words, by default.

It had also always been true that to defeat Lee, the Union army needed to catch him away from defensive works, on ground that was as close to equal for both sides as possible. If he would fight and not flee, he would be beaten by sheer numbers.

The problem with beating Lee, even if it could done, and it had been once, was in keeping him beaten. McClellan had defeated him at Antietam but it had not won the war because defeat had only meant that instead of continuing on his course, Lee was forced to turn around and go back to square one. No major victory in the war so far had resulted in the absolute neutralization, let alone destruction of a Confederate army, except in the cases when the Union captured “places,” such as forts and cities, and the Confederate army surrendered or slipped out the back door. Otherwise, again and again, battles reached a point when one side or the other disengaged and went away. While in so doing, the armies conceded defeat, they were not truly defeated because they still existed, even with diminished numbers, and could always pop up somewhere else, to fight again.

Ironically, even when the Union lost a battle against the Confederates, it gained nearly as much by inflicting losses on the enemy as it would have gained by beating them.

Given that fact, it was to be desired that the Union should continue to seek battles with Lee which, even if they did not completely defeat him, heavily subtracted from his numbers. Any time Lee let himself be drawn into battle, win or lose, he was playing the Union’s game. The Northern people could not or would not see that but it was true.

Conversely, as long as Lee continued to move back and forth along the Rappahannock River, only fighting when the Union ventured across, he would continue to keep the war alive toward the 1864 presidential election, now close enough in time to start worrying the Republicans and those who supported the war in the North.

The Rappahannock and Rapidan rivers come together west of the Wilderness. During the time when Grant was only gearing up for his siege of Vicksburg, Lee remained holding out in that vicinity, and while there, personally sojourned to Richmond to discuss the next move, which resulted in the decision that he would carry another heavy raid into the North.

While Lee held out with the Wilderness as his screen, Hooker was ordered not to go in after him because that would be exactly what Lee wanted.

Being Lee, however, the Confederate commander was not likely to remain in place very long, waiting for something to happen. Of course the Union leadership was not privy to the plan to raid north again, and had no reason to imagine Lee would ever try that again, but they anticipated he would be pro-active and try something, somewhere.

And when he was ready to move, surely signs would be detected, clues that could help the Union itself move the right way to intercept or at least contain him. To accomplish that, Hooker needed intelligence, and for that purpose, he dispatched General Alfred Pleasanton, head of his cavalry, to see if he could decoy Lee into showing his hand.

Pleasanton set out June 9 and in his scouting foray, ran into Jeb Stuart’s cavalry at Brandy Station, Virginia, a collision that resulted in the largest cavalry battle in the war.

Afterward, Pleasanton could only report back to Hooker that the Confederates seemed to be planning some kind of major cavalry raid. That report indicated that Pleasanton had not detected a hint of an infantry advance, but logical thinking would have suggested that a major cavalry raid must be in support of something and not stand-alone. Whatever the accompanying move might be, however, until it began and was actually observed in motion, Hooker was powerless to thwart it.

In this uncertain period, Hooker again tried to convince Lincoln he should attack Richmond, while Lee was farther from the city, but Lincoln insisted the national preoccupation with Richmond was over, in favor of concentration on defeating Lee’s army once and for all.

What Hooker and his intelligence forces were missing was the uncoiling of the Confederate army, like a winch letting out cable, from south of the Rappahannock, into the hidden slot that was the Shenandoah Valley, to the west, behind the screening of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Unit by unit, Lee’s army was working itself north, with his cavalry screening Hooker from observing the movement while the those parts of the Army of Northern Virginia that had not departed remaining in plain, leaving the Union commander unaware that the great raid was underway.

June 14, General Richard Ewell, in the forefront of the infantry, skirmished with a Union garrison up in Winchester, at the far end of the Valley. His forces also captured Martinsburg, taking prisoners and Union weapons, then started crossing the Potomac.

By now it was abundantly clear something bigger than cavalry raids was in progress.

Lincoln to Hooker by telegraph:

“So far as we can make out here, the enemy have Milroy surrounded at Winchester, and Tyler at Martinsburg. If they could hold out a few days, could you help them? If the head of Lee’s army is at Martinsburg, and the tail of it on the plank road between Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville, the animal must be very slim somewhere. Could you not break him?”

Evidently not.

By June 24, Longstreet, closing up the rear of Lee’s army, was crossing the Potomac while Ewell was well into Pennsylvania in a position to threaten Harrisburg, the capital.

Although Lee had put out orders that goods and food taken in the north should be confiscated legally, his men plundered and destroyed bridges and factories, and worst of all, took in any blacks they found, to be sent back or kept with them as slaves, conduct that was in ways more hateful even than the Union’s ransacking Fredericksburg, where only a relatively small number of the personal items in just one town had been mistreated.

Lee continued to hide his men behind mountains, first the Blue Ridge, then its continuation of hills in Maryland and Pennsylvania, but by now, Hooker was aware of what was going on and shadowed the Confederate army in parallel, outside the screening mountains. Again, in the manner of McClellan prior to Antietam, Hooker’s army provided a shield between Lee and Washington.

Shield or not, however, once it became clear that the Confederates were again raiding northward, an unseemly panic erupted. On June 15, Lincoln put out an emergency call for 100,000 recruits from Pennsylvania, Maryland, West Virginia, and Ohio, for six month’s service in defense against “armed insurrectionary combinations threatening to make inroads” into the North. The response was not sterling, with men unwilling to believe they would be released again in six months or less despite the best promises of their respective governors.

By now, Lee and Davis had screwed themselves up to the point that they could imagine taking Harrisburg, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and even Washington. Whether they seriously believed any of that was possible or not, they put out the rhetoric for all who surrounded them to hear. It became catching. The Confederate quartermaster back in Richmond, when asked for rations, suggested Lee could find more in Pennsylvania. Lee himself, when asked about the danger that while he was north, Richmond might be taken, was bold enough to assert that in that case they would trade queens.

The Union side willingly believed that Lee had 100,000 men.

A major disagreement erupted in the course of the Union pursuit, between Hooker and Halleck. So severe was it that Hooker resigned his command.

George Gordon Meade believed he was the last man who would ever be named commander of the Army of the Potomac.

In that period, he was, politically speaking, courting Mrs. Lincoln merely in the hope of being promoted from the rank of major general of volunteers to brigadier general of the regular army, which was actually an upward step. In fact, however, other commanders had already let it be known he was their choice to lead the whole army, and now he was Lincoln’s choice to become the latest rider of the supreme field commander merry-go-round. On June 27 he assumed command.

Meade was not the greatest general available or one of the truly great generals overall, but compared to those who had proceeded him at the head of the Army of the Potomac, he was a superstar. One could say with some confidence that had Meade led the army for the entire time after First Bull Run, it was highly likely the war would have long since been over by June of 1863. Probably, Meade would have taken on Joseph Johnston at Manassas soon as the three year army had been trained, rather than carrying out the harebrained scheme of marching up the Virginia Peninsula, and would almost certainly have won, with the overwhelming power that would have been available to him compared to Johnston.

Enough said about that, but the point can be taken that Lincoln’s choices of supreme commanders was gradually improving.

Assuming command in the midst of a campaign already in motion, Meade had little choice at first except to carry on the progress Hooker had undertaken. What else could he do but continue to shadow Lee while protecting Washington and Baltimore? What remained to decide was how and when to corner Lee and how to fight him when that inevitably occurred.

June 30, the leading elements of Meade’s army arrived at Taneytown, Maryland.

For part of the time during the Union army’s northward advance, communications had been spotty back to Washington, leading to inevitable worries.

Despite being a local rail nexus, the town of Gettysburg was of no interest as far as a focal point for battle, by either side. Meade was not interested in Gettysburg any more than he was in any other town in the area of southern Pennsylvania and Maryland. Instead, he was determined to use the Maryland village of Taneytown as a base for taking on Lee. Meade’s idea was to lure Lee south, into ground of his own choosing, in Maryland, so he did not intend for the body of the Union army to travel much farther north than Taneytown.

In order to keep an eye on the Union army, Lee had detailed his cavalry chief, Jeb Stuart, to observe it in detail. Uncharacteristically, Stuart let himself become tangled up in action that forced him to ride beyond any reach of Lee for days. Ironically, instead of disappearing from all knowledge of the enemy until he was well into the North, Lee had lost all knowledge of the Union army as it pursued him, unaware that Meade had already trailed him into Maryland.

Jeb Stuart was not the only person associated with the Army of Northern Virginia who owned the task of locating the Union Army. Longstreet’s intelligence source was not a cavalry troop, it was just one man, an actor named Harrison who served as a “scout,” a euphemism for “spy.” In his way, however, Harrison was better than a troop. While a cavalry squad could only achieve a certain level of stealth in its job as a scouting body, one man among many could approach the enemy much more closely and see greater detail than a uniformed outfit. It was thus through Harrison, reporting to Longstreet, not by way of Stuart to Lee, that on June 28, Lee learned of Meade’s true location.

Perhaps Lee had grown too comfortable with the snail’s pace of McClellan, but for whatever reason, he had expected to penetrate much farther into the North before the Union army even realized where he was going. He had counted upon reaching Harrisburg before a first battle. Until then, he would have to jealously husband his ammunition, particularly for artillery, whereas at Harrisburg he could replenish his army in all ways, especially cannon “metal.” A fight sooner than that was to be resisted and no one knew that and believed it more avidly than Longstreet.

By all means, the last thing Lee needed was a major battle so soon after entering the North. One of his great goals was to destroy at least one major railroad bridge, in order to sow panic and terror in the North, and he had one in mind near Harrisburg. Already, his need to base his army for at least a short time at the Pennsylvania capital has been noted. Thus, to be stopped now, before he had even accomplished any of his goals would be disastrous for his aim of striking fear into the Northern people, as well as for drawing Grant out of the West.

Still, a hope remained. If he could not sack a key city or burn a key bridge, heavily defeating the Union army in its own territory and returning to Virginia untouched would be worth something. After discovering Meade’s rapid follow-up to the raid, to Lee, defeating Meade appeared to be all that was left to accomplish by this expedition that had turned sour.

Above all else, of course, Lee must avoid defeat, or at least such a defeat that his army would never make it back to Virginia. If he was trapped here, cut off from Virginia, to be picked off virtually at the will of the Union army, the entire war was lost.

Given those factors, suddenly all focus from Lee’s point of view now zeroed in on the next battle, and with that, the need to maneuver Meade into a position in which he could be heavily defeated, after which Lee could race him back to Virginia and reach safety.

At this point, a note must be inserted concerning the way in which Lee’s raid has been perceived and described, versus the reality. Again and again, it has been portrayed as a grand operation that could win the war for the Confederacy, a magnificent gambit, with possibilities for Lee of capturing key cities in the North and forcing Lincoln to give up the war.

Instead, it has been demonstrated in these pages that the raid was a desperation measure designed to keep the war alive, to possibly save Vicksburg, and to do some significant damage to the North and scare the public enough that they would at least take a hard look at continuing the war. Only in the best of cases was there a chance for those goals to be reached, and that was more in the vein of wishful thinking, or even denial of the dire situation the Confederacy was falling into than hard reality.

Once the Union army discovered Lee was proceeding north, although his presence back in Union territory did set up a panic, it was a panic not over a threat to the war but to those persons in the route of the Confederate army, whose homes and towns might be looted, who might suffer from the destruction of bridges and farms. Washington itself might also panic, but that was an easily induced condition and logic did not necessarily enter into it.

By the time Lee realized he would have to fight far earlier than he had intended, his hopes of achieving anything except some level of victory over the Union army had ended, as related above. The chances of stopping Grant’s siege against Vicksburg were mostly evaporated, the chances of winning the war by the results of this raid were long gone. Those who claimed the battle of Gettysburg was a turning point in the war, or held the potential to win it for the Confederacy were and are still mistaken. The turning point had already come for the Confederacy when the vote of three to two had served as an admission that the raid was a desperation measure. In that case, the only hope was a victory, thus if a victory were achieved at Gettysburg, rather than being any kind of turning point of its own, it would only mean the Confederacy would not be ended quite yet.

If Lee were defeated at Gettysburg in such a way that his entire army was trapped in the North, never able to reach Virginia again, all that would remain of the war would be the fighting in the West. And clearly, the Union had the upper hand there. If any turning point was possible as a result of Gettysburg, was if the battle put an end to the Confederacy.

In short, Lee had everything to lose in a fight in Pennsylvania and much less to win no matter how great the margin of victory. After defeating Meade, if he could pull that off, he must still return to Virginia, and as had been done before, the Union army would be repaired and sent after him again, or perhaps worse, finally set up as a cordon to lock him behind the Rappahannock forever.

Those were the stakes on the table about Gettysburg. Lee would have done better to reverse course soon as he knew Meade was waiting for him and rush back to Virginia as rapidly as possible in hopes of not being cut off.

Lee being Lee, of course, he could not give up his always aggressive approach. He would fight Meade somewhere in Pennsylvania and take his chances.

For this showdown which he must win, Lee ordered his forces to concentrate at Cashtown, Pennsylvania, nine miles northwest of Gettysburg. This was the near vicinity to where Robert Patterson and the Pennsylvania militia had begun its operations before the outset of the war, just over a mountain at Chambersburg.

To reach the town, Lee’s army must cross a long ridge called South Mountain, and the chosen route was a pass called Cashtown Gap.

A.P. Hill’s Third Corps led the main army over the mountain, but ahead of all, a squad under Henry Heth continued past Cashtown to Gettysburg, on a double mission of seeking out a source of shoes for his men, plus conducting reconnaissance, searching for information about the activities of the federals, to discover whether or not they had turned their attention toward the Gettysburg and Cashtown area. Heth would find what he sought and more.

Meade had selected ground along Pipe Creek, in Maryland to take on Lee.

To provide a flavor of what Meade was thinking, the following was a dispatch he sent to Halleck.

If Lee is heading for Baltimore, I expect to get between his main army and that place. If he is crossing the Susquehannah, I shall rely upon General Couch, with his force, holding him, until I can fall upon his rear and give him battle, which I shall endeavor to do. My endeavor will be, in my movements, to hold my force well together, with the hope of falling upon some portion of Lee’s army in detail.

The army to which Meade referred when naming “Couch” was a militia force created as part of Lincoln’s call for 100,000 immediate defenders against Lee’s invasion. Only about 33,000 became available and Couch led this group, which set itself in the way of Lee if he approached Harrisburg.

To screen Lee off from Washington, Meade hastily created a defensive perimeter called the Pipe Creek Line. Taking advantage of rugged terrain, this line bunched his army in corps that guarded the routes by which Lee could conceivably turn and attack Washington. The center of this line was the aforementioned Taneytown (pronounced “Tawneytown”) in Maryland. There, Meade intended to confront and fight Lee, having no wish that Lee should reach as far north as Gettysburg.

While that was Meade’s intention, by the time he issued the orders, called the Pipe Creek Circular, too much of his own army had already crossed the proposed line into Pennsylvania. The Circular was issued June 30 but M/G John Reynolds did not receive the order before the First of July and he was too far north and too close to an impact with Lee to be recalled.

In addition to rail lines, Gettysburg was a hub of roads throughout the area and Reynolds had sent a cavalry squad under General John Buford to secure control of that nexus, approaching up the east side of South Mountain ahead of Heth. Thus it was that when Heth reached Gettysburg looking for news of the federals, he struck pay-dirt.

A clash between Heth’s infantry and Buford’s horse soldiers quickly expanded, with Heth successfully pushing Buford’s cavalry from a promontory they had initially occupied, at the site of a Lutheran Seminary, to a second rise called McPherson’s Ridge.

The arrival of Reynolds’s own infantry turned the tide, with the combined force defeating Heth.

Shortly, more Union forces joined the scene, under Oliver Howard, and in conference, the three generals, Howard, Reynolds, and Buford decided to hold Gettysburg.

Two factors of which the generals were unaware might have convinced them otherwise if they had known. First, Lee’s army had heard the gunfire that marked the collision of Heth and Buford and was coming forward from Cashtown, eight miles away, with two thirds of its total force. Second, the generals did not know that Meade was attempting to set up his Pipe Creek Line with the purpose of fighting Lee there if Lee could be drawn that way. Thus the three generals assumed the bulk of Meade’s army was on the way to join them. Clearly, a mismatch was being created, with most of Lee’s army on the way to pounce upon a detail of Meade’s.

The confrontations that first day, July 1, between the Union and Confederates took place west of downtown Gettysburg, and when Howard stood up to the incoming Confederate forces, he was beaten, and many of his men fled into the center of Gettysburg. Fortunately for Howard, he had planted a reserve brigade on a third local prominence called Cemetery Hill and this unit was a rallying point for the disarrayed forces that were fleeing the Confederates.

Word finally reached Meade that a battle was forced upon him in Gettysburg and however reluctantly, he began transferring his headquarters and army to the scene. He dispatched Winfield Scott Hancock ahead of him to take charge on the spot until he could arrive in person, and when Hancock joined Howard at Cemetery Ridge, the two worked in concert to prepare what men they had for an expected charge.

A conversation related by Confederate General R.H. Anderson describes Lee’s attitude at the time.

“I cannot think what has become of Stuart,” Lee said first, referring to Jeb Stuart’s absence. “I ought to have heard from him long before now. He may have met with disaster but I hope not. In the absence of reports from him, I am in ignorance of what we have in front of us here. It may be the whole Federal army, or it may be only a detachment. If it is the whole Federal force, we must fight a battle here. If we do not gain a victory, those defiles and gorges [the Cashtown Gap route through South Mountain] which we passed this morning will shelter us from disaster.”

Lee rode on from Cashtown and took up headquarters on Seminary Ridge, named for the Lutheran divinity school that sat along it. Seminary Ridge and Cemetery Hill, itself more of a ridge than a single “hill”, paralleled each other, with Seminary Ridge the more westerly height of the two.

According to Longstreet, when he joined Lee on Seminary Ridge, he told the commander, “We could not call the enemy to position better suited to our plans. All that we have to do is to file around his left and secure good ground between him and his capital.”

As aware as anyone that Lee had set out on this campaign with the intention of staying out of big battles, Longstreet had believed this was what Lee planned and was shocked when Lee responded, “If he is here tomorrow, I will attack him.”

This was a key moment of the battle of Gettysburg and has stood the test of time all the way to the present as a major controversy. Longstreet’s opposition to Lee’s determination to make a stand here would cause him to be reviled by many former comrades for the rest of his life. Lee’s decision would prove a turning point within the context of his great raid, and would stand as his greatest mistake.

Lee’s explanation, in his official account:

It had not been intended to deliver a general battle so far from our base unless attacked. But coming unexpectedly upon the whole Federal army, to withdraw through the mountains with our extensive trains would have been difficult and dangerous.

This sounded more like desperation, as if he must fight because it would be too difficult to get away. On the other hand, it could be rationalization for the notion that if he did not fight here, his only choice was to end the entire grand raid into the north, give up any hope at all of drawing Grant out of Vicksburg, and thus essentially begin the last stages of the war. His purpose, of damaging the Union army so heavily, and threatening northern towns with capture so powerfully that Grant would have to abandon Vicksburg could not possibly be met if Lee stopped his advance now and began the retreat back to Virginia without a battle.

Thus it can be imagined that he must feel he had to fight here, had to win, or the great game was as good as over. Perhaps it was true, perhaps this was the gamble of all gambles. Withdrawing was tantamount to surrender, hardly worse than fighting and losing, not counting the precious lives on either side that would be thrown away.

And what cannot denied is that when the three days of Gettysburg are considered, Lee had chances to win, but made horrible choices at almost every turning point in the struggle. Yet even had he decisively beaten Meade, unless he totally destroyed the Union army, he would not have done enough damage to cause Lincoln to call Grant away from Vicksburg. Which is a way of saying, Lee’s mission to save Vicksburg by raiding into Pennsylvania was already doomed to failure.

In Mississippi, while the Gettysburg battle shaped up, Grant was already only three days away from forcing the Confederate garrison at Vicksburg to surrender through starvation, and even if Lincoln had called his army east to stop Lee, Grant could have left behind enough of a holding force to complete the siege, another reason that even the best case for Lee would not have saved Vicksburg.

Given all these realities, it is difficult to objectively conceive of a win situation for the Confederates under even the best of cases as they approached this battle with Meade at Gettysburg.

After Lee’s assertion that if the enemy was present in the morning, he would attack, Longstreet replied that if Meade was still there in the morning, it was because he wanted Lee to attack.

Longstreet was an advocate of the concept of fighting from a strong defensive position and letting the enemy do the attacking, exactly the format that had succeeded so very well at Fredericksburg. He saw this position here at Gettysburg as perfectly reversed, with Meade sitting on the high ground, able to sweep the field before him with artillery and muskets, certain to virtually wipe out any frontal attack as surely as had happened to Burnside’s army at Fredericksburg.

If Lee simply must attack, however, it was on this, the first day, in which only a fragment of Meade’s army had arrived, that Longstreet felt was the one moment when a full scale attack would have brought major success, heavily defeating a detail of Meade’s army, and probably deterring the rest from coming forward from their base in Maryland. Longstreet could see that Lee would not enjoy a greater advantage than he would at this moment. Why wait another day to improve Meade’s odds?

In fact, for the moment, Lee actually outnumbered that part of the Union army actually present at Gettysburg almost two to one.

A strange situation now developed. Robert E. Lee was known to have a fiery temper but he also had an iron will that kept it in check most of the time. Lee had once chided a staff member for doing something that caused Lee to show his temper to a visitor, afterward angrier at the display of emotion he had released than at the situation that had triggered it. Longstreet seemed to feel that when Lee was in a temper, he was virtually irrational and unmovable, and that logic would be useless in trying to sway him.

At this juncture, Longstreet read Lee’s body language and discerned that the supreme general had fallen into just such a frame of mind, on the verge of blowing up over Jeb Stuart’s cavalry failures that had put his army in this position, and it seemed clear to Longstreet that it was now impossible to get through to Lee. As deeply as Longstreet felt Lee was wrong and that a terrible decision was being made, he knew it was impossible to talk the commander into the right decision and he gave up trying to reason with a man who could not be swayed and held total power in his hands.

So there would be a fight despite all Longstreet felt he could do, but it would come later than it should, if it was going to come at all. All Longstreet could do was to cope with the commander’s decision and make the best of the battle to come. But Lee would not make that easy, either.

Another bizarre situation developed at this point that would lead to additional controversy. Lee “authorized” General Ewell to take Cemetery Hill if he thought he could do so without triggering a full-scale battle. In a way, this was what Longstreet was advocating, except he was calling not for a one-point operation, he was asking for a full-scale attack against Cemetery Hill.

Surely it was one of Lee’s most profound goals, to catch a portion of the Union army in a situation in which he could beat it. He had that chance in his hands, right now, Longstreet recognized, yet not only would Lee not order the general attack now, did not order Ewell to undertake even a partial attack on Meade’s still weak presence on Cemetery Hill. Lee seemed to be leaving the move up to Ewell.

According to Longstreet, Ewell had mostly worked under Stonewall Jackson’s command. Jackson was not one to “weasel” his way into giving an order; he did not intimate, he did not suggest or hint, he made absolutely clear what he wanted done and expected it to be carried out. That was what Ewell had come to anticipate from a commander. With that, however, was the corresponding situation that what Jackson did not want done, his officers had better not do, whether he stated it or not. In other words, when Jackson gave an order, it was firm and when he did not, the issue was closed.

Lee did not operate that way. Had it been Jackson in Lee’s place, and he wanted Cemetery Hill attacked, there would have been no doubt whatsoever. If he did not, there was no question—the hill would not be attacked. According to Longstreet, failing to hear an absolute, direct order to attack, Ewell believed he had better not attack, and did not.

Thus no attack of any kind came that day, the last time the Confederate army had the edge of men at Gettysburg.

This was the first mistake by Lee at Gettysburg, allowing Ewell to refrain from attacking, or more distinctly, failing to outright order the attack. By inaction, Lee allowed the status quo to remain, and as a result, the Union army gathered in force at Cemetery Hill, and in that case, Lee had already surrendered his greatest chance on this campaign, to achieve his normally favorite goal, defeating an enemy in detail.

The bare facts of the battle at Gettysburg are well known and documented. Certain events over the coming two days happened and cannot be denied; events that were part of the battle, from decisions to attitudes of some of the commanders, would cause arguments and recriminations for decades. Longstreet was maligned heavily in the South after the war, but he was a major player in the war and his view deserves consideration against the views of Robert E. Lee’s supporters. The points Longstreet raises seem to be too important to ignore. Furthermore, one can make a strong case that Lee completely botched the conduct of the battle, while his supporters over the years tried to make Longstreet the scapegoat. For a fully objective study of the battle, it is necessary to observe it from Longstreet’s perspective as well, and Appendix I will provide that perspective.

What is not disputed is that the first day of the battle had ended with Meade in possession of Cemetery Ridge after Ewell declined to oust him.

While it is also undisputed that for the second day of the Battle of Gettysburg, July 2, Lee did devise an attack on Cemetery Ridge, much more controversy would revolve around the plan itself and the manner in which Lee set it up for his generals to carry out.

It is also fact that on the third day, Lee mandated an attack that lost thousands of lives, one grand attack that eerily mirrored the twelve sent by Burnside against Lee’s impregnable position at Marye’s Heights at Fredericksburg.

The controversies between Lee and Longstreet revolve around the manner in which those attacks were planned and carried out.

As to the second day, a highway or “pike” called the Emmitsburg Road entered Gettysburg from the southwest and passed between Cemetery Hill and Seminary Ridge at an angle, ending up in the town center. Lee ordered the attack on Day Two, July Second, to follow that road, which would bring the forces up against the Union on Cemetery Ridge at that same angle.

Longstreet disagreed with that plan, and attempted to influence Lee into allowing the attack to swing farther to the south so as to sweep around two hills that formed the essential end of the overall promontory called Cemetery Ridge. These two hills, later to be made famous as Round Top and Little Round Top, but whose local name was not known to the armies, were separated by a low saddle with Round Top the more southerly of the pair.

If the Confederates could move beyond the Round Tops, they would effectively be behind Meade, that is, to the east of Cemetery Ridge, hitting the Union Army from the opposite direction in which it was fortified and also possibly breaking Meade’s supply and communication links to Washington by seizing control of the Taneytown Road, which led directly to the base Meade had established before moving up to Gettysburg.

The effect would be to trap the bulk of Meade’s army, now in place, on the ridge, and if that were done, Meade would in Longstreet’s belief, have had to abandon Gettysburg without much of a fight. After that, the choice of moves would be up to Lee, whether to proceed on, at least to Harrisburg, or to withdraw hastily back to Virginia in as close to one piece as possible.

If Meade withdrew without a fight, he would almost certainly contest Lee’s exit from

the North, no matter what the Confederate army might achieve while there. A major fight would still be likely but it would not be under the conditions Longstreet saw as potentially disastrous as what faced them at Gettysburg.

To that, Lee would not listen now any more than he did the day before. He was set on the attack as he designed it and Longstreet again gave up trying to change it.

Several problems, developed with the attack as it was carried out, which conspired to ensure it would fail. The route by which the forces that made up the assault were to approach the jumping off point was within clear sight of observers on the targeted ridge. When this was discovered, after the march began, a reversal of direction was called for, which would also be observed by the Union army. Hopefully this countermarch would confuse the enemy over just where the attack would begin and where it would be directed. For a time, as had originally been intended, the Confederate forces disappeared again behind a screen of trees and lesser rises in the land, but the attack still would come on the same line that had been originally designated. The only thing lost in the confusion and countermarching was time, and that would prove not to be a deciding factor in the outcome.

In support of the main attack up the pike, Ewell’s Second Corps was held in reserve north of the field of operations; Longstreet understood that Second Corps would be sent in against the northern flank of the Union army, a sensible plan that would have presented multiple benefits for the larger forces carrying out the main assault. Instead, Lee allowed Ewell to create only a demonstration against the northwesterly section of the federal army, essentially a flank position given that the bulk of the army stretched southward down the ridge, although the Union forces extended to a position on Culp’s Hill.

If the demonstration resulted in an opening for a wider attack, Ewell was authorized to convert it to a general assault, and in late afternoon, with support from artillery, Ewell did mount something of a forward movement. Meade had ordered the commander of that section, Henry Slocum, to move his men leftward to fill in a weaker segment of the main army but Slocum convinced Meade to leave a brigade, under George S. Greene to hold the hill. Greene’s men succeeded in their mission, in so doing, breaking Ewell’s late attempt to flank the army.

The weak attempt by Ewell to take pressure off the rest of the attack engendered a sense of betrayal with Longstreet, who believed that with a more spirited attack by Ewell, Meade, out of fear of being flanked, might have abandoned his position, resulting in victory for the Confederate forces, while taking some of the heat off the main assault, saving lives.

Further mismanagement on Lee’s part, which is outlined in the appendix, prevented success in the attack Longstreet was ordered to conduct. Part of that revolved around the fact that Lee mandated that the corps under General Evander Law’s must participate in the attack, but Law’s men had been forced to march twenty-eight miles in rapid time in order to arrive, and even the question of exactly when, and even why they were set forth on that march is part of the overall controversy. What is known is that by the time they arrived in position to attack they were parched and worn out. No source of water lay across their path, so they were sent on the attack almost dropping in their tracks from thirst.

The Round Tops formed the end of the line for Cemetery Ridge, which ran from just south of downtown in a shape usually described as that of a fish-hook, to those hills. In the beginning of the second day’s battle, the Union army at the southern end, designated its left flank, was up in the air, with nothing to protect it if the Confederates mounted the gap between the Round Tops. The only recourse would be for sufficient reinforcements to be rushed to that end of the line to stave off the Confederate onslaught. By Longstreet’s reckoning, a serious, strong attempt ought to have been made, from both sides of the Round Tops, to swamp that Union force on the far flank and if so, the entire Union line could possibly have been “rolled up” with disastrous outcome for Meade.

Lee refused to authorize any diversion in the direction of the main assault, which meant none of Longstreet's forces were allowed to be sent to the back side of the Round Tops. Hood, in command at secondary level of those forces urge Longstreet to request Lee to reconsider but Longstreet knew the supreme commander was immovable on the question.

As a result, instead of a major assault, on both sides of the Round Tops, only Law’s worn out and parched corps under Law were in the proper position to make an attempt to flank the Union Army at the south or left flank, by way of the saddle between the two hills. It seemed, and to this day still seems outrageous that men in that condition were even asked to rush in and fight, let alone fight uphill against an entrenched, if thinly spread Union defense, without water.

The work needed to reach merely the approach to the round tops was horrendous. The terrain from the floor of the valley into the saddle area was a nightmare for fighting. A huge boulder field, nicknamed the Devil’s Den, thick brush, then forested slopes awaited the worn out men who must make their way through, and should the Union catch on to the situation and place men at the end of the ridge above them, they would be trying to advance through a hail of Miniè balls, perhaps even artillery fire.

Waiting on the west and southern facings of the Little Round Top was the Twentieth Maine, under the immediate command of Colonel Joshua Chamberlain. This was the unit that was up in the air, without any kind of defensive protection. They stood on the crest of the hill, surrounded by trees that ran down to the foot of the hill on the western slope and to the saddle leading to Round Top on the south. Occasional rock outcroppings provided some cover, but otherwise, only the trees and the boulder field down at the foot of the hill offered any physical protection from onslaught by Confederates.

Given the tenuous position of the Twentieth Maine, had Longstreet and Hood won permission to attack on both sides of the Round Tops, Chamberlain’s men would have been swamped and as a result, Meade’s entire army Cemetery Ridge would have risked being flanked. How far the attacking Confederates would have managed to carry on toward the center of the Union line is not certain, but the very distraction this flank attack would have caused might have offered Longstreet’s main attack a much greater chance of success, up the angled pike. If Longstreet and Hood had been heeded, the story of Gettysburg would be quite different than history records it.

Instead, Chamberlain’s Twentieth Maine stood off several of what can only be called in the language of the times “gallant” charges by Law’s exhausted men, led by a Colonel William C. Oates.

Supported somewhat by other units nearby along the crest of the ridge, the Twentieth Maine virtually exhausted all it ammunition staving off multiple up-slope charges by Oates’s men; in a last ditch effort, Chamberlain defeated the last charge by conducting a “grand-wheel” maneuver, in which he led his men downhill in an angled charge, like a swinging door, with bayonets forward, a last-ditch effort to repel the now drastically weakened Confederate offensive in that sector. This counter-charge succeeded, leading to the capture of numerous prisoners, while the survivors of Oates’s force escaped back down the hill, ending the only serious threat to the extreme left flank of Meade’s army.

Elsewhere, the great angled assault on Meade’s main line met with little more success than Law’s against Chamberlain.

Oddly, from the Union point of view, a poor decision by a Union general actually helped break up Longstreet’s main offensive. Dan Sickles was a “political general” who was not fit to hold command anywhere. That day, Sickles had against orders moved his men down from the high point on which the Union Army stood, placing them on the flat ground at the base, and right in the way of Longstreet’s specified direction of approach. Despite the error of positioning, Sickle’s unit did succeed in inadvertently disrupting the flow of the Confederate attack coming up the pike, further reducing the overall effectiveness of the offensive.

When all the good and bad decisions of the day, and the positives and negatives of the Confederate attack were tallied, the Union army remained on its ridge, and the Confederacy had lost more men than it could afford, although the “butcher’s bill” would be far exceeded in what was to come on the third day of Gettysburg.

With that attempt to defeat Meade a failure on July 2, the next day, Lee called for an even grander attack, this time in a direct frontal assault against the strength of Meade’s position. Again, and even more strongly, Longstreet protested. He argued that he was absolutely certain the assault would fail and made strong points to support the argument. He said the situation Lee faced was much worse than the Union charges against Marye’s Heights at Fredericksburg; among other issues, Longstreet noted, Meade now had 75,000 men and the alignment Lee arranged for the coming attack provided for only 15,000 men to attack a force well dug in and waiting. That turned on its head the strongly respected notion that an attacking force must be up to three times as large as the one defending. It is difficult to say why Lee’s plan could not have been clearly perceived by even the lowliest private as sheer madness.

Lee argued that the distance his men must cross to reach direct hand to hand contact with the Union forces was “only” fourteen hundred yards. Yet the massacre at Fredericksburg, in the opposite direction when it was Union men marching over a killing field had only been four hundred yards. (Meade, according to Longstreet’s memoirs, estimated the distance the assault by Pickett’s brigades must cover was between a mile and a mile and a half, with a park ranger later in the century making it out as just over a mile, or something greater than eighteen hundred yards.)

Whatever the distance, why Lee thought his men could cross thousands of feet, coming into artillery and musket range, climb a rise, and defeat thousands more men than themselves, a situation indeed far worse for them than the Union faced at Fredericksburg, is still not clear. It was not clear to Longstreet at the time.

Longstreet made one strong attempt not only to convince Lee to abort this attack, but if the supreme commander refused, Longstreet argued he should find someone else to command it. Longstreet pointed out that the corps that were to make the attack were not even his, and that he did not have faith it in and was thus the wrong man to lead it.

(In at least one battle to come, with Longstreet unavailable at the time, while suffering from dysentery, Lee would decline to trust any other of his corps commanders to lead a charge and he aborted it. Apparently at Gettysburg, he only trusted Longstreet to conduct the grand attack on July 3.)

Over the years to come, Longstreet would be further castigated for not having his “heart” in the charge, despite the fact that he did all he could to make it a success. The fact is undeniable, however, that his heart was indeed not in it. Even he would admit it later.

Nevertheless, Lee was as stubborn over this as he had been during the first two botched days of work, and could not be touched when Longstreet endeavored to talk sense to him.

So disheartened was Longstreet that when the time came to deliver the order for Pickett to begin the charge, he could not even speak it, he only nodded his head. Why of all the things to be said about this attack, known as Pickett’s Charge, his detractors chose to blame Longstreet for not putting on a good face over something he knew would turn into a holocaust is never explained by his critics.

When all the controversy, all the orders, all the arguments were done, the work of the actual attack remained.

It should be noted that Meade bulked up his forces in the center of the overall line because he pointed out, the night before, that Lee had tried attacks on the two outer wings, to the north and the south, and had failed, and thus he could be expected to try the center, and Meade was correct.

Pickett’s unit was made the centerpiece of the grand finale at Gettysburg because it was the last to march into the arena of battle and thus was freshest.

Preparatory to the assault, one hundred sixty-four Confederate artillery pieces were arrayed on the front slopes of Seminary Ridge, with orders to soften up the Union line on Cemetery Hill. The volley of shells did indeed find marks, but as the firing continued in a ripple of dramatic blasts from end to end in the long line, the tail appendages of the cannon began digging into the ground as the guns lurched with each shot, and thus each such lurch caused the nose of the guns to slightly elevate so that after a couple of barrages, shells flew clear over Cemetery Hill, hitting supply trains on the other side, yet for the most part sparing the men on the hill, and the Union artillery as well. The result was that the Union army waiting for Pickett’s charge was only lightly weakened by the huge cannonade. Worse, the smoke that filled the slight valley in front made visual assessment of the effects of the bombardment impossible to conduct.

The man charged by Longstreet with that job of determining the effectiveness of the barrage was his chief of artillery, Colonel Porter Alexander, who warned his boss that the amount of ammunition left would mean he could pound the Union line only so long and that would be it, there would be no more shells. When he had done all the damage he was able, Alexander was to inform Longstreet and the ground assault would have to begin.

When Alexander made that announcement, the time had come, Pickett’s charge was on.

Despite the relatively simple concept for the overall operation, which was for the 15,000 men to “attack” Meade’s men on the rise, the specific instructions were fairly complex, with individual units assigned specific directions, and specific turning maneuvers in order to focus the full assault on the smallest possible front of the Union army. All this took place out on the open fields from the crest of Seminary Ridge to lower slopes of Cemetery Hill, and from that position, the Union soldiers could clearly watch the oncoming tide. The Confederates had to break ranks to climb over fences in the fields, and at what was deemed the best moment, Union artillery opened up on them and kept firing until the survivors came within musket range.

The Union men greeted the assault with shouts of “Fredericksburg!” and proceeded to mow down by the thousands men Lee simply could not afford to throw away.

Indeed, the single assault had similarities to any one of the many assaults by the Union at Fredericksburg. Few Confederate men actually reached the Union position, which in places was delineated by a low rock wall, behind which infantry and artillery were arranged, also much like Fredericksburg. The best penetration of the Union line by Confederates occurred in a jog in the wall, a right turn, just south of Meade’s headquarters, a place nicknamed “the angle.” This was also called the “high water mark,” the closest the charge would come to dislodging Meade’s army. In that vicinity, intense hand to hand combat took place, but it was not the only location where close in fighting occurred.

“High water mark” had two meanings in this battle. For Pickett’s charge, it was of course, as described above, the farthest penetration of the Confederate infantry, but on a grander scale, it represented the greatest forward advance of the Confederate army in its entire campaign to defeat the Union and preserve its independence, not just in this one battle, but in the entire war.

Those Confederate survivors who made it back to Seminary Ridge alive after Pickett’s Charge were formed up and that night, set out for Virginia, greatly fearing a hot pursuit by the victorious Union army. Once more, however, a Union general failed to exhibit a killer instinct. Claiming his men were too tired from the defense to chase Lee, Meade missed the chance to end the war right then and there, almost exactly as McClellan had done after Antietam.

Lee had fought the huge battle he must avoid, had accomplished nothing in his second raid into the North, and his army barely survived to return to Virginia in failure. After losing a criminally large number of men, and being lucky the losses were no worse, courtesy of Meade’s refusal to follow up, Lee must limp back behind the Rappahannock River, with no remaining offensive possibilities before him.

Even after surviving Gettysburg, the Confederacy was now running on a countdown: Lincoln’s awful arithmetic was seriously catching up with Robert E. Lee. The Union had whipped him badly, without even bringing up all available men, and the way events were going in the West, it was possible to foresee a day when Grant would have that section so well in hand that he could dispatch another giant army, at least as big as Meade’s, from the southerly direction, to smash Lee and Richmond in a terrible vice.

Robert E. Lee being Robert E. Lee, however, he would not go down easily. Meade, and soon Grant, still had a great deal of work, and bleeding, ahead of them before the number representing the size of the Confederate army wound down toward zero.

Chapter Two

Already mightily displeased with Meade’s refusal to pursue and further damage Lee, Lincoln was even more incensed upon reading the congratulatory telegram that Meade issued about the battle.

“An enemy superior in numbers and flushed with the pride of a successful invasion, attempted to overcome and destroy this Army. Utterly baffled and defeated, he has now withdrawn from the contest. The Commanding General looks to the Army for greater efforts to drive from our soil every vestige of the invader.”

James B. Fry, from the Adjutant General’s office, noted Lincoln’s reaction to the telegram from Meade.

“When he came to the sentence about ‘driving the invaders from our soil,’ an expression of disappointment settled about his face, his hands dropped upon his knees, and in tones of anguish he exclaimed, ‘Drive the invaders from our soil. My God! Is that all?’”

A general named Hermann Haupt arrived shortly by train representing Meade. Haupt was clearly as disgusted with the results as Lincoln: Lee had been driven up against the Potomac and the general related to Lincoln how he had expected Meade would capture Lee’s army before it got away. He quoted Meade as responding, “Lee’s pontoon-trains have been destroyed, and the river is not fordable. My army requires a few days rest and cannot move at present.”

On July 12, Meade had called a council of war among his generals. Only two of his corps commanders were interested in attacking. Meade personally favored attacking but seeing the opposition, waited.

By July 14, word reached Lincoln that Lee had crossed the Potomac and so far, gotten away.

Part of Lincoln’s anger and despair was the notion that like McClellan, Meade had been satisfied to chase Lee back into Confederate territory rather than defeat him.

He added, to Jacob Hay, “Will our generals never get that idea out of their heads? The whole country is our soil.”

What had taken place in the intervening time, from Gettysburg to the escape by the Army of Northern Virginia over the Potomac?

Lee had moved out of Gettysburg and reached Williamsport, while Jeb Stuart, arriving tardy but forgiven by Lee, now deployed a cavalry screen that prevented Union scouts from observing just where the retreating Confederate army would choose to work its way home. The route had taken them through Hagerstown and Williamsport, while Meade had entered Middletown. All three were towns situated in the western “neck” of Maryland. Skirmishes occurred at Williamsport and Hagerstown between cavalry units, part of Jeb Stuart’s screening action, but the big blow, a follow-up fight that ought to have finished the Army of Northern Virginia never came.

By July 10, Lee had been backed up against the Potomac, finding pontoon bridges left in place were now destroyed by Union cavalry. While waiting for the swollen Potomac to subside enough to cross, he had dug in at Williamsport, preparing to face the oncoming Union army. Meade arrived within striking distance on July 12 and skirmishes began on the Thirteenth, but by that night, the river was sufficiently lowered for Lee to throw across a makeshift bridge and begin the narrow escape.

The next day, Union cavalry hit the Confederate rear guard who had not yet crossed, taking over 500 prisoners. On July 16, more cavalry skirmishes occurred as the Confederate forces held open routes for their army to continue evacuating back into Virginia. July 16 through 19, Meade crossed the Potomac in the area around Harpers Ferry.

Lincoln had sent bitter telegrams to Meade, who did not seem to understand the level of failure perceived in his leaving Lee to escape and nearly resigned in disgust. He thought that what he should have been hearing, instead of carping, was praise for his victory at Gettysburg.

Lincoln saw it a different way:

“The case, summarily stated, is this: You fought and beat the enemy at Gettysburg, and, of course, to say the least, his loss was as great as yours. He retreated and you did not, as it seemed to me, pressingly pursue him; but a flood in the river detained him till, by slow degrees, you were again upon him. You had at least twenty thousand veteran troops directly with you, and as many more raw ones within supporting distance, all in addition to those who fought with you at Gettysburg, while it was not possible that he had received a single recruit, and yet you stood and let the flood run down, bridges be built, and the enemy move away at his leisure, without attacking him.... Again, my dear general, I do not believe you appreciate the magnitude of the misfortune involved in Lee’s escape. He was within your easy grasp, and to have closed upon him would, in connection with our other late successes, have ended the war. As it is, the war will be prolonged indefinitely. If you could not safely attack Lee last Monday, how can you possibly do so south of the river, when you can take with you very few more than two thirds of the force you then had in hand? It would be unreasonable to expect, and I do not expect you can now effect much. Your golden opportunity is gone, and I am distressed immeasurably because of it.”

As always, Lincoln had a knack for observing and pointing out the fact that what one army was able to do under trying conditions, the other, in better condition and not reeling from defeat ought to have been able to match.

Despite the overall disaster he had only partially survived in Pennsylvania, Lee had not given up the war by any means. He would have liked to lure Meade into a fight in the Shenandoah Valley, but he did not have the manpower. At that time, if a battle had been waged, the Union could have counted 105,623 against 59,200 for the Confederacy, of which for the latter, 9,000 were cavalry. Even for a proven gambler like Lee, the odds were not good. Reluctantly, Lee left the Shenandoah at Chester Gap in the July 20-21 time frame without doing damage to his pursuer.

On July 23, Meade dispatched his III Corps through Manassas Gap with the intent of cutting off Lee’s further escape. The interception was to take place at Front Royal. The operation, poorly coordinated, was repulsed and Lee passed by, and although the Union occupied Front Royal, Lee reached the Luray Valley further on. He continued up-valley and took refuge south of the Rapidan River, and thus back to Square One, completing the transfer by the Fourth of August. Meade ended the pursuit back in the vicinity of Manassas.

Once again, after tremendous activity and efforts, the two armies arrived at almost the same places and positions they had occupied months earlier.

To call the situation status quo, however, would be a mistake. Both sides had lost thousands, but as remained constantly true, the Union could absorb those numbers. The Confederacy, of course, could not. Not merely reduced in numbers, Lee’s army was beaten up, and was in no condition to lash out at the nearby enemy as it would have been a year before. The Army of Northern Virginia needed to recover while waiting to see how the Union would act.

Part X: After Vicksburg, in the West

Chapter One

While Grant pressed forward and then closed out his capture of Vicksburg, Rosecrans by June 23 had sent enough pressure against Bragg to dislodge him from Tullahoma; for a time, the latter posted his army in Chattanooga.

On August 16, Rosecrans launched an attack against him.

Shelling Chattanooga as a diversion, Rosecrans sent his forces to the south and west of town, circling around long mountain ridges, while leading Bragg to believe he was approaching from the northeast, where Burnside had a force in the vicinity of Knoxville. When on September 8, Bragg realized Rosecrans was southwest of him and circling the mountains, he abandoned Chattanooga. This Rosecrans took as a sign that Bragg was retreating to Dalton, Georgia, and he set out in hot pursuit.

At this juncture, one of the great lost chances of the Civil War developed. Little has what Rosecrans was about to do been noted. Usually it is taken as fact, that he carried out the division of his army, which led to the battle of Chickamauga, and then weeks later, the battle of Chattanooga ensued.

The words above ought to be considered carefully: When on September 8, Bragg realized Rosecrans was southwest of him and circling the mountains, he abandoned Chattanooga.

How long had that city been a target of the Union army? Certainly since Halleck’s super-force had occupied Corinth and Buell had been sent along the tracks, then was caught up in the campaign that ended at Perryville. Much longer, really. From the time when it became clear that Fort Henry should be captured, opening up the Tennessee River, Chattanooga became an ultimate target. And now, Bragg had pulled away, so that Chattanooga lay unoccupied by Confederate forces, directly before Rosecrans. It is true that Confederate armies were meant to be the targets of Union armies, but never was it sensible to turn down the gift of a major city, a major railroad nexus when it was simply handed over, but Rosecrans now did exactly that. Bragg was beyond him, on the other side of Chattanooga, and all Rosecrans had to do was seize the city, make it his base, and he could take Bragg on any time thereafter. With no major Confederate army separating Grant and himself, if Rosecrans occupied Chattanooga now, the Union would never have to give it up. Just by claiming Chattanooga now, Rosecrans would have locked Bragg away from an entire segment of the Confederacy, effectively blocking him up in a farther corner of the South. Once having claimed Chattanooga as a federal possession, Rosecrans could then have pursued Bragg wherever he might go, using his own army as a screen to keep Bragg from doubling back to Chattanooga, and certainly, by then, Grant would have cheerfully reinforced him so as to maintain the city in federal hands while Rosecrans further pursued Bragg.

Furthermore, had Rosecrans claimed and occupied Chattanooga now, the next move could have been against Bragg and Atlanta at the same time, which would in fact develop, but not for months instead of now.

There is more to this issue, however. Although the following letter to Grant from Halleck was written long after the events in which Rosecrans abandoned Chattanooga, the point of it needs to be emphasized now.

HEADQUARTERS OF THE ARMY WASHINGTON, D. C., October 20, 1863.

Major-General GRANT, Louisville.

GENERAL : In compliance with my promise, I now proceed to give you a brief statement of the objects aimed at by General Rosecrans and General Burnside’s movement into East Tennessee, and of the measures directed to be taken to attain these objects.

It has been the constant desire of the government, from the beginning of the war, to rescue the loyal inhabitants of East Tennessee from the hands of the rebels, who fully appreciated the importance of continuing their hold upon that country. In addition to the large amount of agricultural products drawn from the upper valley of the Tennessee, they also obtained iron and other materials from the vicinity of Chattanooga. The possession of East Tennessee would cut off one of their most important railroad communications, and threaten their manufactories at Rome, Atlanta, etc.

When General Buell was ordered into East Tennessee in the summer of 1862, Chattanooga was comparatively unprotected; but Bragg reached there before Buell, and, by threatening his communications, forced him to retreat on Nashville and Louisville. Again, after the battle of Perryville, General Buell was urged to pursue Bragg’s defeated army, and drive it from East Tennessee. The same was urged upon his successor, but the lateness of the season or other causes prevented further operations after the battle of Stone River.

Last spring, when your movements on the Mississippi River had drawn out of Tennessee a large force of the enemy, I again urged General Rosecrans to take advantage of that opportunity to carry out his projected plan of campaign, General Burnside being ready to cooperate, with a diminished but still efficient force. But he could not be persuaded to act in time, preferring to lie still till your campaign should be terminated. I represented to him, but without avail, that by this delay Johnston might be able to reenforce Bragg with the troops then operating against you.

When General Rosecrans finally determined to advance, he was allowed to select his own lines and plans for carrying out the objects of the expedition. He was directed, however, to report his movements daily, till he crossed the Tennessee, and to connect his left, so far as possible, with General Burnside’s right. General Burnside was directed to move simultaneously, connecting his right, as far as possible, with General Rosecrans’s left so that, if the enemy concentrated upon either army, the other could move to its assistance. When General Burnside reached Kingston and Knoxville, and found no considerable number of the enemy in East Tennessee, he was instructed to move down the river and cooperate with General Rosecrans.

These instructions were repeated some fifteen times, but were not carried out, General Burnside alleging as an excuse that he believed that Bragg was in retreat, and that General Rosecrans needed no reenforcements. When the latter had gained possession of Chattanooga he was directed not to move on Rome as he proposed, but simply to hold the mountain-passes, so as to prevent the ingress of the rebels into East Tennessee. That object accomplished, I considered the campaign as ended, at least for the present. Future operations would depend upon the ascertained strength and; movements of the enemy. In other words, the main objects of the campaign were the restoration of East Tennessee to the Union, and by holding the two extremities of the valley to secure it from rebel invasion....”

Simply put, when Rosecrans had his hands on Chattanooga, he was to keep it in his hands. He was not to pursue Bragg off into Georgia, he was to hold the passes through the valley and then cooperate with Burnside in Eastern Tennessee. After that was accomplished, then the operation against Bragg could proceed.

Combining with Burnside, Rosecrans could have secured Eastern Tennessee as so long desired, then the problem of Bragg could be faced.

Instead, Rosecrans went after Bragg, splitting his army into three, and running into a bigger battle than ever should have been fought. And worse, he abandoned Chattanooga. Despite the fact that the city was essentially behind him, he did not claim or garrison it, leaving it open for Braggs to regain.

Before following out the moves Rosecrans carried out against Bragg, it is worthwhile to consider the situation that was developing, from the Confederate point of view.

In late August and early September, Lee personally traveled to Richmond for a conference that would determine what he would do next, with Vicksburg lost and his great raid into Pennsylvania having turned into ashes. Bragg’s recent retreat from Tullahoma added to all the other worries on the minds of the Confederate high command. More and more, the southern part of the Confederacy was being ceded to Union forces.

Contrary to the good sense expressed previously, that he should let the Union forces just sit and wait, Lee thought he had talked Davis into authorizing a new offensive against Meade and he passed word to Longstreet, currently leading the army when Lee was absent, to prepare for it.

While agreeing to obey orders, Longstreet argued that it seemed futile to continue the offensive and fight a war of attrition and felt the best plan was to hold position in Virginia and bolster the efforts in Tennessee. He thought two corps could keep Meade standing off, allowing Lee to send a third corps to help Bragg in Tennessee.

This was written on September 2, and Burnside was just then taking Knoxville. It was two days later that Rosecrans pressed Bragg through Chattanooga and did not stay, himself.

Suddenly Davis turned about and agreed with Longstreet. He tried to convince Lee to personally lead the corps into Tennessee and take overall command. Lee demurred, insisting that the man who already had command and knew the situation, Bragg, would do the better job.

Davis gave in to this argument, and Longstreet was dispatched with two of his own divisions to go join Bragg.

Upon Longstreet’s departure to Tennessee, about 45,000 remained for Lee against Meade. Using the two rivers, the Rappahannock and the Rapidan as buffers, and laying back in the vicinity of the Wilderness, Lee could feel safe against a threat from the now much larger federal army while Longstreet was away.

Rosecrans had no expectation that Davis would ever send reinforcements into the West, let alone as many as 18,000. This meant he was unaware that the army against him would soon swell by that number. Yet Halleck estimated that enough men could be rallied to Rosecrans’s side to more than match what Bragg could muster. Much of this could come from Burnside, if he would only cooperate.

The plan of creating three columns involved an attempt by Rosecrans, to surround Bragg outside of Chattanooga and prevent his retreat deeper into Georgia, where Rosecrans surmised Bragg would go. As seen above, those were not his orders. Holding Chattanooga and supporting Burnside to solidify federal occupation of Eastern Tennessee would have resulted in Bragg being held off, unable to threaten the Union armies even with the addition of Longstreet. For all intents and purposes, Bragg would have been pushed into a corner, or put in a position of having to conduct an assault on the combined forces of Rosecrans and Burnside in their secure positions, which would have bordered on the suicidal.

With regard to the passes and mountains in the area of Chattanooga, several large formations of hills, or as they were locally considered, “mountains,” stretched in ridges, as if flowing with a wind from the north. These mountains were penetrated by a number of openings through which armies could pass, with greater or lesser ease, much like the topography of upper Virginia, where the Blue Ridge and Catoctin Mountains, and the Cumberlands and Allegheny paralleled each other, with valleys between and gaps cutting through the ridges.

In passing through Chattanooga to try and defeat Bragg, contrary to orders, Rosecrans dispatched M/G Alexander McCook wide to the south, through Winston Gap, one of the passes piercing those mountains, about forty miles below the border of Georgia and Alabama/Tennessee. George Thomas used Stevens Gap and M/G Thomas Crittenden passed through Chattanooga until he was beyond Lookout Mountain, which is one of those long ridges whose northern face loomed over the city of Chattanooga, but the body of which stretched for miles to the south, into Alabama, like a blunt-faced snake.

Crittenden’s corps exited the valley of Chattanooga, through a pass in another mountain to the east called Missionary Ridge, down into the Georgia countryside across the nearby border.

As Rosecrans rushed his three columns eastward and in two cases southward, still believing Bragg was retreating, the Confederate force was in fact near La Fayette and closer to George Thomas’s XIV Corps than Thomas was to any other Union corps, a perfect set up for the always hoped-for “defeat in detail.”

Thomas had “popped out” of the mountains into a valley called McLemore’s Cove and Bragg meant to trap him in there and attack him heavily. McCook would be “fixed” by Fighting Joe Wheeler’s cavalry as he emerged from the mountains further south, and Bedford Forrest would do the same to Crittenden up in the north near McFarland’s Gap. In this way, each of Rosecrans’s columns would be intercepted and blocked as it emerged from its respective pass, with the northernmost and southernmost columns delayed while the central column, belonging to Thomas, was beaten.

Longstreet’s incoming divisions were yet to arrive but with other rare reinforcements on hand, Bragg now had 55,000 total, 40,000 of which he could throw against the 23,000 of Thomas’s column.

September 9, Thomas entered the cove and Bragg ordered the attack.

The plan seemed sound, but the execution was not. The generals Bragg had assigned to conduct the attack on Thomas did not begin to coordinate their efforts until Thomas had already caught a scent of their trap and U-turned back into McLemore’s Cove. The result was a trap that closed on empty air.

Bragg would blame the failure on confusion over the orders sent and received by the two generals who were to attack from different directions but the situation was not as simple as that. The fact was, Thomas was never going to blunder into the trap because he became aware of it ahead of time.

To understand how he came to know the Confederates were waiting for him leads to an intriguing story in its own right, because it exposes dynamics of a kind that existed in this war but which did not show up in bare statistics.

It is informative to read the official report from Thomas, describing events from his point of view as his column approached McLemore’s Cove:

September 9. – Baird’s division moved across Lookout Mountain to the support of Negley. Negley’s division moved across the mountain and took up a position in McLemore’s Cove, near Rodgers’ farm, throwing out his skirmishers as far as Bailey’s Cross-Roads; saw the enemy’s cavalry in front, drawn up in line; citizens reported a heavy force concentrated in his front at Dug Gap, consisting of infantry, cavalry, and artillery.

The intriguing aspect of this report is contained in the last clause of the final sentence: “citizens reported a heavy force concentrated in his front at Dug Gap, consisting of infantry, cavalry, and artillery.”

It should be borne in mind that this occurred deep in Alabama. Citizens, that is, local people, were passing information to a Union army in order aid its operations against a Confederate army!

Thomas again,

September 11. – Baird’s division closed up on Negley’s at Widow Davis’ house about 8 a.m. Soon afterward, Negley being satisfied, from his own observations and from the reports of officers sent out to reconnoiter, and also from loyal citizens, that the enemy was advancing on him in very superior force, and that his train was in imminent danger of being cut off if he accepted battle at Davis’ Cross-Roads, determined to fall back to a strong position in front of Stevens’ Gap. This movement he immediately proceeded to put into execution, and by his untiring energy and skill, and with the prompt co-operation of Baird, succeeded in gaining possession of the hills in front of Stevens’ Gap and securing his trains, without losing a single wagon.

Additional intelligence had been provided by “loyal citizens.” This might have been expected in Eastern Tennessee, but in Alabama?

More:

September 12. - Brannan’s division reached Negley’s position by 8 a.m., and took post next on the left of Baird. Reynolds’ division was posted on the left of Brannan, one brigade covering Cooper’s Gap. Reports from citizens go to confirm the impression that a large force of the enemy is concentrated at La Fayette. A report from General McCook confirms that fact. A later dispatch from the same source says it is reported that Bragg’s whole army, with Johnston’s, is at La Fayette. Generals Brannan and Baird, with parts of their commands, went out on a reconnaissance toward Dug Gap at 1 p.m. to-day. General Brannan reports they advanced 2 miles beyond Davis’ Cross-Roads without finding any enemy with the exception of a few mounted men. Corps headquarters encamped at top of Stevens’ Gap.

September 14. - A negro who had been taken before General Buckner yesterday and released again reports that Buckner and his corps are in Catlett’s Gap preparing to defend that place. A negro woman, lately from the neighborhood of Dug Gap, reports a large force of rebels between Dug Gap and La Fayette.

Thus, through a combination of Unionist local people, blacks who reported in to the Union army, and deserters from the Confederates, Thomas and thus Rosecrans and the other columns were well aware of Bragg’s trap and avoided it by going up Chickamauga Creek. It would seem that a fair amount of carelessness on the Confederate side had also contributed to the process of warning Thomas.

Ultimately, Bragg was forced to give up on beating Thomas for now. Next he turned his attention to Crittenden, up closer to Chattanooga, hoping to entrap him as he had not been able to do with Thomas. Blaming his commanders for the failure at McLemore’s Cove, Bragg decided to trust the entrapment of Crittenden to different commanders. This was to take place at dawn on September Thirteenth. Leonidas Polk was the commander designated to attack Crittenden but when he arrived, he took up a defensive posture and refused to attack a force he feared was superior.

When Bragg reached the position and finally managed to send the assault in, Crittenden, á la Thomas, had slipped off the hook, disappearing behind Missionary Ridge, another long prominence just east of Chattanooga. Already aware, through Thomas’s intelligence, that Bragg was on the offensive instead of fleeing to Dalton as he originally believed, Rosecrans called his three columns back together, in the vicinity of Lee and Gordon’s Mill on Chickamauga Creek, around a “corner” from Chattanooga.

During that time, in a snit over the failures of his subordinates, Bragg did not make any additional move to plant his army in Rosecrans’s way and so the Union commander was able to reassemble his army without harassment.

If Rosecrans had occupied Chattanooga with his entire army then proceeded forward, with his supply lines in the city, and his army blocking the way against Bragg, and had he not taken the long detour with two parts of his army through the mountains southward, he would have been more advanced outside of Chattanooga than Chickamauga Creek, and Bragg would not occupy the ground directly before him. Bragg would have had to retreat farther because Rosecrans would have more directly pressed him from a base east of Chattanooga in such a way, even in a loss, as to keep Bragg from following him around Missionary Ridge into Chattanooga. From there, Rosecrans could have chosen more favorable ground to take on Bragg.

By whatever machinations that placed them there, the two armies now stood poised across Chickamauga Creek from each other and there the battle shaped up, with Bragg arrayed slightly to the northeast of Rosecrans. Bragg assumed Rosecrans would attempt to retreat back up around Missionary Ridge, which was at his back, through Rossville Gap to Chattanooga and Bragg meant to get to the gap first, close it off, and with what was now parity in numbers with Rosecrans, finish him off. Clearly, had Rosecrans already held Chattanooga, he would have positioned himself to prevent Bragg flanking him and cutting off his retreat to Chattanooga if he should need it.

To achieve this victory, which to Bragg must have appeared as a chance to finally stymie the slow but constant advance of the Union army that had begun with Shiloh, he had intended to extend his right flank until it was north of Rosecrans, which would have created an envelopment around the Union left flank, and from that configuration, should have been able to both cut Rosecrans off from Chattanooga and herd the entire Union force back into McLemore’s Cove and trap them as he meant to catch Thomas in the first place. This scenario would not have been possible if Rosecrans had already claimed the city and his entire army had entered this battle from that position.

This attack was to occur early on September 19, but in the night, unknown to Bragg, Rosecrans drastically realigned his forces, moving Thomas to the Union left in such a way that he ended up actually further north than Bragg’s men, outmaneuvering the possibility of envelopment and in so doing, ruining Bragg’s plan to drive the entire Union force south into the trap.

In fact, Rosecrans had generally shifted his entire force to the north, closer to Rossville Gap, which was his safety-valve route through the mass of Missionary Ridge, and back to Chattanooga. This put paid to Bragg’s plan for September Nineteenth.

That same day, September 19, George Thomas probed forward, to the east, and collided with Nathan Bedford Forrest’s cavalry, triggering a fight that erupted into a general battle up and down the whole line. By the end of that day, Rosecrans held the road that ran through the battlefield. Twice his center was hit hard but held.

As for Longstreet, his men had come from Virginia by train, and Longstreet personally followed them in, having to work his way through a Union line in the dark (during which, running into blue-coats, Longstreet disguised his southern accent and bluffed his way past as a Yankee.)

According to Longstreet, upon his arrival, Bragg barely briefed him about the current situation then informed him another attack was scheduled for the next day.

That attack did not develop as crisply or immediately as Bragg had indicated to Longstreet because Polk was three and a half hours late making ready. Longstreet employed the time wasted, however, by further acclimatizing himself to the overall situation under which he was to direct the coming action. At the same time, however, George Thomas’s men took advantage of the same delay to dig in well enough to repulse the assault against their sector when it began.

It is instructive to read what Thomas had to say in his official report, as he describes the terrain in which the fighting took place.

Kelly’s house is situated in an opening about three-fourths of a mile long and one-fourth of a mile wide, on the east side of the State road, and stretches along that road in a northerly direction, with a small field of perhaps 20 acres on the west side of the road, directly opposite to the house. From thence to the Chickamauga the surface of the country is undulating and covered with original forest timber, interspersed with undergrowth, in many places so dense that it is difficult to see 50 paces ahead. There is a cleared field near Jay’s Mill, and cleared land in the vicinity of Reed’s and Alexander’s Bridges. A narrow field commences at a point about a fourth of a mile south of Kelly’s house, on the east side of the State road, and extends, perhaps, for half a mile along the road toward Gordon’s Mills. Between the State road and the foot of Missionary Ridge there is a skirt of timber stretching from the vicinity of Widow Glenn’s house, south of the forks of the road to McDonald’s house, three-fourths of a mile north of Kelly’s. The eastern slope of the Missionary Ridge, between Glenn’s and McDonald’s, is cleared and mostly under cultivation.

With the Confederate attack foundering, a break would come that turned the battle around and won the day for the South. This event that opened up the attack for Longstreet is seldom reported in detail, and when it is mentioned, usually described incorrectly.

The usual explanation for this phenomenon was a confused report that a hole existed in the federal line to the north and Rosecrans dispatched what he thought was a reserve unit to fill it, but instead, sent a front line unit, pulling it out of place and as a result, in so doing, creating an actual hole where none had existed, a hole through which the Confederates poured.

Up to a point, that description is accurate, but the actual details that led to the creation of this key gap in the line are interesting enough to report more fully, since this incident is the key to the Confederate victory at Chickamauga.

It will be recalled that by Rosecrans shifting his entire army to the left, or north, which was a wise enough move, he placed Thomas’s corps in the way of Bragg’s intended envelopment. That far out on the wing, being “in the air,” George Thomas felt exposed to flanking and more than once dispatched couriers to Rosecrans, requesting reinforcements.

One of those couriers, in moving down the line to meet with Rosecrans, discovered what appeared to be a gap in the Union defensive lines. Deep in the woods, however, hidden from the messenger’s sight, a division under command of John Brannan was indeed holding the position as he should be. Thomas’s description of the lack of visibility in the forest explains how this could have developed.

Nevertheless, in the name of diligence, the courier reported to headquarters what he perceived as a dire situation, an opening through which the Confederates could charge and make a turning movement onto the rear of the entire Union line.

Rosecrans appears to have panicked at the report of a hole in his line, and without investigating, accepted the claim at face value. He insisted that General Thomas Wood move over to fill the gap. That was the fatal mistake.

Let General Woods describe what ensued:

I received the order about 11 o’clock. At the moment of its receipt I was a short distance in rear of the center of my command. General McCook was with me when I received it. I informed him that I would immediately carry it into execution, and suggested that he should close up his command rapidly on my right to prevent the occurrence of a gap in our lines. He said he would do so, and immediately rode away. I immediately dispatched my staff officers to the brigade commanders with the necessary orders, and the movement was at once begun. Reynolds’ division was posted on the left of Brannan’s division, which, in turn, was on the left of the position I was just quitting. I had consequently to pass my command in rear of Brannan’s division to close up on and go in to the support of Reynolds.

So soon as I had got the command well in motion, I rode forward to find General Reynolds and learn where and how it was desired to bring my command into action. I did not find General Reynolds, but in my search for him I met General Thomas, to whom I communicated the order I had received from the commanding general, and desired to know where I should move my command to support General Reynolds. General Thomas replied that General Reynolds did not need support, but that I had better move to the support of General Baird, posted on our extreme left, who needed assistance. I exhibited my order to him, and asked whether he would take the responsibility of changing it. He replied he would, and I then informed him I would move my command to the support of General Baird. I requested General Thomas to furnish me a staff officer who could conduct me to General Baird, which he did. Taking this staff officer with me, I rode at once to Barnes’ brigade and directed the staff officer to conduct it to and report it to General Baird. I then rode to the other two brigades for the purpose of following with them in the rear of Barnes’ brigade to the assistance of General Baird. When I rejoined them I found the valley south of them swarming with the enemy.

It appears that when I moved my command to go to the support of General Reynolds, the gap thus made in our lines was not closed by the troops on my right, and that the enemy poured through it very soon in great force. The head of his column struck the right of Buell’s brigade, and cutting off a portion of it, forced it over the adjacent ridge, whence it retired, as I have subsequently learned, with the vast mass of fugitives from the troops on our extreme right toward Rossville.

Prior to the advent of the above situation, the initial attack by the Confederates, when it finally came after the delay caused by Polk, was at first confused. Still, like a low spot in the road draws the rainwater, the gap in Rosecrans’s line seemed to draw the Confederates to the opening and there, they broke through and got behind Rosecrans’s entire defensive line, a disaster for the Union side, as Woods made clear.

Even with this gift handed to them, all was not well on the Southern side, either. The initial confusion, before the gap was exploited, seemed to stem from the fact that Bragg had been quite miffed when his grand design to shove the Union army up into McLemore Cove had failed and he seemed to lose interest in the coming attack, or else confidence, or both. He was satisfied to issue the orders for an all-out straight-on attack, then personally abandoned the scene, riding north, throwing over his shoulder the message that if he were wanted, he would be found at “Reed’s Bridge,” and added that the battle was in the hands of the corps commanders, meaning, primarily, as senior man, Longstreet.

Before the attack finally began, and certainly before the providential gap in Union lines was discovered, Longstreet had likened the impending charge to Pickett’s at Gettysburg, and tried to bring as much order to it as he could before it stepped off. This time, however, he had more men, they were in better shape and position, and the enemy was less powerful than Meade had been, nor did they hold the same quality of higher ground.

To him, the initial charge seemed to fail, with John Bell Hood’s line repulsed at first and Hood himself felled with what was thought a deadly wound.

It was in this period, however, that the open lines left by Wood’s departure were discovered and when the general charge came, it flowed through the hole. The tail end of Wood’s division, still in the process of moving around Brannan’s was hit hard, and the integrity of Rosecrans’s army generally fell apart from that point.

In the comedy of errors that was the Chickamauga battle, two beacons of light and order stood out on either side. Longstreet made the most—and it was enough—of a bad situation, and George Thomas prevented the loss from turning into an all-out catastrophe on the Union side by holding firm for as long as he was able.

After Longstreet’s breakthrough, and the rampage of his men through the rear of Rosecrans’s defense, the stampeding Union forces did not stop, they carried on up the valley to Rossville and beyond, and the unraveling continued like the ripping open of a zipper until it reached Thomas’s position. About two thirds of Rosecrans’s entire army on the field had been routed and vacated the battle by then.

It will be recalled that Bragg’s master strategy had been to carry out a massive “wheel” to the left, meaning his whole army should swing around north of Rosecrans’s and shove it into McLemore Cove, but that plan was long gone. Instead, as Longstreet would explain it, the great wheel-left was converted into a wheel in the opposite direction because the opening and the route through the hole where Wood had evacuated caused the momentum of the retreating Union army to go north. If they could no longer be driven into McLemore’s cove, perhaps they could be pursued and finished off here along the Chickamauga, so Longstreet turned the attack in that direction, with great success until its momentum began to wear out and it ran into George Thomas’s men standing in the way.

Thomas’s men were arrayed in a semi-circle around Snodgrass Hill and they held on and were reinforced by a reserve unit under Gordon Granger, further north than Thomas. Those federals who still remained on the field rallied around this force. It was not sufficient to reverse the fortunes of the battle, but the resistance thrown up by Thomas allowed much of Rosecrans’s army to get away even if they were holding their proverbial tails between their legs.

For this heroic stance at Snodgrass Hill, Thomas gained the nickname, “The Rock of Chickamauga.”

The accepted story of this part of the battle says that Rosecrans fled through the Rossville Gap into Chattanooga with his men, turning over command of the field to Thomas, who was left to withdraw at his own discretion. By that version, Thomas held firm until enemy artillery drove him out, leaving the field to Bragg.

It is said that Rosecrans, when he saw the assault coming his way, announced, “If you care to live any longer, get away from here,” and promptly took his own advice. An observer on the spot noted that immediately, “The headquarters around me disappeared.”

Longstreet understood the end of the battle differently. Rosecrans did not simply flee the field, he announced he was transferring to Chattanooga, only a few miles away, to “view the position there.” At least that put a better face on his exit than simply running away.

This is Thomas’s description of the same scenario:

General Garfield, [future president of the United States] chief of staff of General Rosecrans, reached this position about 4 p.m., in company with Lieutenant-Colonel Thruston, of McCook’s staff, and Captains Gaw and Barker, of my staff, who had been sent to the rear to bring back the ammunition, if possible. General Garfield gave me the first reliable information that the right and center of our army had been driven, and of its condition at that time. I soon after received a dispatch from General Rosecrans, directing me to assume command of all the forces, and, with Crittenden and McCook, take a strong position and assume a threatening attitude at Rossville, sending the unorganized forces to Chattanooga for reorganization, stating that he would examine the ground at Chattanooga, and then join me; also that he had sent out rations and ammunition to meet me at Rossville.

Longstreet agrees that the Confederate artillery finally convinced Thomas to leave, and an order from Rosecrans to pull out came after Thomas had already decided it was time to go.

Longstreet said that while he was wiping up after Thomas had withdrawn, it was not until the next day that Bragg arrived from the right to find out his army had won the battle. In his continued fit of ill humor, he had remained out of the arena, with a reserve of five brigades that had not even been inserted into the battle.

By whatever interpretation one chooses, the fact was that Rosecrans fled to Chattanooga and when he could, Thomas also joined him, and as a result, Chickamauga was heralded as one of the few victories for the Confederate army in the West. Yet controversy raged over the manner in which Bragg dealt with the ending. The fact is undeniable that for one reason or another, even in defeat, Rosecrans and his army ended up in Chattanooga, where they ought to have been all along, or at least from which they should have based.

While that seemed like a better than deserved outcome of a badly fought battle, the conditions under which Rosecrans and his men took up residency in the river city were not quite what they would have preferred. Bragg’s army had them sequestered under what amounted to siege conditions, or at least modified siege conditions, and would be well along toward starving them into submission by the time they were rescued.

The controversy, from the Southern point of view, surrounded the issue of allowing Rosecrans to at least occupy the city even if under unfavorable conditions rather than driving him clear out and away from Chattanooga. It seemed shameful to many in the Confederate army that in losing a big battle, the vanquished ended up in possession of a key city, even if it was as virtual prisoners.

Worse, unlike Pemberton, Rosecrans could certainly expect outside help before his men starved or surrendered. Grant was relatively close by and had the firepower to oust Bragg, and if he did, Chickamauga would turn out to be only a temporary positive for the Confederacy, for in the end, Bragg would likely be as much boxed into a corner of the Confederacy as he would have been if Rosecrans had taken Chattanooga first and used it as a base to chase him south and east.

No doubt, it would only be a matter of time before Grant and Sherman came knocking at Bragg’s door. Still, too much time would be wasted in actually siezing and holding Chattanooga as opposed to Rosecrans taking it first and using it as a position of strength out of which to strike.

It would be some time before Grant arrived to bail Rosecrans out, but nevertheless, a battle was about to open in Chattanooga right away, between Bragg and his own generals, a battle that had been a long time coming.

Chapter Two

With Rosecrans safely sealed up in Chattanooga, now came one of the fateful decisions for the Confederacy. Bragg queried Longstreet on what he thought should be done now. Longstreet said that they should push Rosecrans clear out of Chattanooga, by crossing the Tennessee River and coming at him from the north while holding the east passes, forcing him to exit westward. The other options were to continue the siege arrangement that already existed and hope to starve Rosecrans out.

A secondary version of the latter idea would be to sequester Rosecrans at Chattanooga with a smaller force while sending the rest north to try and defeat Burnside, who was hovering up around Knoxville like a specter over the horizon.

The option Bragg chose was a modified version of the latter plan, in which a lesser force was sent against Burnside and the rest held Rosecrans in place. Bragg would dispatch Longstreet, Bushrod Johnson, and Irish-born Patrick Cleburne north to suppress Burnside and the remainder would stay.

This was one of the poorest decisions made in the war by the Confederate side. The Union badly wanted Chattanooga and had for a long time, and if the Confederacy were to lose it, that would be the next great blow. Technically, as it was, Rosecrans, not the Confederacy, occupied Chattanooga, although a lot of good it was doing Rosecrans as a virtual prisoner inside. Still, unless his entire force could be captured, having Rosecrans there meant the Confederates could not do much more. They had to leave more than a garrison to lock Rosecrans up or the situation would be as good as giving the federals the city. They should also have been able to predict that if they left Rosecrans in place, Grant was bound to come all-out to rescue him and then to fully control Chattanooga.

Knoxville was not all that important compared to Chattanooga, so dividing forces to oust Burnside should not have rated as high on the list of priorities as ousting Rosecrans from Chattanooga as quickly as possible, and not by sheer starvation, which would take time.

Following that decision by Bragg, this was the moment when political intrigue among the generals under his command began to surface.

It is worthwhile to note that few people seemed to like anything about Braxton Bragg. The tragedy in this, as far as the Confederacy was concerned, is that the one man who counted most enjoyed warm feelings for Bragg, and that was Jefferson Davis. After Bragg’s army had settled into place against Rosecrans at Chattanooga, but before Longstreet left to go pursue Burnside in Knoxville, certain of the generals under Bragg approached Longstreet; thinking he had great clout with the government, they asked him to write a letter to Davis about Bragg. Longstreet responded by pointing out that not since the year before had he been asked for advice from Davis and felt it would not be appropriate to become entangled in this now. He did, however, agree to write to Secretary of War Weldon, as well as Robert E. Lee.

At the same time, Daniel Harvey (D.H.) Hill, who had accompanied Longstreet over from Virginia and was critical of Bragg’s fighting style from the outset, and one of those who approached Longstreet on the subject, wrote a letter of his own to Jefferson Davis and had several of the corps commanders, omitting Longstreet, to sign it. The purpose of the letters was to serve as a petitions calling for Bragg’s removal from command.

While this was going on, Bragg was firing Polk and Hindman, who he felt had failed him at Chickamauga.

On October 29, the situation reached a boil when the big man himself, Davis, showed up to meet with Bragg at his headquarters atop Missionary Ridge, looking down upon Chattanooga.

An ugly, embarrassing scene developed when Davis demanded that the generals, including Longstreet, express their opinions of Bragg, in the presence of the man about whom they had issues. Longstreet thought forcing this situation was beyond Davis’s right even as a president and he avoided responding any more than he had to, endeavoring instead to turn the meeting to other issues. Davis would not relent.

Despite the nastiness of the session, perhaps it was healthy nonetheless for the generals to be able to air their opinion of Bragg, which centered on the point that he had not taken advantage of the victory at Chickamauga and would serve the Confederacy better elsewhere than in command of the Army of Tennessee.

The next day, Davis privately met with Longstreet all day and broached the idea of handing Longstreet command of Bragg’s army. Longstreet, however, was not eager to have an already bungled situation dropped into his lap, and suggested that since Joseph Johnston had overall command in the West, he ought to pick up the pieces. In that case, Longstreet expressed willingness to serve as a corps commander under Johnston.

Unfortunately, Longstreet had spoken the magic words, “Joseph Johnston.” Just the name itself seemed to drive Davis into an angry frenzy and he apparently snapped at Longstreet. As a result, instead of making any change in command, Davis left Bragg in position, ordering him to pull his army out of Chattanooga and transfer it to Rome, Georgia. (Bad weather set in, however, and Bragg remained at Chattanooga.)

In the group meeting earlier, the generals had almost openly agreed that the Confederacy was in dire straits and if the end were not actually at hand, it was not far up around the bend.

The upshot of all the meetings was essentially nothing. Davis made no major decision, and appeared to be a man who had psychologically given up on the war, although subsequent events would belie that.

Longstreet and Bragg became embroiled in yet another controversy concerning the operations necessary to keep Rosecrans penned up in Chattanooga. The issue revolved around the question of who would be in control of the routes which Rosecrans might use if he either abandoned Chattanooga or was to be re-supplied and reinforced. Bragg would later claim that Longstreet was made responsible for holding the exits to the west, implying that the eventual failure to prevent the arrival of Union forces was all on Longstreet’s head. Longstreet rebutted this, saying his command was over the eastern routes from Chattanooga, and the mountains and westward routes had been outside his jurisdiction.

Out of all these factors would before long emerge the battle for Chattanooga.

Naturally, the situation into which Rosecrans had maneuvered himself at Chattanooga drew intense interest in the North. Again, as was the case through most of the war, the government and Northern press failed to recognize that even with an army somewhat bottled up in a key Southern city, the war was nevertheless being won in the West. The fixation of attention remained on Virginia, and while the victory at Gettysburg was a huge positive, once Meade failed to complete the job by destroying Lee on his way home, and the two armies returned almost to the same place they had begun, gloom set in again in the North.

Even the fact that the Confederacy was reeling from its ripple of setbacks did not seem to signal to the people of the North that in fact, the situation was rather good over the whole realm of the war. Even with the scenario at Chattanooga, aside from the actual discomfort of the men and animals locked up in the river city, the potential for a positive outcome was better than ever. All that had been lost was men and time. The city remained and was ripe for the picking at last.

If Rosecrans were extricated from his prison in Chattanooga, it would happen because superior Union forces were brought to bear. Whether that would directly result in Bragg’s defeat or at least his ouster from around Chattanooga, the immediate result would be the same. It was Bragg’s army that would eventually be shoved away from Chattanooga and pushed into a deeper corner of the South.

Time lost, or wasted, in the entire series of events, from Chickamauga to the coming battle to secure Chattanooga for the Union, was not a small issue, however. By the time the fight for Chattanooga geared up, Rosecrans should have owned the city by right of occupation after chasing Bragg out, and instead of preparing to ride to his rescue, Grant should have been in position to send heavy reinforcements to set up the next great move, that of pushing Bragg to Atlanta and perhaps defeating him there. Instead, it was clear that whatever happened to rescue Rosecrans, the next offensive against Bragg would wait until the coming year. The battle to come, in which the Union must rescue Rosecrans and seize Chattanooga permanently should never have been needed.

At this juncture, even after Chickamauga, another golden opportunity existed for the Union to do what it ought to have done long before. Still, the leadership failed to see it: Lee should now once and for all be sequestered by a sufficient force in Virginia to keep him behind the Rappahannock River, and everything else that could be spared should be poured into the Union effort in the West. Grant’s command should have been supplemented such that it could accelerate its progress in pushing the Confederacy armies deeper into a box, and in so doing, concentrate on gaining the now relatively small amount of ground needed, beyond Chattanooga, to turn for the home stretch, sending armies north through the Carolinas to take Richmond from that direction and smash Lee in a pincer. Instead, the Northern people were left to perpetuate the glass-half-empty mindset.

At this point, before considering the upcoming battle, it is instructive to observe just what remained in the way of territory that could be considered under Confederate control.

Bragg’s army was the primary force on the side of the Confederacy south of Virginia. It is true, other, smaller armies, especially Nathan Bedford Forrest’s wild cavalry were still rampant, which, although present at Chickamauga, was detachable at will and able to range throughout the South. Taken separately, however, no unit of the Confederacy was powerful enough to stop the Union army if it asserted itself against them in its full strength.

In a way, these lesser Confederate armies were little more than moving garrisons, holding the land they happened to occupy but little else. The remaining big prizes, still under Confederate control, but only because they had not yet been challenged seriously by the Union, were Mobile, Atlanta, and Charleston. Of course Richmond was likewise still free but that was a special case.

In his position at Chattanooga, Bragg was as much a captive as Rosecrans. He was riding a tiger, unable to move without giving up the great prize, but set up in such a way that he could not fight in a coherent mass because he had to plant his men on the high points around the southern and western part of the city, to keep Rosecrans in and supplies to him out. Having won a single battle, he was unable to challenge other Union armies elsewhere except Burnside, perhaps, not far away at Knoxville, and even a victory there would be something of a dead end. If pushed out of Knoxville, Burnside was bound to pop up somewhere else in such a way as to trouble Confederate forces.

In fact, Bragg ought to have counted himself lucky that Burnside had not descended upon him from the north at any time, including now, which would have created an opening for even Rosecrans to fight his way out of the trap.

In essence, Bragg controlled only Chattanooga, and points south, but nothing to the west or to the north. There was little of use directly east of Chattanooga of a military value to claim except space between that point and Richmond, and the coastal cities.

The Union during this period had not exerted itself in actually governing the part of the Confederacy that had been taken back. There was no need. When the war was won, such a huge re-adjustment would be necessary that it made no sense to tweak it now. The local economy, the local people, must carry on their lives and there was no great need to dictate to them past the fact that where Union armies actually passed, slaves were freed, which was effectively true even without considering the Emancipation Proclamation, which had gone into effect on the First of January. In ousting the Confederate armies from cities and capitals, the Union had also ousted Confederate leaders, who could not afford to be caught and punished in whatever way Lincoln saw fit.

Aside from that, sometimes locations were garrisoned with small groups of men to maintain order and serve as a first response if Confederate units threatened, but otherwise, the armies moved on, and in those cases, it was sufficient to leave the citizens of the South to cope with their own losses. The Union thus had no need to do other than let life go on behind the lines, until the war was fully over and Lincoln could determine what penalties and penances would be required by the rebellious section of the country. Or more importantly, who would run the state governments in the aftermath of the war. More than ever, the only concern of the Union need be the Confederate armies, and the stage of mopping them up was arriving rapidly.

That was the theory. Soon, however, Lincoln would take a step designed to start recreating Unionist governments in the states firmly under federal control. The major experiment would be Louisiana, whose largest city had been in Union hands for a long time.

What happened to the blacks freed in this manner was an entire subject of its own. Some remained where they were and actually cooperated with their former masters in order to survive, which the Emancipation Proclamation effectively asked them to do, some of course took revenge, many moved away from their former homes and set to work surviving as free but destitute citizens, and many left the South, to not especially happy futures, but at least free.

And of course many joined the army, a trend that was slowly growing and remained a huge controversy in the North. In time, the contribution of black men, originally free and freed by the war, as military combatants would snowball, and in fact, even the South would face the decision of whether to offer blacks a place in their army or not, with several key Southern commanders, calling for exactly that.

On the whole, from a practical standpoint, by the time Rosecrans was locked up in Chattanooga, the Confederacy per se had been reduced to a rump government of desperate men occupying a single building in a Virginia city far from the scene of action in Tennessee and points south and west.

If one harkened back to Lincoln’s original plan, voiced in his inauguration, for the goals of the federal army, that of taking back the “places” illegally seized by the original rebels, the army had succeeded famously over a wide stretch of land. Unquestionably, not all the places of interest, Charleston for instance, were back in federal control, but certainly the mighty Mississippi could be checked off on the ledger as returned to its original owners, along with all the cities on its shores.

On the other hand, the aim of the military had ballooned to something far greater than Lincoln’s original declared intent back in March and April of 1861. Having had to not just regain federal installations, but rather to totally suppress almost an entire population, the army had moved far along even in that mission.

When the original lines of the Confederacy, as defined by the states that formed it, or alternately by the defensive lines which defended it, at the outset of the war, are compared to what could be seriously claimed as outside the control of the Union by the battle of Chickamauga, the change is stunning. It is like a moving picture showing a huge counterclockwise motion, the color representing Confederate authority receding, rotating around the axis of the Appalachian Mountains like the closing of a Japanese fan.

It remains one of the wonders of the war, that few seemed to recognize the fact that although fights remained ahead, in the West, if winning the war meant eradicating the Confederacy, the war was being won handily. Instead, every hiccup and setback was treated as an awful pill to swallow by the people of the North and their government.

Instead of rejoicing that a key city which had been a destination for months now had federal troops in it, never mind how or why, the Northern public must lament that alas, Rosecrans was bottled up in Chattanooga!

If they had thought about what was bound to happen to Bragg’s army when Grant got around to liberating Rosecrans, they should have been shouting for joy in the streets in anticipation.

Chapter Three

Grant’s options for dealing with the Chattanooga and Rosecrans situation were not overly restricted. He could directly overwhelm Bragg, he could send elements to join Burnside and bring him down from the north while surrounding Bragg on all sides except the east, or he could reinforce Rosecrans inside the trap and let him fight his way out with Grant lending a hand where needed.

While Burnside had of course been dispatched to again work in favor of the Unionists in Eastern Tennessee, based out of Knoxville, Bragg had viewed him as a threat to his position farther south in the state, hovering over Bragg like a vulture. Thus Bragg had dispatched a force to defeat or at least oust Burnside from that region, as was discussed in the last chapter.

As has been intimated in these pages, rather than letting himself be isolated and threatened up in Knoxville, however, Burnside should have long since thrown in with Rosecrans against Bragg, in which case his added firepower could have turned the tide at Chickamauga, even with the mistake on the part of Rosecrans in giving up Chattanooga in the first place.

Now, Grant had to worry about both Rosecrans and Burnside, if the latter were himself penned in by Longstreet, Bushrod Johnson, and Cleburne. And Lincoln would not let Grant forget, pestering him again and again to do something about Burnside.

It cannot be denied that Rosecrans was in a difficult position, when food and supplies were considered. Only one route was left for him to obtain those needs, and that was a rough road up and over Walden’s Ridge, northwest out of town. Bragg’s artillery covered the other routes, including the Tennessee River. Soon talk would surface, reaching Grant and Washington, that Rosecrans was planning to abandon Chattanooga. Such talk raised panic in Union circles, because the last thing they wanted was for Rosecrans to give Chattanooga up, especially when means existed to extricate him from his predicament if he held on.

If only the Union leadership had been able to listen in on Longstreet’s meeting with Davis, they would surely have felt considerably more cheerful even given Rosecrans’s situation.

Nevertheless, on October 17, Grant met with Secretary of War Stanton in Cincinnati. Long since having grown dissatisfied with Rosecrans, the War Department’s impatience had reached a head with his failures at Chickamauga.

Finally, at this time, all the armies in the west were being pulled together under one command and commander, and while Grant had been acting in this capacity since Halleck left for Washington, he had still only technically held the position of a Department commander and had in fact been outranked by Banks, although he had managed to avoid being superceded in actual operations.

Now, he was to finally rise to official command in the entire West. The title of the command would be the Military Division of the Mississippi. There it was, the war effort was now under two grand regional commanders, Meade in the East, Grant in the West, with Halleck holding a desk in Washington, now generally reduced to serving as a contact point between those generals and Lincoln, and not always needed even for that.

On paper, this promotion was grand, but in actual workings, it changed little, since Grant had been effectively running the war in the West for quite some time, even when that meant taking shortcuts to edge Banks out of the picture despite the latter outranking Grant. What changed was that now he had more power to hire and fire commanders under him.

His first opportunity to make a decision with regard to generals under his now official command occurred at the time he received orders promoting him to that command.

Two sets of orders were offered to him, which were essentially blueprints for the operations ahead of him. Except in one particular, the two sets of orders were identical and he was free to choose one or the other.

The only difference between the two sets of orders was the name of the man who would command the army locked up in Chattanooga. In one set, Rosecrans remained the commander, in the other, George Thomas finally became commander of the army he had been offered before Rosecrans took over. Grant only had to select one or the other of the packets of orders and the leadership of that army would be determined.

He selected the one with the Virginia Unionist’s name on it, George Thomas.

One way for Bragg to avoid the jaws of the metaphorical hungry feline upon which he was now riding would be to abandon Chattanooga and move eastward and southward into Georgia, a move that had actually been broached by Davis in the ugly session among the conclave of generals atop Missionary Ridge. Clearly, if Bragg withdrew, he would be giving up what he had won at Chickamauga, rendering all the lives lost there completely wasted, if one could deny they had not been the case already.

The only other choice for Bragg was to stand and fight when Grant inevitably arrived, but carrying out the metaphor of tiger-riding, that option presented an even greater likelihood of the Confederate army ending up between sharp teeth.

After all the talk, however, action must ensue. Grant still must actually carry out the rescue and as an ancient Chinese philosopher had once said, the march of a thousand miles must begin with the first step, and that step was yet to be taken.

That first step must be to convince Thomas to hold on under siege until help could arrive. To carry this out, Grant fired off a message to Thomas, of course advising him that he was now the commander, then ordering him in no uncertain terms to hang on, in the phrase of the times, “at all hazards.”

With that initiated, the next move was to provide what Thomas and his men required to hold on in place: supplies. Once that situation was stabilized, Grant meant to oust Bragg from his guardianship of the city, and do him as much damage in the process as possible. When that was completed, Grant then could move ahead of the curve and actively plan operations to push Bragg even farther into a corner of the war, or utterly beat him in the process.

Bridgeport, Alabama was the first place outside of Chattanooga where the Union forces could form up and not be within the field of fire of the Confederate artillery and small arms which was holding Rosecrans/Thomas in lockdown. From the facing of Lookout Mountain, Bragg could pour metal down on anyone coming by way of the road south of the river heading into town, but Bridgeport was around the corner from that position and unreachable by Bragg’s guns.

The Walden Ridge wagon road, the only safe route in and out of Chattanooga, northwest of town, was the scene of a face to face among Grant, Thomas, and Rosecrans to discuss the situation of their army, and what would be done to alleviate it.

In that meeting, Grant learned that the panicky reports that Rosecrans planned to abandon Chattanooga were erroneous. Quite to the contrary, Rosecrans had been fortifying his position with intentions of withstanding the siege as long as he must.

Present with him in the city, Rosecrans had about 45,000 men actually in condition to report for duty, while Bragg still maintained 70,000 holding most of the routes in and out. Unnecessarily, as if Grant would not have thought of it, Halleck ordered him to send all available forces from Mississippi and Western Tennessee to participate in the Chattanooga relief operation, and better yet, he dispatched Joe Hooker with sixteen thousand more from Meade in Virginia to help, something like a counter to Longstreet’s earlier march west. But Meade could far better afford to lend Hooker than Lee had been able to spare Longstreet.

When Bragg figured out that Grant was on his way, something he should have automatically expected, he attempted to recall the corps under Bushrod Johnson and Cleburne, whom he had sent along with Longstreet to Knoxville. Johnson had already passed the point of no return, however and would continue on with his attempt to oust Burnside from Knoxville. Fortunately for Bragg, Cleburne had not gotten too far along yet and was able to rejoin him. Fortunately was the right word, because Cleburne’s presence would be a major boon to Bragg’s attempt to survive Grant’s coming operation.

The Tennessee River, at Chattanooga, loops in a hairpin turn, back upon itself, then loops yet again, with the ridges of Raccoon Mountain, Lookout Mountain, and Missionary Ridge standing guard over town. The segment of land that was caught up in the first loop of the river west of town was called Moccasin Point, reminiscent of DeSoto Point opposite Vicksburg on the Mississippi River. The route via Walden Ridge paralleled the River on the north side of this point before crossing it on another bend, toward Bridgeport.

The Tennessee River wandered north past Moccasin Point, then bent again in a larger loop, before plunging past the mountains into Alabama, even farther west. To bring food to Rosecrans, never mind adding reinforcements of men, Grant must find a better route than the difficult Walden Ridge way. The river itself could be such a highway, but before it could be used, some engineering work would be necessary to allow incoming forces and supplies to avoid rebel guns. They could follow the river to within a safe distance beyond Confederate guns on Lookout Mountain, then cross the spit of land to the next crossing, and on into Chattanooga. First, ferries or bridges would have to be erected by engineers. The desirable road coming in from Bridgeport crossed the river first at a point called Brown’s Ferry; this was beyond the reach of enemy artillery but pickets controlled the crossing. To clear the pickets, a federal force must brought in, but the pickets themselves would seem to preclude that.

Enter Baldy Smith, and the river. Approaching from the unexpected direction of the Tennessee moving east and south, Smith brought a squad by boat, which routed the pickets and floated in pontoons, and with this, a solid crossing was soon established by which ground forces could safely enter the valley by way of the Bridgeport Road. Step one complete.

Step Two, Smith, the engineer, installed a second pontoon bridge, on the other side of Moccasin Point, which resulted in a route all the way from Bridgeport to Chattanooga that carried too far north of the facing of Lookout Mountain for Bragg’s shells to reach.

The Smith operation took place on October 27, and with it, an open way existed to re-supply Thomas in Chattanooga; in the worst case scenario, now, Thomas’s army could remain in Chattanooga and not starve.

The hungry men locked up in Chattanooga called this successful logistical operation the “cracker line.” It could also have been called the “hay line” since it was nearly as important to bring provender for the animals of the besieged army as it was for the men.

Besides holding the north facing terminal wall of Lookout Mountain, Bragg’s army was also spread along the broad crest of Missionary Ridge to the east, and in fact was headquartered up there. While the west face was a more sheer headwall than the easy slope of the east, which was accessed from the battle site of Chickamauga, it was not much more difficult as a route for men to climb than the east.

Grant’s plan, to seize Chattanooga for the Union, led with an operation by Hood to force Bragg’s men and artillery off the facing of Lookout Mountain, then continue forward, that is, to the east, and climb the western slope of Missionary Ridge, south of the Confederate forces arrayed on top. At the same time, Sherman, still on his way, would mount the northern face of Missionary Ridge and the two forces, Hood’s and Sherman’s would squeeze in on Bragg, who, when chased off the mountains, would be forced, by the lay of the land to flee east and south, into Georgia, which comported well with the overall designs of Grant’s developing grand scheme.

Sherman was bogged down on his way to Chattanooga by bad weather until November 23, when his men finally crossed Moccasin Point, west of the city. On the way to their post in a gap between Missionary Ridge and the next ridge down, they laid in another bridge over the looping Tennessee River to facilitate their safe approach farther north than Confederate guns could reach.

Due to their unpleasant stay in Chattanooga, and their rough treatment in the Chickamauga fight, the men of George Thomas’s army would be coddled by Thomas himself and by Grant. Neither general wished to stress them unnecessarily while they recuperated, but Grant did have a job for them, one that was relatively gentle, but useful.

Confederate troops were ensconced in positions along the steeper west face of Missionary Ridge, occupying rifle pits and other defensive works, unable to advance by the presence of a growing Union army in the valley before them, but still serving as a menace, or at least as irritants.

Grant dispatched Thomas’s men, the former victims of semi-starvation, following defeat at Chickamauga, to move up closer to the slopes of Missionary Ridge and set up a diversion to take Bragg’s attention away from the true lines of attack, the north and south assaults planned for Hood and Sherman. To do this small part, Thomas’s men were sent forth to seize a local prominence called Orchard Knob, down by the foot of the ridge, from which they could pin down Bragg’s men above, and chase any who had ventured nearer the valley floor.

In the minds of Grant and even Thomas, it seemed almost cruel and unjust to impose even a small military burden upon those men but Grant felt satisfied that what he was asking of them was light enough duty. They were not being asked to fight, only to provided a presence, a pressure, to keep Bragg’s men on the western side of Missionary Ridge in check.

What would result from this seemingly minor assignment would prove one of the controversies, as well as one of the pivotal actions of the Battle of Chattanooga.

The following day, Sherman’s men captured ground at the extreme northern end of Missionary Ridge, near a railroad tunnel, but they would find the terrain so tough, and Cleburne’s defense so stout that they could not mount a serious assault. If they were unable to climb the end of the ridge, they obviously could not flank Bragg off the summit. The situation was not unlike that of Colonel Oates trying to reach and defeat Chamberlain on Little Round Top.

The difference was the fact that Hood was expected to provide pressure from the south, and if Sherman could not actually flank Bragg on the summit of Missionary Ridge, he would ensure the enemy would not escape by that route.

That was the theory, at least.

The presence of Hooker’s army at Chattanooga is a story in itself. They begin by train at Culpeper, Virginia, and traveled 1,233 miles, through the Appalachians, twice across the Ohio, using boats, and in eleven days reached Chattanooga, 20,000 strong. No other troop movement could rival it before modern transportation methods evolved in the coming century, yet little is ever heard about the feat. The amazing sojourn is usually ignored, on the basis that since Hooker’s men were needed at Chattanooga, they were dispatched, and they arrived, never mind how.

The confrontation between Hooker and the rebels on Lookout Mountain usually receives the star rating when the Battle of Chattanooga is mentioned. The battle did not occur on the summit of Lookout Mountain, but on the slopes of the north facing section of the ridge. When fog rolled in during the operation, the sounds of the action melodramatically echoed through the area, invisible to those below, creating an ethereal scene which gained fame as the Battle Above the Clouds. In truth, it proved a relatively easy proposition for the Union side. The real trouble developed only following the successful ouster of Confederates from Lookout Mountain.

After sweeping Bragg’s men from the heights, Hooker was expected to follow them in their headlong flight across the intervening valley and as described earlier, mount the slopes of Missionary Ridge south of Bragg’s position and hit his left flank, in conjunction with Sherman on the right.

The hitch developed when the fleeing Confederates, despite the ignominy of being routed off Lookout Mountain, maintained the presence of mind to wipe out the bridges crossing Chattanooga Creek, situated in the lowland between Lookout Mountain and Missionary Ridge. This sabotage succeeded in slowing Hooker’s pursuit, buying Confederate forces from Lookout Mountain the time they needed to join the rest of Bragg’s army and in so doing, temporarily stopping the second phase of the flanking operation cold. Certainly this was not a fatal setback to Grant’s plan, but it was frustrating. For a time, both sides of the flanking plan, those of Sherman to the north, and Hooker to the south seemed frustrated. That was where Thomas’s men in their easy assignment around Orchard Knob would enter the picture.

At the foot of Missionary Ridge, north of the area up which Hooker was expected to attack when the bridges were repaired, the army of George Thomas was asked to move forward from its holding position at Orchard Knob, to take over the Confederate rifle pits if they were able. This was not regarded as a major operation, just the application of a little more pressure and a diversion, to draw some of Bragg’s attention away from Sherman to the north.

It was true that the movement would place the coddled men under Thomas into the harm’s way of rifle fire from up the slope and the summit of the ridge. Reluctantly, Thomas sent them forward, but they approached the rifle pits, the rebels holed up within recognized that their position was untenable and fled, abandoning the pits with virtually no fight at all.

With no better fallback position near the foot of the ridge, they continued on up the mountain, all the way to the top; inspired by their quick success, and eager to pay back the Confederates before them for their defeat at Chickamauga, Thomas’s men reached the rifle pits, where they were supposed to dig in, but once there, never slowed down. In V-shaped formations that appeared to have developed spontaneously, Thomas’s men charged directly up the ridge, in one great uncoordinated but brilliant lunge, all the way up the mountain, dodging whatever kind of defensive fire the Confederates above could rain down upon them, and they swept Bragg off the mountain in one glorious assault.

Controversy still exists over this attack, revolving around the question of who directed it, if anyone directed it at all. No source of orders to carry forward and take the mountain has been confirmed and the consensus remains that if any such orders were given, they were given by those on the spot, in the moment, whether officers or otherwise.

More likely, no orders were given at all other than shouts between those at the forefront of the charge, flung over their shoulders to those behind them to “follow me,” passed on from man to man.

Alternately, it is possible that upon reaching positions under the brow of the mountain, among the rifle pits, the men found themselves under withering fire from above and found it easier to dodge enemy bullets by following the contours of the mountain uphill, from which it would have been difficult for Confederate gunners to get an angle of fire on them, and then continued dodging and running until they found themselves among the rebels, who must have been as surprised as the Union observers on the valley floor.

Whatever impelled them, it was these men who ultimately won the Battle of Chattanooga and in so doing, gained more than a measure of revenge for Chickamauga.

What Sherman and Hooker had been prevented from achieving on the flanks, these men took care of by direct assault.

With that, Chattanooga was presently and forever back in Union hands. As if that were not enough, while Bragg was losing Chattanooga, up in Knoxville, Longstreet was unable to knock Burnside out of a strong defensive position. With nothing to gain by staying, Longstreet left Burnside in place and continued on back into Virginia with his men, bringing an end to any further presence by the Confederacy in Tennessee, and in so doing, fulfilling a dream of Lincoln’s to free the Unionists of the eastern part of that state at last.

Chased out of Chattanooga, Bragg fled south into Georgia, ceding even more territory back to the Union. Although action would return to this area, it would only be part of a dying last burst by Confederate forces after losing Atlanta, and the fact that the Union now held the whole line across the South would put the Confederates in check at that time.

Shortly, the great Union command change that had been needed all along would finally be made and it would signal the beginning of the last phase of the war, and a new philosophy with regard to the importance of Western armies to the larger scope of the war. Still, that final phase would prove a lengthy one.

Part XI: Closing out 1863 in the East and West

Chapter One

Following the return of the armies to Virginia after Gettysburg, Lee had taken up a position across the Rapidan River and Meade set up nearby to “fix” him in position.

With this advent, Lee had once and for all lost control of the upper part of the defensive line which had held up through most of the war. He would not move north of the Rappahannock in force again.

Still, Lee attempted to push Meade away with an offensive in early October, using two corps, around Meade’s right side, causing him to retreat along the Orange and Alexandria Railroad. A cavalry skirmish in the rear of Meade’s retreating forces went against the Confederacy, at Auburn on October Thirteenth. The next day, A.P. Hill attacked two corps of Meade’s still retreating army at Bristoe Station, unaware that Meade had posted his Second Corps in ambush behind a railroad embankment. The offensive by Lee did succeed in pushing Meade back to Centreville, close to the old rallying ground where two Manassas battles had been fought, but Lee was disappointed not to be able to do more damage to Meade’s army in the process. After backing that far, Meade turned to the offensive, crossing over the Rappahannock, facing only slight resistance, and his advance caused Lee to abandon plans to wait out the winter around Culpeper and instead, he again moved south of the Rapidan, leaving Culpeper and Brandy Station to Meade.

In late November, Meade sought one big chance to crush Lee before winter and set out to drive all the way through the Wilderness, as Hooker had meant to do the year before, and if he had met with success, would have followed that by hitting the right flank of Lee’s army across the Rapidan.

After heavy fighting, Lee was forced to entrench along a creek called Mine Run, and Meade decided Lee was too strong to attack now and on December 2, declared fighting over for the winter.

One of Lee’s staff, however, wrote an interesting note on Lee’s reaction. According to the account, the great general said, “I am too old to command this army. We should never have permitted these people to get away.”

In the other theater of the war, still nominally “the West” but now moving into the southeast part of the country, after the Union secured Chattanooga, Joe Hooker pursued Bragg as far as Ringgold Gap, in the direction of Atlanta, where he was temporarily stymied. Grant, who had been bombarded with messages from Lincoln reminding him not to forget about Burnside’s plight in Knoxville, sent Sherman in the opposite direction, unaware that Burnside was doing very well on his own against Longstreet and Bushrod Johnson.

Indeed, by the time Sherman reached Knoxville, Burnside had already extricated himself and Longstreet was on his way back to Lee. Having made what was essentially a wasted sojourn, Sherman regretted having left Chattanooga, where he felt he could achieve so much more. Soon as he verified that Burnside was safe, Sherman dropped off some of his men and took the rest back to the Tennessee River city.

Already, Sherman envisioned a campaign that would both put an end to Bragg’s army as a viable threat, and result in the seizure of Atlanta. No such offensive would begin until spring, however, because Grant planned to set the Union forces in the West in winter quarters and make sure all elements were at peak preparation before starting the next year of war.

The fact that this offensive against Bragg and Atlanta had to wait out the winter was the direct result of Rosecrans’s failure to take Chattanooga initially when he had it, because all the time wasted on Chickamauga and then the Battle of Chattanooga could have been used in an advance toward Atlanta long before winter. Given the conditions farther south, it would have been perhaps unnecessary for the Union army, after taking Atlanta in 1863 rather than 1864, to go into winter quarters and it could have been moving up on Richmond from the south months earlier.

Unfortunately, Rosecrans had made his choices, and they had resulted in the winter’s delay, so Sherman must wait. Sherman would spend some of that winter hiatus working with Grant in Nashville, laying out on paper the coming year’s campaign. This planning work was the genesis of the great turning point in the strategy of the war, something created not in Washington, but between two men, one of whom had been at one time labeled a hopeless drunk, and the other, insane.

In December, while his army was still holding position in Dalton, Georgia, Bragg asked to be relieved of command; for the moment, William Hardee replaced him.

On March 3, Lincoln finally came to the decision he should have made long before. He picked Grant as the supreme commander of all Union armies in the field. Congress had been ahead of that curve, pushing for Grant to be named overall commander, and had begun the process of reviving the dormant rank of Lieutenant General, a three star position, with Grant to be the recipient.

Another issue, a strange one when his history was concerned, now began to swirl around Grant. His name started popping up as presidential candidate for 1864! The man himself had nothing to do with the phenomenon and swore off any interest in it.

It was recognized that Grant had certain peccadilloes (but who doesn’t?) which mostly numbered alleged drunkenness at times and a habit of getting too many men killed in battles. Far to the plus side, however, was the fact that along with Sherman, he was one of the two generals currently in high positions who always fought when the opportunity arose, and did so promptly, and usually as straight ahead at the enemy as possible. Better still, Grant managed both to follow the orders given to him without argument, yet at the same time, found ways to innovate within those orders to do more than most generals seemed able to do. And more than once, he had gotten around superiors, so as to do what he believed must be done, without violating orders.

Even in defeat, Grant usually plunged forward as soon as possible afterward, seldom willing to go backward, no matter how comfortable an about-face might seem, and hardly seemed to even take time to lick wounds and regroup before he was on the forward thrust again. Imagine that kind of attitude at Antietam or Gettysburg. Had Grant led in either case, the war would have long since ended, at least in the East.

These qualities would all be called out in Grant’s new job.

His promotion meant more than just a new face at the top of the leader board for Union generals. It would mean that the new way of seeing the war that Grant and Sherman had developed would finally reach the pinnacle of military planning. It would mean that finally, it was recognized that the Civil War was being won in the West, and it would mean that the two separate conflicts that had been carried on up to now would merge, at least as strategy, into one.

Before this time, even in the halls of Washington, the action in the west, in a peculiar way, was still viewed as secondary, a sidebar to the real war, in the Eastern Theater. This is peculiar given that the two armies in the East, Union and Confederate, rested at that time about where they had started in 1861, within miles of status quo, while the Western armies owned virtually the entire Deep South and were poised to take possession of the rest.

The main thing that had been achieved by the war in the East was the destruction of human lives, and the numbers were heavily in favor of the Union. Otherwise, the war had gone literally nowhere. By the rules used in physics, if an object is moved up, down, or in any number of directions, but returns to the place from which it began, it is considered to have done zero work. By that standard, the armies in the East had done zero work.

Yet the war was winding down. Logic demanded the fact that it was winding down because of what the Union army had achieved in the west. In a way, however, that was not entirely true.

The awful arithmetic was also winding the war down in the East. To have said that the two armies had achieved status quo was itself erroneous. All the fighting that had gone on, the wins for one side, the losses for the other, and vice versa, while physically resulting in the occupation of the same positions by the same sides as two years ago, had not resulted in all things being equal.

The two armies were not the same in any way as those that had begun the marathon in July of 1861.

Ironically, one might believe the men themselves were wearing out and the fighting from there on would be less spirited, more desultory, men on both sides just going through the motions until something finally happened that brought the war to an end.

The truth was quite the converse. The hardest, most hateful, determined fighting of the war was poised only now to begin. The armies that had been left standing to this point were for the most part made up of the survivors, those who, no matter how beaten up in spirit from all the fighting, were no more ready to be coddled, or to coddle their enemies, than had been George Thomas’s men who threw off any self-pity and charged up Missionary Ridge.

No, the men remaining on both sides were about to fight harder, more mercilessly, and more ferociously than anyone had seen perhaps in the history of modern war.

So true was this that the war rather than ending by some mutual consent in a political forum, would come down to almost the last Confederate soldier standing. That may sound like hyperbole but it is not. Still, that final scenario was yet a good year in the future. Much awful fighting yet stood in the way.

Grant loved killing and having his men killed no more than any other general and far less than some. He knew, however, that war meant death for soldiers and the ultimate goal of war was to win it first and count the cost afterward. He was reviled and was soon to be even more so for costing too many men in his victories. Most of the time, it could be said that it would have been impossible for him to achieve the success he had accumulated if he had held back, but in the hardest part of the war, yet to come, like Burnside, he would expend men far too drastically for gains that were not worth even one life.

And he would regret it.

If he was hard on the lives of Union soldiers, he would bleed the Confederacy dry of men at an even greater rate than ever before, in months to come. What he knew, even if he hated to face it, was that he had the numbers—the awful arithmetic—on his side: he could afford percentages of losses equal or even somewhat greater than Lee could afford, and still win the war handily. It was not his wish to win that way, but it was the resource he had and he must use it if nothing else sufficed. Thus he would truly fight, if necessary, until no Confederate was left standing, and he damned nearly did.

A point must be inserted, however, a caveat, one might say, and one that is not new to the issue of the Civil War. If somehow, Lee could find it in himself to stave off that fatal attrition of men, the presidential election of 1864 was now clearly in sight. If by November, the people of the North had finally soured on the war and someone other than Lincoln...just to pick a name...McClellan were elected, that one chance for Confederate survival still existed. That being so, could Lee finally adapt to the kind of warfare he must employ, if that hope were to be realized? Could he keep enough men standing, armed and able to fight, to last to a political resolution?

Why, with the war going as it was, would the voters of the Union in fact sour on it and vote a McClellan in? The answer reverts back to that failure to recognize that in fact the war was going well. Men were still dying, and more would be asked to die, and until the people of the North recognized that one more year surely would be the last, they truly might wonder why they should give Lincoln a mandate to continue.

Or would they decide, instead, that so much blood and treasure had been invested already that to let it all go by quitting the war, they would have thrown away all the lives lost so far, and so, they would see it out to the end?

When the November of 1864 elections neared, so nervous was Lincoln about his chances of losing that he would make plans how to close out the war in the lame duck period between losing in November and being replaced in March of 1865, rather than handing his successor a disaster not of his making, even if that successor were McClellan.

Those facts being true, then by all means, cause existed for Lee and Davis to still hope for salvation, but only if they could fight as conservatively as they had fought aggressively up to that point.

Before Grant’s ascension to the highest uniformed position in the Union, the closest anyone had come to serious coordination of effort for ultimate victory, between the Eastern and Western federal forces had been McClellan’s plan to bring Buell’s army over the Cumberland Gap and threaten Joseph Johnston from behind, in 1862. That had not been proposed, of course, as a deliberate coordination of operations, but as a way of stealing forces from one hand to help the other, in other words, to help McClellan and to hell with what resulted in the West, but the effect would have been the same.

Otherwise, moving of forces from East to West, as when Hooker transferred to Chattanooga, did not come up to the level of an actual coordination of efforts. Simply detaching men and sending them to the “other side” did not constitute a joint operation. For the most part, up to the winter of 1863, the operations in the West simply had no bearing on the East and vice versa.

Grant rued leaving the West, where he knew his commanders and had his hand well on the throat of the enemy, but he knew it was what was expected by Lincoln, and what in fact was needed. He had long ago formulated to his own satisfaction the master plan, that of connecting the two wars, but had been unable to act on it from his lower ranking positions. Now, the grand plan was his to bring about, but he would physically conduct only the eastern branch of it now.

Happily, he left behind the man who knew the plan and would carry out the western branch of it. Sherman, the “crazy” man who had begged not to be given command of even a lowly army at the outset of the war would now take over as the overall commander of the West, in Grant’s place. The two men, Grant and Sherman, fully understood each other now and were already clear on the master east-west plan Grant envisioned.

The great plan was one that had been lurking as an idea for much of the war: use the Union armies that were external of Virginia to box-in the main Confederate armies, defeat them as quickly as possible, or at least neutralize them, then finally turn that corner represented by the Appalachians, and which barrier served as the nominal boundary between East and West theaters, march through the Carolinas and hit Lee and Richmond from the south, while Grant, in control of the armies in Virginia, pressed Lee hard from the other side of Richmond; the two Union armies would convergence on Richmond and Lee in an unbreakable vice, but only when no other viable Confederate army existed. Defeating Lee would be the close-out of the war.

It was true that other armies still existed in the South, but Sherman had a plan for most of them, preparatory to engaging the last significant army, recently under Bragg and temporarily under Hardee, and now blocked off in Georgia. When the picture became clear to the Confederate leadership, desperation would demand that all other armies show themselves and carry out what would amount to suicidal attempts to save the Confederacy by throwing themselves at Grant and Sherman. If they did not, they would be of no value, lurking in dark corners of the Confederacy waiting until the victorious Union dispatched clean-up squads to flush them out.

Furthermore, Grant and Sherman would not employ all the federal armies in their grand design. Smaller forces would be left to further contain or even defeat those lesser Confederate armies. For the time being, they would be used to continue sequestering the smaller Confederate forces, until such time as the mop up was all that remained to be done, unless the Confederate armies saw the light and surrendered while they could. That was still for the future, however, as Sherman prepared his next step.

In fact, that next step, in a way, would involve those lesser Confederate armies.

No one said the final phase would be easy or happen overnight, but the plan and the need for the plan were clear. That was the strategy that brought the two wars together, East and West. Complete the fan-like sweep through the Deep South, and take out the two last significant armies, then mop up as needed. Whoever finished first would go help with the other, Grant or Sherman, Virginia or Georgia.

Off the field, Grant faced problems that seemed, at first, as daunting as fighting Lee: establishing a working relationship with Lincoln and Halleck. Grant was handed the position of general-in-chief, when Halleck was relieved supposedly at his own request, to become “chief of staff.” By then it was clear that Halleck had done as much to slow the war effort down as he had to aid it, and much of that slow-down had been perpetrated against Grant, while he was still in command in the West. Lincoln would not permit Halleck that liberty any more.

In his lesser role, Halleck’s main job now would be to facilitate Grant by virtually any means Grant might ask, and otherwise, stay out of his way. And if he had a helpful, actually useful suggestion from time to time, he might drop it in while he was at it.

With that, Grant now had the last laugh on Halleck, but he did not abuse his new power, preferring to work with Halleck to the benefit of the war.

As to the actual dynamics of taking command of the whole army, as well as the field command of the forces in Virginia, arriving in Washington to move into his new position, Grant could not yet be certain how much authority he would actually be granted by Lincoln. Specifically, he feared that Lincoln would micromanage him, and although he could deal with that, and had dealt with Halleck’s hand firmly on his neck the whole war up to now, as the man who must finish out the war, he certainly preferred more autonomy. Either way, he wanted the ground rules set.

It has been suggested that although he was the man in charge of the army, Grant in fact only conducted Lincoln’s war plan, not his own. Those who say so try to make the point that it was strictly Lincoln’s plan that sent the army, under Grant, in 1864 more directly against Lee than ever, rather than against Richmond. Yet it has been seen that Lincoln wavered back and forth throughout the war on the issue of whether to fight Lee or go after Richmond. Most of the time, even in disagreement, Lincoln had flowed with the desires of his current supreme commander. Why anyone would suggest, after having found the best man to finish the war, that Lincoln would start dictating to him was not explained.

The truth of the matter, as Grant moved into full power, is found in the record of Nicolay, describing the meeting between Grant and Lincoln on the day of his investiture as lieutenant general:

“In the informal conversation which followed, General Grant inquired what special service was expected of him; to which the President replied that the country wanted him to take Richmond; and being asked if he could do so, replied that he could if he had the troops, which he was assured would be furnished him. On the following day, Grant went to the Army of the Potomac, where Meade received him with frank courtesy, generously suggesting that he was ready to yield the command to any one Grant might prefer. Grant, however, informed Meade that he desired to make no change; and, returning to Washington, started west without a moment’s loss of time. On March 12, 1864, formal orders of the War Department placed Grant in command of all the armies of the United States, while Halleck, relieved from that duty, was retained at Washington as the President’s chief of staff.”

(Nicolay, p. 394)

This paints a picture of Lincoln’s having revisited the notion that Richmond came first and that he was expecting Grant to make that his goal. Grant, however, in his memoirs, stated as his own opinion that the target for the two great divisions of what was now a solid Union army must be the two remaining Confederate armies, those under Lee and those under Hardee, soon to be replaced by Joseph Johnston, in northern Georgia.

If this is the case, with Lincoln appearing to opt for a campaign against Richmond, and Grant for one against Lee, what, and who, was the deciding factor?

The answer can be found in a letter on April 30, in which Lincoln expressed his opinion to Grant, before the first operations after winter began:

“Not expecting to see you again before the spring campaign opens, I wish to express in this way my entire satisfaction with what you have done up to this time, so far as I understand it. The particulars of your plan I neither know nor seek to know. You are vigilant and self-reliant; and, pleased with this, I wish not to obtrude any constraints or restraints upon you. While I am very anxious that any great disaster or capture of our men in great numbers shall be avoided, I know these points are less likely to escape your attention than they would be mine. If there is anything wanting which is within my power to give, do not fail to let me know it. And now, with a brave army and a just cause, may God sustain you.”

By giving Grant no specific orders, about Richmond or Lee, or anything else, he left it to his chosen general to do what he saw fit. Having allowed the worst of his generals to have his head, as far as ultimate objective was concerned, it seemed only reasonable that Lincoln would do the same for his best.

As far as details of the grand operations of the entire Union army, Grant specified that when the advance began, five individual armies, larger and smaller, would move simultaneously, with various goals in support of the larger mission.

One of those would be the army under Meade, facing off against Lee, where Grant would command. The second would be Sherman’s army against the largest army in Georgia. The third would be under Butler, to present a diversion against Richmond until he could turn his activities into a potential actual assault. The fourth would be by Franz Siegl in the Shenandoah Valley, initially to keep outriders of Lee’s army from slipping around and menacing Washington. The fifth army under Banks would close in on Mobile, Alabama.

Now in firm control of the West, although calling the actual area of operations “the west” was a misnomer, Sherman first returned to Vicksburg, his base headquarters, to clear up some military business before setting forth on the big job to which he was assigned. That work would be called the Meridian campaign, named after a town about a hundred miles east of Vicksburg near the Alabama border.

While it was true that the only Confederate army of any consequence in the West was the one temporarily in the hands of William Hardee, soon to be handed off to Joseph Johnston, it has been noted that several smaller outfits remained to bother the federal occupation of the South.

Sherman’s concern was to clean up as much as possible of these pockets of trouble, less to achieve victories toward the overall goal of ending the war than to remove issues that would cause him to waste troops holding off these lesser armies. Certainly if the pesky Confederate outliers could be dealt with by defeat, all the better, but first, Sherman wanted to find ways to add troops to his approaching war within a war against Johnston outside of Chattanooga.

By this cleanup job, Sherman estimated that 20,000 men could be freed up to join with him on the big work ahead.

Confusion has long attended the question of how Sherman’s capture of Atlanta, and then his famous “march to the sea” developed. Sherman believed Georgia was a key domino that must fall the Union’s way if the entire southern tier of the Confederacy were to be considered back in federal hands. The whole of Georgia need not be occupied, Atlanta was enough.

Atlanta was not the capital of Georgia during the Civil War. That distinction went to the town of Milledgeville; nevertheless, Atlanta was the key city of Georgia, a prime industrial base for the Confederate war effort, as well as another railroad nexus, like Chattanooga and Corinth.

Georgia, as a whole, served a purpose not unlike the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, as a source of food production; Sherman wanted first to shut down Atlanta as a Confederate asset, then end Georgia’s overall contribution to the war effort.

Nearly as importantly, the loss of Georgia would be a hammer-blow to the morale of the Confederacy, and when Atlanta was in Union hands, it would be symbolic of the Union taking control of Georgia overall, politically if not literally, adding yet one more state to those that had been seized since Corinth, Mississippi fell.

Once Atlanta returned to Union control, enough of the entire South outside of Richmond would have been taken back that Sherman could put it in his rearview mirror, as it were, and make that great turn north and run his army at Lee from behind. Atlanta, then, was the last great loose end to tie down, Mobile not withstanding.

These factors would seem to give the impression that Atlanta was Sherman’s next target. That impression would be incorrect.

Grant saw Lee as his target, not Richmond, and he stipulated that it was Hardee’s/Johnston’s army that was Sherman’s target. Sensibly, however, the Confederate army now had no viable place to which it could retreat except Atlanta. If it reached the city before Sherman caught it, then in defeating the Confederate army, Sherman would receive Atlanta by default. If he caught the enemy first and thoroughly defeated him, nothing would save Atlanta from his own army and it would be his just the same.

All in all, only severe defeat of Sherman’s army by the Confederate forces already backing away from Chattanooga could save Atlanta, but only for awhile.

Grant’s top concern, in Sherman’s coming campaign, was to ensure that the largest remaining Confederate army outside of Virginia...did not survive to reach Virginia.

Perhaps that was not necessarily the best plan. Perhaps it would have been better to drive all the cattle into the same pen and use all the cowboys to brand them in one go, but that was not how Grant wanted it. Better, he had decided, to neutralize Johnston and make it less of a struggle when Sherman arrived afterward to finish Lee from behind, than to fight Lee and Johnston both in a larger mass.

What Grant was demanding, in effect, was a defeat of the entire Confederate army in detail, on a massive scale.

In all that, Atlanta was just a pawn in the last great game. Or a prize to be gobbled up along the way.

With all this laid out between the two top Union commanders, Sherman set to work. Initially, combining three armies that had gathered at Chattanooga to rescue Rosecrans, Sherman commanded about a hundred twenty thousand men. Famously his target now, the Army of the Tennessee, soon under Johnston, had a core of sixty thousand men, and a reserve force of another twenty thousand, split between Demopolis, Alabama and Meridian, Mississippi.

Before setting out on his campaign against Johnston, Sherman would conduct that Meridian Campaign, to mop up some of those lesser forces in order to free up the additional 20,000 men.

Part XI: 1864, the Last Full Year of the War

Chapter One

In Virginia, Meade’s orders, as field commander under Grant, were clear. In the same way that Sherman was assigned against Johnston, Meade was to go wherever Lee went and keep after him until he was run to ground and defeated. The war had come to this, as it should have long before now. In the same way that Atlanta could fall out as the prize for defeating Johnston, Richmond would do the same when Lee was beaten. If by his actions Lee made Richmond a theater of the last fighting, then the capital would be taken as part of his defeat.

Of course, when that point was reached, the war would be over anyway and Richmond would revert to being only a state capital, not a pseudo-national capital, making it of no more of interest than say Nashville, or Jackson in their respective states.

Richmond still had a purpose as far as the Union war effort would be concerned. It would serve as a magnet to somewhat anchor and restrict Lee’s movements. Lee could not simply take his army anywhere he wished, he would always orbit around Richmond as he had done most of the war. Now, more than ever, he must put his army forward as a screen to protect the city. Grant would use that in his strategy, more than had been possible for the Army of the Potomac to do before.

That was the purpose of Butler’s army, which would menace Richmond from the direction of the James River, although not, as it would turn out, particularly well. Still, as long as an army hovered near Richmond, Lee must also keep men there, which decreased the number of forces that could be used to fight Grant directly, and Lee must remain in close enough proximity to those auxiliary elements to be able to reunite with them when the situation became desperate, and this further bound him to the vicinity of Richmond.

Unlike Sherman, however, who wanted to chase Johnston to Atlanta, Grant wanted to beat Lee outright, in the open, then freely walk into Richmond without opposition. To do that, he wished to “fix” Lee in a place where he could be defeated, away from strong defenses, on as neutral ground as possible, where Grant’s advantage of superior numbers would matter. Of course this had been an objective of generals before Grant in the Virginia theater, and none had succeeded.

With Grant on one side and Butler on the other, Lee would not be comfortable a moment for the rest of the war, and one mistake would be the end of everything.

Worse still for Lee, Grant had it in his mind to eventually work Siegl’s Shenandoah force around to the west side of Richmond, taking away yet one more potential line of maneuver from Lee’s use.

No general as astute as Lee, despite errors he had made in the past, would fail to see all of this as clearly as Grant could devise it. Probably Lee’s best military quality had always been that of thinking steps ahead of his opponent. At this stage of the war, however, knowing what the enemy planned and being able to stop it with the comparative resources left to him would not be the same thing.

And with Grant, Lee had a different problem than anything he had faced out of all the preceding commanders. Grant did not always do the expected thing. Even in following the obvious pattern, trying to box Lee in by threatening Richmond from behind while pressing his army from the front, Grant might do it in an unconventional way.

If that were not enough, Lee would know that by no means would Grant fail to follow up a victory by letting Lee off the hook as had happened at Antietam and Gettysburg. The first time Grant beat him heavily, Lee would know Grant would drive in for the kill without hesitation.

As May of 1864 approached and the ground began to dry in the various venues of war, with everyone aware of their part to play in the coming drama, and the forces in position, the juggernauts that would lead to the end of the war in less than a year began to roll.

May 3, Grant set the army into motion, under Meade, with around a 122,000 men, crossing the Rapidan into the Wilderness, with the intent of flanking Lee’s right. Of course this had been tried before and Grant did not have the experience of the Wilderness to know how its tangled vegetation could bog a huge army down. Like Hooker leading to Chancellorsville, Grant believed he could get his army through the woods fast enough to avoid being hit in the process.

Grant was up against a new learning curve. Never had he attempted to actually wield, in one place, an army so gigantic. What he could do with 60,000 or even 80,000, he could not so easily do with well over a hundred twenty thousand. Indeed, it was impossible for such a large army to do anything quickly, and once again, Lee easily responded to the Union attempt to sweep through the Wilderness, and succeeded in forcing a battle where Grant would least want one—in the heart of the Wilderness itself.

“Too old” or not, this was “Bobby Lee” at his best, avoiding a flat-land battle that he could not win, instead using the natural defenses of his native Virginia to neutralize Grant’s huge advantage in numbers.

On the morning of May 5, according to a staff member, Lee was unusually upbeat, pleased that Grant, like Hooker, had let himself be drawn into the Wilderness. He opined that Grant seemed willing to give up numerical advantage by becoming entangled in the nightmarish forest.

The first shot had not yet been fired between Grant and Lee, but once it was, a continuous state of combat would exist for eleven months, something so far from the stop-and-go warfare that had marked the Virginia campaign up to now that it would be in a way an entirely different war.

Despite his glee in seeing Grant caught up in the Wilderness, Lee knew that three serious threats were hanging over his head at this time. The first, the one right in his face, was Grant himself, both the man and the army.

Second, after his jovial dinner in camp on the night Lee realized Grant was allowing himself to be caught up in the Wilderness, Lee had received dispatches from Davis informing him that Benjamin Butler had moved up the James and was menacing the train lines that converged on Petersburg, the key rail center twenty miles south of Richmond; and worse, from where he lurked, Butler also threatened Richmond itself, a move that was part of Grant’s trap to draw Lee toward the capital city.

The third bit of disquieting news involved a Union campaign that was beginning to develop up in the Shenandoah Valley, which was of course Siegl’s operation, set in motion by orders of Grant. If the Union should gain the upper hand in the Shenandoah, Lee saw as clearly as Grant the potential that Siegl could then slip down and close in on the west side of Richmond, or worse, surround the city entirely, something the Union had never come close to doing before.

From those last two concerns, Lee was beginning to see the enormity of Grant’s grand strategy.

For the moment, Lee responded to all this by sending a reply to Davis telling him he was unable to deal with those other issues—Butler and Siegl—directly because his first job had to be concentrating on Grant, the worst threat of the three and the one that stood before him.

Grant took up direct personal command of the army where it faced off with Lee across the Rapidan River. The choices before him for the next move were two: move west, to the right, and use rail lines to try and get past Lee in order to hit him away from the Wilderness, or to the left, through the Wilderness and seek the same desired result.

Grant had to think in terms of the future. If he pursued Lee successfully, the rail lines would not be sufficient to support his army and were also susceptible to cavalry raids and guerrilla attacks. If he passed the other way, keeping a ground track, he would eventually use waterways including the Chesapeake for supply lines.

Thus he directed the army toward the Wilderness.

A third choice did exist, but Grant never considered it. From the position of the army that he had inherited from Meade, he already held Lee close. He could have backed out of the area a good distance and shifted even farther east, whether to Fredericksburg or beyond, but Grant hated ceding ground for any reason even when it served a purpose. Just as Lee had said at Gettysburg, that since the enemy was there, before him, so he would fight him there, Grant established the same policy now. Lee was here, he would be fought here. He would either defeat Lee here or press him to a place where he could meet him but he would not back up now.

Sickeningly for those in the Union army who had been there before, having to fight within the confines of the Wilderness triggered sensations of déjà vu, harkening back to the nightmare of the battle with Hooker in this place in 1862. Lee was on the outside, the Union army tangled up within, and the Confederate side had reason to hope something like the same results could be achieved as they had enjoyed at Chancellorsville. And the Union men had who had been there before had reason to fear the same.

Lee would learn beyond doubt, however, that in this new era of the war, he was up against quite a different man from any he had faced, win or lose. Certainly, this was not Joe Hooker who would essentially give up and withdraw entirely soon as his nose was bloodied.

To avoid becoming disoriented in the midst of the thick woods, both sides attempted to keep their columns anchored on one or another of the many roads that crisscrossed through the Wilderness. Men in the woods might not know where they were, but as long as they had other men beside them, who in turn were linked one by one to those who were on the road and knew their position, no one was lost. In that way, some of the miseries and confusion of the Wilderness could be overcome. Some, not all.

On May 4, from lookout positions on nearby hills, Lee’s men watched Grant cross the Rapidan River by two fords and a bridge, from west to east—the Germana Ford, Culpeper Mine Bridge, and Ely’s Ford. Just west of the site where the old Chancellorsville home had stood before it burned in the previous battle, two roads containing the name “Orange” converged.

(Orange, in this case, had nothing to do with the color, nor to the fruit, it referred to a town nearby that served as one of the termini of the roads. The origin of the name itself referred back in time to King William III of England, former Prince of Orange, a region in Holland, the same man after which Williamsburg was named.)

Grant’s plan was to take the northernmost of the two Orange roads, the one called the Orange Turnpike, which passed through the Chancellorsville intersection and continued on to Fredericksburg.

The corps settled into camps around the Chancellorsville site and that evening, Grant was also jovial, relieved to have passed the Rapidan without incident. That night, a reporter apparently unaware of the true purpose of the expedition—to defeat Lee first and take Richmond afterward—asked Grant how long did he expect to take to reach the Confederate capital. Rather than rebuking the reporter, however, Grant said, “I will agree to be there in about four days.” He let that sink in before adding the joke. “That is, if General Lee becomes a party to the agreement. But if he objects, the trip will undoubtedly be prolonged.”

The next morning, General Gouverneur Warren was to carry out the mission of holding the road open, to protect both the arrival of supply trains, and Burnside’s division, still making its way down across the Germana Ford to the north. Warren was to spread his men across the Orange Turnpike so as to ward off any interference by Lee’s men from the west. Winfield Hancock would take the road southward to Todd’s Tavern at the next big intersection then swing southwesterly to Shady Grove Church, and the columns would move out at five o’clock, with the goal of ensuring roads were free while the massive lines of supplies in wagons passed through.

Clearly Grant had a master plan for clearing through the Wilderness and in this way, he expected to be out of the woods with all his men and supplies on May 6, ready to face Lee in more open terrain. The information Grant had from his own observers on mountains around the area suggested everything Lee was doing seemed geared to withdrawal and Grant believed the situation was going his way. But Lee had used that tactic before, feigning withdrawal to suck the enemy into a wrong move, even in this same place, which had of course led to Jackson’s flanking maneuver on the hidden furnace road.

The Wilderness Tavern, an empty, falling down building, the place where Stonewall Jackson’s amputated arm had been buried, was just west of the point at which that very same surprise attack had taken place during the Chancellorsville Battle. While Grant slept well the night of May 4, the men among his army who had been there at Wilderness Tavern that other time felt haunted by ghosts of those among them who had died there before, and also by the specter of Confederates who were very much alive, and who must surely be lurking somewhere nearby.

Lee was walking into a fight based on a miscalculation. His own force had been boosted to 65,000 men and he thought that Grant’s total, counting everything available to him, was no more than 75,000, which would be pretty good odds for a side that was fighting defensively. The truth, however, was that Grant’s numbers were closer to 150,000 men when reinforcements available just outside the immediate arena were considered. Grant was also “astride” the roads that he must use to carry on beyond the Wilderness, so despite being temporarily tangled up where he would rather not be, Grant seemed to have improved odds on his side at the outset.

Believing the numbers, erroneous as they were, Lee was also content with the situation as he knew it, so both commanders were satisfied that events played to their favor.

Now that he had control of his exit routes, Grant did not perceive the inevitability of a battle here, inside the nightmarish Wilderness, while on the other side of the line, a fight here was exactly what Lee desired.

Not all of Lee’s forces were in place. He had Ewell set to move up the Orange Turnpike, A.P. Hill on Orange Plank Road, but Longstreet was twenty miles out, on his way from Gordonsville.

With Longstreet’s men moving briskly to the scene, Lee planned for Ewell and Hill to be the ones to first contact Grant and keep him from proceeding, that was to say, to tangle him up right there in the Wilderness before he could get out, so that when Longstreet “got up” into place, he could bring the heavy blow. When that hammer descended, Lee expected to drive Grant clear back across the Rapidan, and take out as many of his men in so doing as he could. The result would be quite similar to what had happened to Hooker in this place in the Chancellorsville battle. Lee could not plan beyond that, it would be enough to have thrown Grant out of the area with heavy losses, although unfortunately for Lee, it would be difficult to avoid heavy losses of his own, which he could afford far less well than Grant.

The morning when it all began, May 5, Ewell successfully “contacted” Grant, by observing Warren’s forces on the road, holding their position, while making sure they were also seen by Warren. By Lee’s instructions, Ewell and Hill were not to bring on a general engagement at that place and time, they were only to freeze whatever Union force they encountered until Longstreet arrived. To carry this out, they were only authorized to trigger some kind of minor skirmish or incident, just enough to distract Warren, then they were to fall back slowly, sucking him in, hopefully into the trees and confusion of the Wilderness itself.

With one of his elements caught up that way, Grant would be hard put to abandon the engagement and so, Lee reckoned, he would have to fight then and there, and be hit unexpectedly hard when Longstreet arrived.

Riding along with Hill on the Plank Road, Lee suddenly heard the gunfire of more than “contact” going on up at the intersection.

In establishing the skirmish Lee had mandated, Ewell’s men had fired a long range volley upon Warren’s men as they entered Saunders Field. Warren called up his corps, and they spread out a mile wide along the road, then lit into Ewell. The Confederate general’s men tried to indeed “fall back slowly,” but the skirmish turned into a rout, until General John B. Gordon’s brigade counterattacked, managing to envelop Warren’s flanks, chasing the corps backward and causing massive carnage among them.

Ewell did not allow a pursuit, sticking to the orders to engage and not fall into a general engagement. He contented himself with chasing Warren back to the intersection then dug in a mile on either side of the Turnpike.

That was only one phase of the action and it had come as the result of a mistake. Meade had dispatched Warren to go after Ewell, believing Lee’s larger force was moving away and thought Warren could carry one of those “detail” conquests of a smaller section. Of course it had not worked out that way.

Hearing that A.P. Hill was coming up the Orange Plank Road, Grant authorized turning Hancock around from his position down near Todd’s Tavern to backtrack and jump on Hill. In other words, Grant took the bait and called for an engagement in place, in the Wilderness.

Sedgwick was ordered to send divisions to both fights, and thus when Hill’s men—under Lee’s direct command because Hill was ill that morning—proceeded up the Plank Road toward Brock Road, Hancock attacked.

As so often happened in war, the moment the first shots were fired, all great plans went out the window and his was a beautiful illustration of that maxim. Rapidly, the affair was turning into a debacle, for Confederates as well as Yankees.

Although Grant had not wanted a fight in the Wilderness, once he came to believe he was facing only two “details” of Lee’s and not the whole army, he was eager to do what damage he could. That was Grant’s style. It sounded very much like Lee’s style.

Hancock was having the best of Hill and only stopped beating up on him when darkness fell on the scene. Ewell was just north of Hill and according to what remained of plans, in the morning Ewell would be fixed in place so that he could not help Hill, and Hancock would hammer the latter to pieces. Given that, the battle appeared to have turned Grant’s way, but a wildcard in Lee’s hand had yet to be played. That of course was Longstreet.

For the next day’s business, Lee made an adjustment.

Initially, he had wanted Longstreet to come up by way of Todd’s Tavern, and thus on the Union left, but now, Lee needed him in the thick of things so he had Longstreet divert to the Plank Road, the more southerly of the two “Orange” roads. Hill would be moved up closer to Ewell in the almost triangular confluence of roads and Longstreet would proceed right on along the Plank Road and head on against Hancock.

Longstreet was expected at midnight, but even by dawn, he had not arrived, when Hancock opened his action against Hill. Under his onslaught, the Confederate forces were beginning to break, while northward, as planned, Warren and his support forces were successfully freezing Ewell in place, keeping him from coming to Hill’s aid.

Burnside, who had made his way during the winter to join Grant from Tennessee, was counted upon to throw ten thousand more men against Hill, but his men were lost, going around in circles in the Wilderness and thus they failed to weigh in.

As morning wore on, Longstreet arrived in person, ahead of his column, and when he perceived the dire situation facing Lee, he returned to his men and rushed them forward, feeding them right into the fight.

Until the moment Longstreet’s men arrived, the situation for Lee was indeed deteriorating, his men starting to flee in reverse, while he directed his artillery to fire over their heads to protect those still in the fight.

In the midst of the chaos, Lee perceived Confederates passing by him, heading the “right” direction—on the attack—and he demanded to know who they were. When they identified themselves as Texans, Lee knew it was Longstreet’s corps arrived at last and he raised his hat in salute, shouting, “Hurrah for Texas!”

The presence of reinforcements so aroused and excited Lee that when the Texans charged Hancock’s men, he rode right in among them. To see the great man, the one man who must not be lost, charging right into the face of death, the Texans slowed their charge and began chanting, “Lee to the rear!” Some told him they would not make the charge if he did not move back to safety. Only with difficulty could soldiers and officers convince their august commander to recede from harm’s way.

Shortly, more of Longstreet’s men, Alabamians this time, passed Lee on their way to jump into the fight against Hancock.

This timely infusion of men reversed the tide of the battle at the Wilderness—Hancock was the one who was now being rolled up, lucky to survive.

Here, something happened that was almost eerily similar to the tragedy two years before in this same place. Only perhaps a couple of miles away, Stonewall Jackson had been cut down by friendly fire, and now it was Longstreet’s turn, shot by mistake during the final stages of the day’s spectacular success. Unlike Jackson, while badly injured, Longstreet would survive, but his wounding cast a pall over the Confederate victory and yet again, removed Lee’s current top deputy from the war for months.

That night, in the Wilderness, was horrible for many survivors of the battle, on both sides, who lay wounded in the woods, unable to move, while fires that had been triggered by the massive gunfire crept up on them, burning alive many of those trapped among the trees.

No major fighting occurred on May 7, and the Union began pulling out. Although it was not clear which side had won or lost, what had not happened was the grand defeat of the Confederate army that Grant had sought. To the contrary, for the men on the Union side, the situation had the feel of defeat, something they had tasted so bitterly in just this place the year before. As they assembled to pull out again, just as they had done under Hooker, in this same place, the men felt as if nothing had changed and the war must surely be returning to the same reset position of the year before.

No doubt, they were bound to retreat back behind the Rappahannock, leaving Lee to hold his place the way he had been doing since the war began.

Believing that, fearing that, they were about to receive a shock. As this dejected army approached the cross-road that would lead them back over the river and to disgrace, they discovered what having Grant as commander truly meant.

At the key intersection, when the old army would have turned north in retreat, Grant turned them east and south, in a maneuver designed to carry the fight once again to Lee, and even closer toward Richmond. Grant was not taking them away, he was sending them on to what he hoped was a better position to hit Lee again; they could put the Wilderness behind them and look toward to the next almost immediate clash with Lee, somewhere else, and they were cheered.

In fact, he was directing them toward a crossroads called Spotsylvania Courthouse, where, unknown to anyone at this moment, the first step in the next phase of war would be made, a development that would lead to a profound change in the very condition of war itself.

Chapter Two

Tactically, nominally, Lee had been triumphant in the Wilderness battle. He could claim to have won, and the press and pundits would crown him victor, because his army had not been destroyed and Grant was the one who had withdrawn. As a result, the Confederacy would live a little longer.

That was the most and best that could be said for the results of the Wilderness for the Confederacy. Otherwise, Grant had not gone away, he was still there, nearby, threatening, waiting for the next, and better place to attack. Far worse, just to hold position and stand Grant off, Lee had lost far too many men here.

Yes, Lee still counted 54,000 men after the losses at Wilderness, and he had other forces scattered about as reserves, but how many more battles could he fight and lose eleven thousand at a time? Logic said no more than five, before he was down to reserves. That was an eye-opening reality, that Lee’s army might actually fight its way down to total depletion. Clearly, Lee’s hopes of keeping the war alive, eking out an existence until the election later that year, were evaporating at a shocking rate.

Interestingly, some astute people, historians and analysts, have since said of the situation facing Grant at that period, that he and the Union army were in trouble because failures by some of his other armies, such as Butler’s on the James River, would soon free a few thousand more men to join Lee, which Grant would have to fight directly. Concern would grow in the North over this, more of that incipient pessimism that would not go away, but even if Lee brought more men directly against Grant, there were only so many total anywhere, and never would enough exist to match Grant casualty for casualty. Yes, adding more men to the direct head on confrontation made the fight harder for Grant’s men, but nothing like impossible.

The only true concern was whether the American people would tire of the war and vote Lincoln out in 1864. If not, the Union was still primed to win the war.

The fact was, after the Wilderness, that Lee must either surrender, collapse back to Richmond and begin the final, fateful siege, or stand up and keep fighting Grant the rest of the way, losing men in great horrific bundles.

If Lee did not like Grant’s reaction—his “sidle” to the east and south instead of backing off to lick his wounds as all the other federal commanders had done after even a slight defeat—he at least understood what Grant was trying to do with his forward move after the Wilderness: cut Lee off from Richmond by way of the crossroads called Spotsylvania Courthouse.

Then so be it, that was where the next battle must happen.

By its location as a nexus of roads, Spotsylvania Courthouse was another of those key positions an army on the make would desire to control. Lee assumed Grant was trying to beat him to Richmond and thus would want Spotsylvania for that purpose.

Not so. Grant’s goal remained that of seeking a way to bring Lee out on open flat ground for a drag-out fight he could win by superiority in numbers. The desire to control Spotsylvania was not about Richmond but about getting at Lee directly, yet the fact that Spotsylvania was in fact closer to Richmond than the Wilderness made it attractive to Grant because he was squeezing Lee into smaller spaces, taking away his options, by pressing him toward Richmond. This was a way of pushing Lee into a corner even where a corner did not exist, something that Sherman was to do to Johnston in Georgia, using Atlanta as the magnet, or more realistically, as an anchor around the Confederate neck.

Lee could not avoid a fight, or he would in fact be backing into the corner. Grant was not actually interested in bottling Lee up in Richmond, he was interested in forcing the fight, but if he could not achieve it, he would accept the alternative, boxing Lee in.

If Lee did not make a stand at Spotsylvania, then Grant would bypass it and continue to edge in closer to Richmond, until Lee did stop somewhere and fight.

The region was criss-crossed with a variety of roads, making it possible to travel from location to location by more than one route, and the side, Union or Confederate, which managed to control the interior lines could reach the next position first.

In seeking control of the crossroad of Spotsylvania, to deny it to Lee, the Union army moved down the Brock Road from Todd’s Tavern to Spotsylvania, while the Confederates traveled by way of Shady Grove Church on an alternate route.

The problem for Grant was that his army was still so large it could not move rapidly enough to reach its next destination ahead of Lee, especially when Lee held interior lines. Seeing the direction Grant was directing his army, Lee dispatched Jeb Stuart’s cavalry to slip around the slow-moving Union army and take control of intersections at Spotsylvania. Lee could not afford to cede another inch of ground in the direction of the capital, so he must stand up to Grant where he could, and for his purposes, the next stop must be Spotsylvania.

But for one startling advent, wholly unpredicted and unpredictable, involving the scenario that developed at Spotsylvania, out of Lee’s initial control, it is entirely feasible that Grant would have obtained his open-country head on collision with Lee under conditions favorable to the Union at that place. While he may not have utterly defeated Lee there, Grant might have damaged his army so severely that Lee would have had little choice but to collapse into the defenses of Richmond immediately, with Grant’s army in full pursuit.

The singular development which saved Lee’s army in this battle prolonged the Civil War by months, but almost as importantly, transformed the very way the remainder war would be fought, and had an impact on the face of war into the next century.

With Longstreet wounded and out of the action for awhile, Richard Anderson now led the First Corps and he was sent along as fast as possible in Stuart’s wake, in hopes of staking a position for Lee’s army at the anticipated scene of the next battle.

The tactic of using cavalry to seize a position was not an exclusive strategy of the Confederates and Grant dispatched Phil Sheridan on the same mission toward Spotsylvania.

Stuart arrived first, then Sheridan, then Anderson, followed by Gouverneur Warren.

Warren’s V Corps had the interior lines to Spotsylvania, but it was of no advantage when the Union force could only move in fits and start. Warren’s progress was inhibited by the bedevilment visited upon it from Confederate cavalry, who threw down physical roadblocks and otherwise harassed Warren’s infantry in every way possible short of opening a general battle right on the road.

In contrast, while facing the longer distance to cover, Anderson’s men, who did not have to deal with the impediments of the kind thrown up before Warren, could not find a safe haven to stop and rest, and ended up marching through the entire night, all on the evening of May Seventh. As a result, they more than made up for the difference in distance and easily arrived at the vicinity of Spotsylvania before the most advanced of Union infantry—Warren’s division—was able.

Ahead of Anderson, Jeb Stuart set up shop, splitting his cavalry into three columns, one to seize the intersection at Spotsylvania, one to protect Anderson ahead of his arrival, and the third to harass Warren. Part of this latter crew under Fitzhugh Lee, nephew of Robert E. Lee, cut down trees ahead of Warren and threw them across the road, which contributed greatly to the nightmarish pace of the Union force. When he had satisfied themselves no more need be done on that task, Fitzhugh Lee continued ahead and set up barricades just beyond the town of Alsop, a little short of the actual crossroads of Spotsylvania Courthouse, but in a key position to waylay Warren’s men when they finally reached the area.

What transpired now was that singular event hinted toward above, which became the very first step in the transformation of the war into its new phase.

Fitzhugh Lee was under no illusions that his squad could fight off a full-scale infantry attack. Only to buy time, holding the position until Anderson’s main corps could join him, Lee’s now un-mounted cavalry began digging entrenchments, supplemented by wooden breastworks made from local fences, a rudimentary form of defensive works.

Certainly, the use of defensive works in the Civil War was hardly new. After all, Lee had once been derisively nicknamed “the king of spades,” and the military academy at West Point specialized in turning out military engineers, not field commanders, so the notion of throwing up physical barriers in defense against an infantry attack was basic to the tactics of war. Nothing, in the beginning at Spotsylvania, of this simple act of protection, was new or unheard of, but what Lee and his men put into motion here would take on a strange life of its own.

The circumstances under which these men dug in was key to the situation because Grant had anticipated forcing Lee to fight on open ground with little protection, the very antithesis of the scenario in the Wilderness. Whether thinking in terms of foiling Grant’s purpose, or simply acting in on-the-spot self defense, Fitzhugh Lee would present Grant with perhaps his worst nightmare in the entire war up to this point.

Fitzhugh Lee and his cavalry did not have to face Warrant’s incoming infantry alone because Anderson arrived first after their all night march. The Confederate combined forces of infantry and cavalry, aware that Warren would hit them soon enough, and concerned over being outnumbered, hurriedly expanded the breastworks Fitzhugh Lee’s men had begun, but with a vengeance.

Farther along, at the intersection that was Spotsylvania proper, Jeb Stuart had tried to buy time by holding the position, but Union riders coming from the direction of Fredericksburg on one of the alternative roads immediately chased him out.

In the interim, the entrenchments begun by Fitzhugh Lee’s men had already expanded into a remarkable edifice, what amounted to a semi-circular “fort.” When federal forces, led by Warren’s division arrived, by early afternoon, federal orders dispatched them forward in three attacks against the incredible defensive edifice.

Even while absorbing these attacks, Confederates inside the defensive works continued to improve and extend the structure, enclosing more and more territory to absorb incoming Confederate units within the protection of the redoubt.

Indeed, men continued pouring into the area from both armies, strung at times all the way back along the roads to the Wilderness area, and not all units had time to engage in the fighting that day. A fourth attack by Grant was fended off by newly arrived men of Ewell’s corps.

Grant was dismayed at the way this situation had turned out. Due to the rapid, brilliant, if impromptu engineering of the Confederate troops, far from finding Lee’s men standing exposed in open field, waiting to take the crushing attack of Grant’s greater numbers, he found them closed up behind an almost unassailable, though man-made, defensive position.

Already intending to move on and around Lee, to force him out again, Grant hoped to bypass the defensive works and take the town of Spotsylvania, but Ewell had foiled that by planting his men right in the way.

The next day, May 9, was mostly employed in reconnaissance by the Union side, investigating the huge defensive formation which the Confederates had constantly improved even more during the night.

Even those reconnaissance operations became hazardous to the federal troops when Southern sharpshooters, from their secure bastion, began picking off anyone who showed his head outside the Union’s own protections. (Within seconds of deriding his men for their fear of the snipers, Union General John Sedgwick was killed by one.)

The works constructed by the Confederates now formed a gigantic triangle pointed northward, with sides that curled eventually all the way around and down to the town of Spotsylvania on the east and almost to the Po river on the west. By the shape of its ground track, the center of the works acquired the name “the mule shoe.” The northernmost extension of the shoe, almost formed into a point, would come to be known as the “salient.”

Given the stupendous strength of the three mile long defensive bulwark, Grant was caught in a quandary. He could give up this assault and try to go around again, and Lee would entrench somewhere closer to Richmond, or he could just sit before the castle walls, so to speak and leave Lee free to send men against Butler and Sigel. Or he could attempt again to beat Lee here.

The next day, May 10, after some confused maneuvers caused by Burnside’s misinformation that Lee was splitting his forces, Grant called for a massed assault on the mule shoe. Led by Warren, it was a sanguinary failure, but in the midst of it, a Union colonel named Emory Upton spotted something that gave him an idea.

With twelve regiments he stormed the salient at a single point, which came to be known as the “bloody angle”, and very nearly succeeded in pushing masses of men inside the Confederate works. Although ultimately a failure, his attack suggested to Grant that the thing could be repeated not with just twelve regiments but two corps.

The larger onslaught was a ghastly success; after nightmarish hand-to-hand fighting, concentrated around the bloody angle, with men buried, dead and alive in layers, down in the mud, blood, and torn bodies of the trenches in the angle, Union cannon were brought in to blast apart the works almost point blank. Finally, the Confederates abandoned the northern segment of the mule shoe, falling back to yet another layer of trenches, across the foot of the original works, and Grant began withdrawing, shifting his forces to the east, hoping to move around Lee again.

Lee was up to the task of matching Grant’s maneuver, and the battle of Spotsylvania simply evaporated into sporadic skirmishes as the two armies began maneuvering for better advantage against each other somewhere else.

So Grant took his show on the road again, still in hopes of catching Lee away from any kind of defensive protections.

The sequence of events was captured by the report of General Ewell:

The nature of the struggle will be apparent from the fact that after the loss of Johnson’s division (before sunrise) my force barely numbered 8,000, the re-enforcements about 1,500 more. General Edward Johnson estimated the enemy’s force at this part of the field at over 40,000, and I have every reason to believe this a moderate calculation. The engagement was spoken of in Northern papers as a general attack by their army. It was met only by my corps and three brigades sent to my aid, and after lasting with unintermitted vigor from 4.30 a.m. till 4 p.m. of May 12, ceased by degrees, leaving us in possession of two-thirds of the works first taken from us and of four of the captured guns, which the enemy had been unable to haul off. These guns were withdrawn by hand to the McCool house, and General Long was directed to send after them at night. Major Page, whom he instructed to get them, left the duty to an ordnance sergeant, who failed to find them, and they were again allowed to fall into the enemy’s hands.
As it was unadvisable to continue efforts to retake the Salient with the force at my command, a new line was laid out during the day by General Lee’s chief engineer some 800 yards in rear of the first and constructed at night. After midnight my forces were quietly withdrawn to it and artillery placed in position; but his efforts and losses on the 12th seemed to have exhausted the enemy, and all was quiet till May 18, when a strong force advanced past the McCool house toward our new line. When well within range General Long opened upon them with thirty pieces of artillery, which, with the fire of our skirmishers, broke and drove them back with severe loss. We afterward learned that they were two fresh divisions, nearly 10,000 strong, just come up from the rear.

At Spotsylvania, despite the failure of the Union forces to completely defeat Lee, they captured thousands of men and came close to cutting the Confederate army in half.

While tactically, the battle must be reckoned a draw, the big winner was clearly the Union on the basis of having further whittled down the manpower of the Confederacy.
On the other hand, the fantastic development of defensive works by the Confederacy suggested that if even better developed over the rest of the war, such tactics might save them yet for awhile, both by staving off ultimate defeat and preserving more men who would have otherwise died in a straight-on fight of the kind Grant sought.

What had been undertaken as an emergency expedient would now become a standard element in the Confederate battle plan for most of the remainder of the war. No one could foresee it, but trench warfare had been invented there at Spotsylvania, though it had already been tinkered with to a lesser extent elsewhere, particularly at Vicksburg. Trench warfare would certainly not come and go with the Civil War but would continue on into the first major global war, to take place in the second decade of the new century.

Far advanced was the art of war in 1864 compared to what it had been in July of 1861, when men still tried to carry out the ritual of double lines plugging away at each other from only a few dozen yards apart.

Trench warfare was an extension of Longstreet’s brand of defensive fighting, carried, one could say, to an extreme. Now, interior lines stretched not just across miles of countryside, they could be employed from one side of the same defensive work to the other, and a future battle, only days away, would demonstrate how a much smaller army could multiply its effective size by being able to split a larger force into pieces and holding them off by transferring men, even one at a time, back and forth from one protective wall to the other.

To defeat an enemy deeply entrenched, the attacking army must be willing to surrender virtually unbearable numbers of men. Just one time, Grant would attempt exactly that offensive gambit, to his eternal regret.

This series of battles that began with the Wilderness in 1864 came to be called, collectively, the Overland Campaign. Unlike any period in the Civil War before it, the fighting in this campaign was virtually non-stop, the only break coming when armies transferred by hard marching from one site of combat to the next.

Along with the new kind of war, a new kind of army existed on both sides. It was hardly possible for the kinds of soldiers that filled out the bulk of both armies now to contrast more with those who had fought at First Bull Run. Then, Lincoln had pressed McDowell forward by pointing out, “you are all green alike.”

The men who remained, who had served in both armies from at least Gettysburg to Spotsylvania were the veterans of all veterans, hardened almost to the point of losing their sense of civilization.

As a result, the combat from that point on was the most hate-filled, intense fighting of the war, conducted by men who had come to win no matter how long it took. And Grant was the general to lead them, on the Union side. Of course Lee was of no different mindset.

It was no wonder, on one hand, that the fighting was the most ferocious of the war, and yet perhaps it was a wonder after all. Perhaps men who had been through so much would be weakened in resolve, on both sides of the line now, eager to end the fighting even if it meant surrender, but they were not fighting as if they had come to that pass.

It would seem callous to now just dismiss Spotsylvania and move on without some comments about what had taken place there, not specifically that it was a battle, but in a way, what it meant, and how it came about, and to what it ought to have led, and thus the psychology that had been demonstrated, as part of “hard war.”

First, it is remarkable in a gut-churning way, to think of how casually such an awful bloodbath began. It was just another clash, on paper, in a new place, two armies rushing to seize fairly unremarkable ground, and one side dug in just for survival, waiting for the other to arrive and attack. So typical, so simple. But then, while waiting, the entrenched force created one of the most formidable defensive works in history up to that time, a veritable fortress erected by men who simply would not face the end of the war.

If soldiers among the Confederates, seeing that Grant would not relent the way his predecessors had done, had decided to give up on the war and write it off as a bad investment, and had gone home, to start dealing with life after the war, no one should have been surprised at this point. For the most part, however, the Confederate fighters absolutely did not.

Anyone who could study Spotsylvania and even hint that the Southern soldier was only playing out the skein would seem to have lost their mind. The men in the gray and butternut uniforms at Spotsylvania must have been more dedicated than any on either side at any other point in the war, to submit themselves to this horrific fight that came to a mere draw, rather than let the war wind to a close, so they could go home.

No one would fight that fiercely, on either side, and not be committed to their respective causes to the depths of their being. Indeed, it is remarkable that after three years, men were fighting harder now than at any time before, in any part of the war.

This was certainly true on both sides, however.

One could argue that the Confederate men should have let the war go. Every Confederate soldier’s life was now more critical for the future of his section of the country than it was for the war. Each man who did not go home now and start trying to rebuild the shattered infrastructure of the South could be said to be throwing himself away, or at least stood at risk to do so.

But if the soldiers intended to fight to the bloody end as long as their commander would, perhaps the commander himself should have been put under the spotlight. That does not mean Jefferson Davis, who would have little choice if the field command decided to end the slaughter now. That means Robert E. Lee.

Indeed, it is astounding, and almost sickening, that Lee was still willing to expend thousands of lives to defend a principle, in fact a principle he had not believed in originally, when he must surely have seen that at this rate, there was little reasonable hope left of winning what was no longer a war of prolongation, trying to reach the election a few months away.

In fact, Lee would at a critical time in the following year admit he had not had true hopes of winning the war, yet he kept throwing away lives on something appearing more and more hopeless.

Think back to why Lee had chosen to fight for the Confederacy and not the Union. He had not believed in secession, and although he owned slaves and was not an especially benevolent owner at that, he had not entered this war to defend slavery. He had done so to keep Yankee invaders out of Virginia. Just Virginia, just his state, just his... “country” as he called it.

Here in the fourth year of the war, he had truly done his best, but in that mission alone, he had failed, for here, again, was a Union army within bare walking distance of Richmond. On a principle, not even a cause, such as independence or the saving of slavery, Lee was still willing to expend every life that had been placed in his care, for a mission which, by his own standards, was already a failure. He was truly only fighting not to lose something that was already lost.

He was using up his human resources at a greater rate than ever, and even when he won a minor victory, or won by a narrow margin, he was still forced by Grant to back up closer and closer to Richmond. In that, even in victory at a battle, he was clearly losing the war.

It must be wondered, fruitlessly of course, since all the principals are long dead, whether it ever occurred to the mind of anyone who had the power to act upon it, that at this point it might be better, more humanitarian, more, well, decent for the Confederacy to give up the dream of independence, which was by now clearly left with little hope, and start rebuilding the South, not in the sense of Reconstruction, but in the sense of putting lives and families and farms back together instead of throwing more and more and more of them away.

There seems a valid argument that Lee ought to have let it end now, but it is also obvious that the sensitivities, the call of Manhood, of Chivalry, and Honor inherent in the very soul of the Southern Man just as staunchly insured that the Confederacy would fight to the last soldier before willingly calling off the great experiment one minute sooner than it was forced to do. Therefore, a principle, however failed, was deemed to be worth thousands more lives and thus the war must go. And on it did.

Even as Lee approached surrender the next year, it must be noted that many in the army and in government not only advocated fighting on in mass, they called for the people and the military remaining to the Confederacy to move into the mountains in western Virginia and carry on a guerrilla war as far into the future as could be imagined, to harass and threaten the American people and the “occupiers” of the South, never meaning to let the war go.

When that is factored in, it is in fact more easily comprehensible that even after Spotsylvania, there was no talk of quitting the war out of decency. Plain and simply, the whole affair had passed irretrievably beyond that hope. It would be carried on until the Confederacy simply could not support another minute of war, and not before.

The worst thing to be said about Spotsylvania is that it was not even the low point of the fighting that would be faced in Grant’s Overland Campaign.

Chapter Three

After disengaging from his position at Spotsylvania, Grant continued to move south and east, making for the North Anna River near Hanover Junction, about forty miles from Spotsylvania.

Recognizing the need for reinforcements, Lee negotiated with Davis for additional men; Davis reluctantly robbed Beauregard and Breckenridge of 8,500 men, from their defensive positions against Butler on the James River between Richmond and Petersburg. Lee deployed the additional men to Hanover Junction, where he hoped to tie Grant up in a battle Lee thought he could win.

Again, despite the fact that Grant was squeezing Lee into a corner much the way Sherman would squeeze his adversary in Georgia, the Northern people again fell into a mass feeling of depression over the way the war appeared to be unfolding. Only total victory, now, seemed sufficient to stem such feelings, and certainly, the numbers of dead piling up did nothing to improve the attitude.

Hanover is west southwest of Spotsylvania and almost due north of Richmond. While Grant marched his men along the Richmond, Fredericksburg, and Potomac Railroad, Ewell and Anderson had access to interior lines, made up of the Telegraph Road, and with their smaller forces, they arrived ahead of Grant at the junction of interest on the Twenty-Second of May.

A.P. Hill worked his way down as a rearguard further west by the next day. Around noon, the Union began to show up. Warren had crossed over in such a way as to reach Hanover Junction by the same Telegraph Road near the end of his march into the next battle site.

At the outset of the new round of fighting, the big guns exchanged “greetings” and then long range rifle fire broke out.

Warren moved to the west and forced a crossing of the North Anna River at Jericho Mills. Lee personally reconnoitered the enemy move, dismissing it as a feint and ignoring it, but in a rare case, Lee was incorrect, because Warren was indeed coming on via that route in force.

Warren set up in woods across the river and Hill rushed to face him. At first successful in repelling Warren, the men sent by Hill fell into confusion and ended up losing as many as they killed and gaining nothing in the process. Hill’s failure left Warren established in his chosen position but Lee was not convinced one way or another of whether Grant meant to fight here or was setting up another move closer yet to Richmond.

When a heavy rain erupted and subdued the fighting between Hill and Warren, Hancock did not let the weather hamper him. Where the river dipped south and then north again, at the Chesterfield Bridge, Hancock attacked through the rain and seized the position.

Lee remained perplexed over Grant’s plan at this juncture. Appearances, based on the moves Lee had noticed so far, suggested that Grant intended attacks on the east and west of his position, yet both actions could be covers for another “sidle” around Lee toward Richmond, or in a search of a better place to fight.

If, however, Grant meant to stay and fight, and meant to attack on both wings, Lee, who was beginning to suffer, as several other of his corps commanders had recently, from dysentery, would lay a trap for him, based on what he had discerned from the topology of the ground south of the river. Due to his delicate condition, however, Lee would not be able to participate fully in the battle shaping up.

Despite the positive notion of continuing to move forward even after losing or drawing in battles, the Union men had at first become discouraged when they would fight, then break off engagements and move again, wondering why they never were allowed to finish Lee off. Little by little, however, it began to occur to them that while they were pulling out of battles, they were also actually moving forward, driving, or more correctly, dragging Lee farther and farther south and ever closer to Richmond, and that realization began to cheer them up. Sooner or later if Lee kept giving up ground, as well as men, he would run out of one or the other, or both. Only then would the final, great battle for everything eventually have to be fought. At last, the superior numbers of the Union would finally matter.

Grant believed he had found the place now, and here, he meant to encircle Lee, coming around behind him, seeking to force the all-out battle. After digging in for the night, Warren was to continue south the next day, and Hancock was to cross the North Anna and do the same on the other side. Burnside was to come up and hold the middle in place while another force followed Warren in to seal the west side.

Lee had managed to gain control of a key crossing of the North Anna River, the Oxford Ford. That meant that Grant’s men must either all cross farther to the east or west, or split his forces. The Little River flowed not far south of this position, near enough that Lee could establish a defensive line between that and the North Anna river. A second line extended a bit south of east, forming a V shape with a flattened point, along a southwestward curve of the North Anna about three quarters of a mile in length. Inside this huge V, his army set up, and Grant could attack one side or the other in full force or split and attack in detail. This was another instance when Lee could use interior lines inside a defensive position to bolster one side or the other.

Grant initially expected Lee to attack one of his wings from within the defenses, but he was not aware of the plague of dysentery that had swept through the Confederate command structure. Some have speculated that Lee was further weakened by heart issues, but that is unsubstantiated, although it was heart disease that eventually led to his death.

The result of the indisposition of Lee’s command was that no attack of any kind was attempted from out of his defensive position. The Confederates were content to fend off federal attempts to defeat them in place.

Burnside was expected to attack the blunt-nose point of the defensive V but ran into enough of a threat from Confederate defenders that Grant called him off. Leaving a small holding force, Burnside’s men were dispersed to the left and right wings of the Union army’s deployment.

The right leg of the V stretched all the way to Hanover Junction, creating a configuration that stymied Grant’s intentions of a major battle here.

It will be recalled that Longstreet was unavailable to Lee during this time, still recuperating from the friendly fire that had felled him at the Wilderness. Without a Longstreet or a Jackson to run the actual field operations, this was also an instance in which Lee lacked confidence in his remaining corps commanders to conduct assaults on Grant’s separated wings, while he was flat on his back.

With Grant unable to gain a foothold and Lee unwilling to risk an attack under his depleted command corps, the situation at North Anna evaporated into thin air. After some attempted diversions and no major fighting, North Anna as an engagement simply “played out” and again, Grant moved around Lee, heading as straight south as possible.

The ferocity of the battle to come, in the annals of warfare, would make up for the lack of one at South Anna River.

The North and South Anna rivers, joined between the two by the Little River, merged to become the Pamunkey River, flowing southeasterly. The Pamunkey continued on until it emptied into the York River at West Point.

Grant sent his army down parallel to the rivers as far as Hanover Town, distinct from Hanover Junction. He moved in two columns, crossing the Pamunkey nearby, using pontoon bridges, on May Twenty-Eighth. A cavalry fight broke out at Haw’s Shop, but it did not deter Grant’s movement. His army continued on to Totopotomoy Creek, now only ten miles from Richmond.

Grant required three days to reach that point in force, but using interior lines, Lee was there in one day, and had artillery in place waiting when Grant came to call. In the process, Lee had sent cavalry under Fitzhugh Lee and Wade Hampton to investigate Grant’s movements; Grant had in turn dispatched Sheridan ahead, and at Haw’s Shop the cavalry forces collided.

(It must be noted that on May 11, during the lead-in to Spotsylvania, Jeb Stuart’s cavalry had engaged in a sharp fight with Sheridan’s, under Custer, at a place called Yellow Tavern, and there, Stuart had been killed, so Lee no longer had Jeb to rely upon.)

Again, Lee could not be sure of Grant’s intentions at this juncture. The looming question now was whether Grant would cross Totopotomoy Creek first or stay north and parallel it when he reached it.

In the time between the North Anna non-event and now, while Lee had received 10,000 more reinforcements, Grant had 40,000 picked up more, an ominous ratio that was not lost on Lee.

Even more discouraging, the new men who had joined Lee had been taken out of Beauregard’s containment force that held Butler at bay, down much closer to Richmond and Petersburg. Davis visited Lee at his base on the Totopotomoy and warned him that if Beauregard’s line were weakened any further, Butler would end up with either Richmond or Petersburg in his pocket.

Lee could somewhat divine Grant’s plan. He was leapfrogging his supply lines, heading first for the Chickahominy River, after which he would no doubt move on to the James. Unlike McClellan, however, Grant would almost certainly cross or move up the James toward Richmond rather than bailing out and going back to Washington. It is heartbreaking to imagine the possibilities if Grant had suddenly taken over McClellan’s army in this area during the Seven Days battles.

Aware of his jeopardy now, Lee appealed, he all but begged, for more help from Beauregard and finally convinced Davis to order Beauregard to send him more reinforcements, invoking a word that few would ever have expected to hear from Robert E. Lee: “disaster.”

Only such panicked language from the imperturbable Bobby Lee would have convinced Davis that the situation was indeed that dire. Beauregard reluctantly yielded up four brigades and sent them on their way.

Grant saw the time had come to move in, punch Lee hard then go around and take Richmond, using Cold Harbor as his base. No more now than ever before did this indicate a change on Grant’s part, toward making Richmond a target, except to the extent that doing so would make Lee’s army virtually homeless. Depriving Lee of a base certainly made Richmond fair game, but only as far as supporting the ultimate defeat of the Army of Northern Virginia.

Wherever Lee put himself within reach next, that was where Grant would carry out this one final all-out offensive. That place would be the vicinity of Cold Harbor, north of the Chickahominy River.

Again, Lee sent the cavalry ahead to gain position, under Fitzhugh Lee. To counter, Grant dispatched Sheridan.

Cold Harbor was no more than a tavern at a crossroads, “cold harbor” meaning that travelers could rest there but not obtain hot meals. The two competing cavalry units collided at that location; Fitz Lee’s men dismounted as they had done at Spotsylvania and Sheridan’s did the same.

Sheridan expected Baldy Smith to arrive from White House, behind him, in support but because of various administrative errors, the arrangement failed. The only infantry reinforcements who showed up were Confederate— those men Lee had managed to wheedle out of Beauregard, under the command of a Robert Hoke.

With the arrival of Hoke’s men, Fitzhugh Lee’s cavalry began falling back, anticipating that the infantry would take over the fighting. Believing the cavalry already had the situation in hand, Hoke’s infantry also fell back, leaving a vacuum into which Sheridan hastened to jump, until he realized he faced more enemy than he was equipped to handle. Deciding he could not hold Cold Harbor alone, Sheridan withdrew his cavalry, but only until Meade learned of the situation and overrode Sheridan’s decision, sending him right back into the fray.

Because the reports reaching him indicated that the first elements of his own infantry had arrived at Cold Harbor ahead of Grant’s, Lee made the determination that if he could mass his army first, he could take out the incoming Union forces unit by unit, once again seeking that always coveted victory in detail.

To place the coming battle in perspective, as far as location and layout is concerned, one can harken back to the battle in the Seven Days series, at Boatswain’s Creek, also called Gaines Mill, which occurred adjacent to the Chickahominy River, a little south of Cold Harbor. Ultimately, now, Lee’s defensive line stretched all the way from near Totopotomoy Creek north of the Chickahominy River, down to the latter river, passing between Cold Harbor and Gaines Mill. That line was an astounding seven or eight miles long. The Union set up not quite as widely dispersed, from north of the Bethesda Church down nearly to the River.

The southern end of the Confederate line was based near the Grapevine Bridge. With reinforcements, Lee had about 60,000 and Grant still had numbers in the area of 110,000.

The terrain along this line ran the gamut from flat to hilly, to wooded, to hard ground, to bog, and while Grant’s men filed in for the fight, Lee’s men used their skills to again create fantastic edifices of defense, making use of every variant in the landscape. This was everything that Grant wished to avoid, but he still held to the decision to conduct one last straight-on fight and this was where it would take place, before he sent his army in a leap across the James River, a bid to lay his hands on Richmond in order to deprive Lee of it.

To Union eyes, what the Confederates contrived in the way of defensive works did not look like much. This did not appear to be the veritable bastion that had risen in the fields at Spotsylvania. This edifice seemed beatable, and that was the beauty of it. Believing they could do much better against this line than they had against the Mule Shoe, the Union side would be lured into disaster.

The genius of the Confederate works at Cold Harbor, whether designed or created by chance, was the layout which appeared, on the whole, to be a long straight line, but which was in fact composed of zigzag sections, which created complex fields of fire that concentrated the musket balls into what would in effect become clouds of hot flying lead in the spaces in front of the structure. One could think in terms of the “hornet’s nest” of Shiloh multiplied by a factor of ten, or worse, at the height of the assault.

Grant intended to attack at dawn, on June Second. Hancock was late in arriving and his men were played out, so the attack would wait. This was one of the tragedies of the affair to come, because had the attack occurred on schedule, the Confederates would not have been ready for it. Instead, Grant set the assault for five in the afternoon, later put off almost twelve hours, to until four thirty the next morning.

Grant’s goal was to open some kind of rupture in the Confederate line, a hole similar to what had opened for Longstreet at Chickamauga, through which the main force of the Union army could pour and suddenly appear behind the Confederates.

Meade had ordered his sub-commanders to reconnoiter the enemy line such as they could. He then left it to them to make plans of attack and the best any of them came up with was just to “pitch in.” If ever Grant and his key people exhibited complacency, at least since Shiloh, it was now.

The ground before the Confederate defenses was fractured, uneven, which meant that unlike the open territory in front of Marye’s Height at Fredericksburg, and Cemetery Hill in Gettysburg, opportunity for cover by men trying to get at the defenses existed. Yet no one on the Union side made any attempt to map it out, to find lanes by which the men could approach or take shelter as they attacked, and no one studied the enemy positions in order to figure out where cross-fires would occur and where they could not.

Grant saw Cold Harbor as the last chance to defeat Lee directly and if ever Grant gave in to a sense of desperation, of having to fight and win a particular battle, it seems he did so here. It was now abundantly clear that Lee would not ever come out of his defensive works again, anywhere, until he was starved out.

To finish Lee off now, Grant seemed to have determined to carry out one grand replication of Pickett’s Charge, and if it failed, only then would he accept the fact that the war would come down to a siege against Richmond.

The men who must make this last charge saw it as their own end, but not in the way Grant did. So certain were they that this was a suicide mission that they began sewing into their uniforms papers identifying themselves, with information on whom to contact when their bodies were found, an early predecessor of the notion of dog tags that would in time become common for soldiers.

At least one man wrote his own obituary in his diary before the fight, tersely commenting that he was killed at Cold Harbor. The day’s fight made his entry correct.

The charge, the whole event, carried out by 60,000 men, was less than ten minutes in duration and some on the Confederate side were shocked at the abrupt way it was suddenly over. At the focal point for the massed fire conducted by the Confederate soldiers, some likened the effect to that of a fireball or a pressure wave that concentrated the spray of bullets in such a way that it seemed to explode, akin to a firestorm, out in that killing ground through which the Union men were expected to advance. When the incoming body of troops ran into this blast, they reacted as if hitting a physical wall, cut down with such devastation that the entire attack withered and died on its own, with no one willing to advance into what they could see happening just ahead. Apparently no single Union officer ordered the attack to halt, any more than someone had ordered the men at Orchard Knob at Chattanooga to go up the ridge. Witnessing the destruction on a massive scale before their eyes, the men trailing the lead attackers knew they could not advance into that blast furnace of gunfire.

Officers apparently did attempt to order their men to go on, but the attempt met with the futility of trying to order a non-swimmer to proceed against a tidal wave.

Those among the Union soldiers who survived, who had found places to protect themselves, did fight back. They fired into the defensive works, but they did not get on their feet and charge after that horrendous ten minute blast from the Confederates.

Grant was to confide later that he regretted having called for this attack, because it did not gain anything nearly worth the “heavy loss we sustained.”

While Cold Harbor was unquestionably a huge victory for Lee, yet as devastating as it seemed to the Union side at the time, it would be Lee’s last victory. Nor did it gain him any ground, or even slow down the continual advance of the whole Union Army. It merely prolonged his own army’s ultimate defeat. It also prolonged its suffering, for months.

Great criticism fell upon Grant now for what was considered butchery at Cold Harbor. Part of the outrage revolved around the clear sloppiness with which the attack was researched and prepared. The emotional and spiritual condition of this Union army had hit nadir at Cold Harbor.

A scenario that played out in the aftermath only added to the sense of emotional collapse that followed the last shots. It begin with the feeling among many that Grant ought to have appealed for a cease-fire to rescue the maimed victims who lay in the no-man’s land between the lines. Thousands were spread out there, suffering from thirst, pain, and their wounds, but no one could reach them without being gunned down.

At last, Grant petitioned Lee for an agreement that both sides should be allowed to take care of their casualties. In response, it was Lee who now displayed his own worst side. He knew very well that the only men “out there,” who needed rescuing, were Union men, since his own had not been insane enough to leave their defenses. Thus he had no need of a cease-fire, but in offering to grant one, he turned the issue into a matter of honor. He insisted that if “either side” wished to go take care of their men, they should do so under a flag of truce. Knowing he had no need to do so, he was putting Grant in the position of having to call for mercy, a clear sign of submission, a trap into which at first Grant refused to fall.

But while this unnecessary game of power was being played, the wounded continued to lie in agony, crying out for help and receiving nothing.

At last, Grant finally gave in and asked for a two hour cease fire, which was brought about on the Seventh of June. By then, only two men out of the hundreds who had lain in the field were still alive.

That sordid episode did not reflect well on either general, each of whom sacrificed wounded men for points of honor, which accomplished nothing whatsoever toward ending the war.

At least, however, the bashing of armies head-to-head was over for awhile, as the war moved into the next phase, a combination of trench warfare and siege.

Chapter Four

After the failure at Cold Harbor, Grant faced the fact that he would never be able to draw Lee out of his defenses for a straight-up fight. The use of elaborate defenses such as those now employed by the Confederacy had multiplied the size differential an attacking army now required to defeat such an entrenched force. Although Grant still could conceivably have overwhelmed Lee with numbers, the cost was becoming prohibitive and could lead to the election of a president who would not sustain the war.

Grant disliked the idea of a siege to end the war, but he had won by siege in the past, at Vicksburg. He now seemed left with that choice, unless he could bypass Lee and actually take Richmond first. And he would give that a shot, with siege as the consolation if he failed.

Putting Richmond under siege would be quite a different operation from what Grant had been able to carry out at Vicksburg, however. A city with land on all sides must be totally surrounded by the attacking force, whereas a city like Vicksburg, sealed off on one side by water, only need be enclosed by besieging forces on the remaining sides.

While the James River formed a boundary at Richmond, it was not wide enough to prevent supplies entering, and unlike Chattanooga, no high ground existed from which to seal off all traffic by use of artillery instead of massed forces. To put up a siege, Grant would have to at least cut off all outside lines of supply and even with his huge army, that would not be easy, nor would it be done in a short time.

Once Lee committed to collapsing inside of Richmond, he could not leave again as long as the Confederate government operated there. If he took refuge inside Richmond’s defenses, Lee would have no other mission than to protect the city. That had always been the ultimate purpose of the army, to keep the Confederacy in business and if the government must flee, there was no more effective Confederacy. That entity existed only where its army had control. Yet until the army was defeated, war must go on. In effect, once Richmond was evacuated, the Confederacy would exist only where the army fought.

For the first time, the goals of seizing Richmond and defeating the Army of Northern Virginia would converge for the Union army.

The need to bottle Lee up in Richmond and cut off his army from all outside support, and starving them out, would magnify the importance of a second city nearby. Lying about twenty miles south, on the Appomattox River, a tributary of the James, was Petersburg. This town was another of those railroad junctions, with five lines coming to a head there. Petersburg was, in fact, essentially the transportation hub for Richmond. In addition to the railroads, key turnpikes and lesser roads converged on Petersburg, then extended on in fewer numbers to Richmond.

The quickest way to cut Lee off from the outside world would be to extend whatever cordon Grant could set up around both Richmond and Petersburg, a larger task still, but one worth the effort.

No such thing as a serious Confederate Navy existed now, and what there was had never been much. The James River was not available to Lee as a source of outside supplies or contact, because the Union controlled its outlet on the Chesapeake Bay. In the opposite direction, the river flowed into the mountains in the west, a dead end. Anything that could be moved downstream would be more easily transported on rail lines.

It was in fact rail lines that offered Lee his greatest hope. Grant knew this and his efforts would be especially directed toward “breaking” those lines by seizing key points. Success in that endeavor would come in time, but these factors had to be considered even now, while he was just disengaging from the nightmare at Cold Harbor and preparing his future moves.

Benjamin Butler had been dispatched up the James River to initiate the process of closing in around Lee and Richmond from behind, but he had permitted himself to become bottled up in a loop of the James River at the site of an old colony holding called Bermuda Hundred, and was now neutralized by Beauregard. If Butler could have seized Richmond out from under Lee, he would have accomplished what McClellan had the chance to carry out from Malvern Hill during his Seven Days Campaign.

By turning either to his left or right, had Butler not let himself be hog-tied, he could have chosen to fight his way in to invest either Richmond or Petersburg.

In the vicinity east of the location where Butler was hung up, the James River spread out into what was essentially an estuary. Grant intended to cross the river upstream from there, before Lee was aware of it, or at least before Lee could put up any resistance to the operation.

Making use of cavalry action to draw Lee’s eyes away, Grant began that crossing, using boats as well as pontoon bridges.

While it was Butler who had been caught in a trap at Bermuda Hundred, it was Beauregard who rode the tiger. If he let up or lost enough men, or vacated the position, Butler would pop out and take one of the two cities, so Beauregard was as trapped in a way as Butler. The situation was not unlike Bragg’s, when Rosecrans was locked up in Chattanooga. By all means, it was obvious that if Grant could lend Butler any aid, despite his current predicament, his position could turn advantageous very quickly.

With the hopes of drawing Lee’s cavalry eyes and ears away from his impending crossing of the James, Grant sent his own cavalry into the Shenandoah Valley, an action Lee simply could not ignore. With this in motion, on June 12, Grant began the crossing.

When McClellan had approached dangerously close to Richmond in 1862, the panicked Confederacy had set a Captain Charles Dimmock to building powerful defensive works that were designed to somewhat protect Petersburg from attack. Dimmock was an ex-Union officer who had been in command of the federal armory in Richmond when Captain Imboden prepared the attack on Harpers Ferry with the Virginia militia. Dimmock had thrown open the doors of the armory, turning everything within over to the Virginia militia, and joined the Virginia militia, himself; he lent his expertise as a combat engineer to create strong these defensive works around Richmond, a network which came to be called the Dimmock Line. Grant was moving up to the point of encountering the Dimmock Line.

The man Grant now sent forward with forces to take Petersburg was William “Baldy” Smith, whom he had borrowed from Butler for the ill-fated Cold Harbor operation. Smith was the same general who had floated down the Tennessee River, chased off the pickets at Brown’s Ferry, and employed pontoons there and on the other side of Moccasin Point during the Chattanooga campaign the year before, in the program to relieve the siege of Rosecrans’s army. He had also been the man who was appalled by McClellan’s negotiations with Fernando Wood over the presidential nomination of 1864.

Now, when Smith moved up and encountered the Dimmock Line, he stopped. After what he had lived through at Cold Harbor, Smith was somewhat adversely affected by the experience of trench warfare and this had the looks and feel of another potentially disastrous battle similar to Cold Harbor. What he discovered upon investigation, however, was that this segment of the Dimmock Line was barely manned. Lee just didn’t have the people to spare to cover that defensive point just now.

With his unsettled state of mind smoothed by this discovery, Smith dispatched an available “colored” unit which quickly overran the defenders and were soon well along toward taking over Petersburg. All they needed was for Smith to throw in a couple more divisions and they would have been on their way.

This was another major turning point in the war. Had those black soldiers been supported as they required, Petersburg would have been lost to Lee at that very time. Lee would have been denied his railroad communications with the outside world, and in addition, he would have to had hole up within Richmond itself, and with Petersburg in Grant’s hands, a major start would have been made in the job of completely ringing Richmond with Union forces: employing Petersburg as a shield, Grant could have quickly moved more and more troops around the western side of Richmond, while forcing Lee to send his own men out to contest them. Areas Grant would in fact spend future months trying to cover would have already been in his hands had Petersburg fallen that quickly.

Better yet, from Petersburg as a base, he could have moved directly against Richmond, at any angle he chose so as to keep Lee from escaping. End of war.

Truly, this capture of the Dimmock Line by the colored troops was potentially a great moment in the war.

Unfortunately, Baldy Smith did not use the chance. Fearing that Lee was already dispatching reinforcements to the Dimmock Line, troops that could theoretically wipe out his own, Smith told the commander of the black troops, Brigadier General Edward Hincks, to just hold the defensive works but not advance, which was to say, not to advance on into Petersburg. Instead, Smith wanted Hincks’s men to prepare themselves to withstand the shock of Lee’s incoming reinforcements.

That night, June 15, the two divisions Hincks had asked for arrived, led by Winfield Scott Hancock. Unfortunately, and almost inconceivably, rather than being used to support and back up Hincks’s outfit, Hancock’s divisions were sent to relieve them. So instead of a larger force moving out and taking Petersburg, the Union army continued to hold place on defensive works outside the town, and therefore accomplished nothing.

There is some suggestion that Smith was not confident in black troops to do the job, never mind that Hincks’s unit had an esteemed history of strong operations in the war up to that time. If the fact of Smith’s reluctance to trust the black troops were true, it would not be the last time over the coming year that racial prejudice would cause the loss of a potential major breakthrough in shortening the war.

Hincks insisted he could march his men right into Petersburg. Hancock, who technically outranked Smith agreed with Hincks, but because he was newly arrived on the scene and not familiar with the whole situation, he declined to override Smith’s existing orders.

If one wanted to make a case in Baldy Smith’s behalf, it could be agreed that some small rationale for holding back and maintaining position on the defensive works did exist: when all of Grant’s army was up, a force of a hundred thousand men would be available to push on into Petersburg, and that should have seemed like enough. On the other hand, there was that unrelenting axiom that a far stronger offensive force was needed to defeat a smaller defensive one, and thus even if the full power of Grant’s army should appear, it would take time, enough time for the Confederates time to upgrade their defensive works and that could have be fatal even to a massive assault. The attack should have come at this time, when the defending force was negligible, but Smith surrendered the advantage.

Smith’s fear became a self-fulfilling prophecy. By waiting, Hancock and Smith had put an end to the last chance Grant would have of easily taking Petersburg and ending the war perhaps within weeks.

Even when he realized the Union Army was crossing the James, Lee at first had been uncertain where Grant was going to concentrate. Would Grant go right after Richmond or take the “back way” through Petersburg? Initially, then, when Smith found the Dimmock works weakly defended, it was because Lee had not yet decided Petersburg would be the point of Grant’s application of force. Once he saw the truth, Lee rushed in reinforcements and thus Smith’s hesitation gave Lee that opportunity to strengthen the Dimmock Line and end hopes of an early federal occupation of Petersburg.

And now, seeing what Grant intended, Lee had no reservations about throwing all he had into defending Petersburg.

On June 17 and 18, Grant hurled his first serious assaults against the growing Petersburg defenses, but because of Lee’s reaction, there was no chance of breaking through them now.

Even a vast army like Grant’s could not place a cordon around two whole cities that were twenty miles apart. Anyone paying attention to his style would know Lee loved to defeat armies in detail, so if Grant strung out his army all the way around the Richmond and Petersburg, Lee could slip out and beat segments of it one at a time then slip back in, or when he was desperate enough, fight past a thin spot in the cordon and continue on to the Carolinas, or even the mountains to the west.

The ace Grant was waiting to play was in Georgia. This was the very scenario for which the combined theater operations was so perfect. When Sherman eventually dispatched Johnston, or whoever the next commander might be in Georgia, he would make his way up and help seal off some of those open areas through which Lee might eventually leak. And if that meant sealing up the southern avenues, Lee would indeed have little choice but head for the mountains to the west—unless Grant had time to close off even that option.

That said, it would be a mistake to believe that Grant, by any means, was now content to settle down outside and wait for Sherman. Over the months to come, he would never tire of trying to “get at” Lee inside his works, while at the same time continuing to extend his own foothold farther and farther into the now open south and west of the Richmond-Petersburg complex, trying to close the circle completely around Richmond the two cities.

Despite those attempts to break through into Petersburg, however, Grant was no longer sending waves of troops against the enemy. As he had done at Vicksburg, Grant could have his army dig in, to “out camp” the Confederates, and as a result, each side, Confederate and Union, created their own elaborate trench system, sometimes only yards apart. The Confederate works extended south and then west, extending in a semi-circle, with the Union works matching them most of the way.

A useful aspect of defensive works was the fact that they reduced the number of men to form a front. Similarly to the arrangements of a curved defensive line inside of which the defenders could use interior lines to rush men to the point of attack without spreading men over the entire perimeter, the same situation prevailed in the case of Petersburg.

The situation for the Union was that of containing the Confederates and the powerful defensive works made it possible to do so without also needing to spread men over the entire perimeter.

Grant needed to continue extending his cordon around Petersburg-Richmond and even he did not have an infinite number of men to do so. If the Confederates wanted to create trenches all the way around, Grant would match them, and once that was accomplished, the process of starving Lee out would begin in earnest.

Eventually, the Confederate works stretched from the Appomattox River, through Petersburg, on the east, all the way around to the west, with additional works continuing out to the southwest. Another line of works extended up to connect to those previously laid out protecting Richmond, so that a formidable front blocked easy federal approach to the space between the cities in the east, essentially cocooning Richmond and Petersburg in a vast defensive wall.

Neither city was ever completely encircled by works, leaving a wide stretch to the west that could be attacked by the Union, but those areas were protected by the Confederate army as necessary using interior lines.

It was unnecessary for Grant to lay out either defenses or men to block the escape of the Confederates from the Richmond-Petersburg complex in 1864 because they had nowhere to go. If Lee abandoned Richmond to protect and feed his men, then he was giving up on the war and only fighting for sheer survival and Grant recognized this.

Rather than literally containing the Confederates, Grant’s mission was to “get at” them and defeat them inside their defenses. To starve them out he needed to close off any sources of food and supplies, which meant rail lines and roads. Otherwise, there was no value, yet, in spreading his army all the way around two cities that Lee could not leave anyway. Only when he was ready to attack Lee inside the defenses would Grant need to completely surround the two cities, unless it became clear that some other Confederate army might attempt to join Lee, or in desperation, Lee might attempt to break out, abandon the cities, and go south to join up with that other army.

There was only one such other army of any significance for Lee to join with, and that was Joseph Johnston’s, being pursued by Sherman, and it would be some time before Johnston could even conceivably try to reach Lee. For the rest of 1864, Johnston was preoccupied with surviving against Sherman, so Grant did not have that to contend with.

Despite numerous skirmishes in the vicinity of Richmond and Peterson, along with this slow but seemingly inexorable extension of trenches through the latter part of 1864, the war settled into a slow crawl in that region. Elsewhere, events were developing that would bode well, except at first, for Lee.

It is difficult to technically label the situation at Petersburg as trench warfare because little fighting took place where the trenches existed, certainly nothing on the order of Spotsylvania or Cold Harbor.

Yes, firing occurred back and forth, along with some bombardment, but for some time an odd kind of situation developed in those areas where the lines were so close, another similarity to Vicksburg.

From the summits of the defensive works, the enemies exchanged conversations, some commodities, and even concerts by opposing bands. This had occurred off and on throughout the war, usually between pickets who would sit up over common fires at night and threaten each other during the day. Other impromptu meetings occurred in the spaces between the lines, earlier in the siege.

Some humorous stories developed, such as men of one side warning those of the other when officers were coming who would expect them to exchange shots and not coffee. Such call-outs as, “Get your haid down, Yankee boy, my captain’s on his way,” and the like were heard back and forth.

An incident was looming, however, that would put an end to such camaraderie for the rest of the siege.

While all appeared idle around the trenches, Grant was engaged in carrying forward three projects during this time. One was constant pressure to move men beyond the cordon, with the purpose of one by one seizing control of rail lines emanating out of Petersburg toward other points in the Confederacy, thus denying them to Lee, part of the plan to starve out his army. To prevent this, Lee had no choice but to send his own men out, generally in the form of cavalry, to try and keep the rail lines open.

A second project Grant conducted was a never-ceasing attempt to find a way to break through the hardened defenses with enough force to eject Lee from Petersburg and chase him out at last into the open, or even to allow a direct attack through a breach in the trench system, hitting Lee directly, within the city.

The third was to find a way to move men in some form or another into the north and western areas to seal off even more potential escape routes for Lee and squeeze in ever closer to both Richmond and Petersburg, if not to attack directly.

Much has been made of Lee’s counting upon Joseph Johnston to join with him for a combination that might stand up to Grant. In fact, not until after the turn of the year would the army led by Johnston free itself enough to try to reach Lee. Until then, under the command first of Bragg, then Hardee, then Johnston, then Hood, then Johnston again, that last significant Confederate army in the “west” would be fighting for its life against Sherman, it would lose Atlanta, it would be bottled up in Alabama, and fight one last battle at Nashville, after which it would mostly be ignored, left free to make its way to Lee, while Sherman rampaged through Georgia and likewise made for Virginia.

By the time Lee saw Johnston’s army as his last hope for the survival of his own army and the Confederacy, Johnston’s army was a shadow of itself. To say more would be to get too far ahead of the tale, but suffice it that in the latter part of 1864, Lee could not see any likelihood that Johnston would evacuate the Gulf states and come join him.

If Johnston was not due for some weeks or months, in late 1864, neither was Sherman, and Grant did not want to wait until Sherman completed his mission in Georgia to finish his own with Lee, but if he must, he would.

What could be imagined was that if Sherman was on his way to Grant, by Grant’s own orders, it would mean Johnston’s army had been neutralized. It would not work out exactly that way, but nearly enough so that Sherman would be far more of a benefit to Grant than Johnston would be to Lee, if both armies reached the theater at Petersburg.

Furthermore, should Johnston evade Sherman by some means and come to Virginia to join with Lee, he would still have to break in, past Grant. If Grant could not surround Petersburg from a close-in position, he could on the other hand by all means send a corps or two in the direction of Johnston’s approach and very likely defeat him on open terrain in the way he had not managed against Lee.

And in that scenario, Sherman would be in hot pursuit, catching Johnston in a deadly pincer. That would have been a killing blow, putting an end to the last significant Confederate army outside of Virginia. And when that was done, Sherman would be free to throw all his weight alongside Grant against Lee.

By no reckoning did a promising situation exist for Johnston or the desperately waiting Lee. Indeed, by any calculations, Lee’s chances in the long haul continued dim. It was just a matter of what form the end would take and how long it was in coming. And how many people on both sides must continue suffering and dying until that day.

It cannot be ignored, however, that one last hope remained for Lee and the Confederacy, and that was the presidential election on its way in November.

If Joseph Johnston should escape Sherman and come to Lee’s aid, it would likely be by rail. In addition to the need for rail lines to bring supplies into Richmond/Petersburg, Lee must hold open Johnston’s route to join him.

Grant of course also recognized for both reasons the value of those rail lines to Lee, so he was equally interested in severing them. His first target to shut down was the Weldon line, which ran due south out of Petersburg. It was both the next line around the circle that had not yet fallen into Grant’s hands and was the most direct route into the deeper south.

On June 22, Grant sent a division to seize the railroad and the parallel Jerusalem Plank Road but Lee’s cavalry chased them off, demonstrating that the Confederate army could still protect its back door at this stage of the siege.

A second aspect of the proximity of enemy defensive lines, allowing conversation back and forth, was subtle, yet of growing impact. While amiably chatting away, the Union men constantly tempted their counterparts to “come over,” meaning desert; as the siege wore on, food was becoming, as it had in Vicksburg, an issue of need for the Confederates. The hope of food was the lure the Yankee boys offered the Johnny Rebs, and it began to have an effect.

Just sitting in place, the Confederate army was already shrinking, from desertions and from illness that led to death. And those who did not die were becoming too weak to fight with the vigor of old, or in many cases to fight at all.

While all seemed cold on the actual combat front, aside from the scrimmages over the railroads and roads, a project was shaping up on the Union side that held the potential for a sudden dramatic chance to end the war with a literal bang.

Chapter Five

The proximity of Union and Confederate trenches and defensive works to each other raised the possibility that if a tunnel were delved from the Union side, under its own works, it might be extended beneath those of the Confederate side. This led to the revival of an operation that had been attempted in a similar situation at Vicksburg.

The 48th Pennsylvania was composed largely of coal miners. One of the men suggested literally blowing a hole in the Confederate defenses by boring a four hundred foot long tunnel under both entrenchments, loading it up with black powder explosives and setting it off. (Dynamite and nitroglycerin had not reached a developmental stage that made them safe enough to use, leaving gunpowder as the chief source of explosive power for a situation such as this.) Such a massive underground bomb should be expected to rip open the Confederate defensive walls above, allowing an infantry invasion into the rear of the enemy army.

The 48th Pennsylvania fell under Burnside’s jurisdiction, and when he heard of the bomb plan, he approved and passed it on to highest levels; Grant gave Burnside the go ahead to set the plan into motion.

On June 25, the dig began. By July Thirtieth, a tunnel five hundred and eighty-six feet long had been completed. What followed would be the key instance in which racism may have reared its malevolent head to play another part in stretching out the war.

Burnside had initial authority over the preparation of units that would be sent first into the hole hopefully to be ripped through the heart of the Confederate defensive line. The first troops in would be of key importance because they must confront the Confederates who initially reacted after the shook of the blast was over, and then they were to charge forward and begin the process of seizing the town of Petersburg and holding position until a flood of Union forces could enter and attack Lee’s army from behind.

Burnside was a general who believed black troops could serve as well as whites, and for this important mission, he had selected a unit of colored soldiers, led by white General Edward Ferraro. This unit had so far been restricted to guarding supplies and rail lines; they were well trained and disciplined, and due to having been kept out of combat, were fresh.

While the work to build the mine under Confederate lines carried on, Ferrero’s men rehearsed the assault and became very prepared to do their job when the time came.

In the beginning, the notion of this project had been more a source of amusement to those in the know, with most believing it probably would not work any better than a similar attempt that had been made at Vicksburg. At best, it might rattle the enemy, which was worth something, but it would not be world-ending. In other words, it appeared to be another “experiment.”

Only when it became clear the miners could actually lay in the shaft far enough under Confederate fixtures to do the job was skepticism replaced by hopefulness, and the attitude toward the plan changed from regarding it as a joke to treating it as a “Big Thing,” as the slang of the era had it.

If the hole created by the blast proved large enough, it was anticipated that for a few minutes at least, the Confederates in the near vicinity of the blast zone who were not outright killed, maimed, or stunned would gather their wits before rushing to challenge incoming Union troops. The first mission of Ferraro’s troops would be to secure the edge of the blast site on their way to occupying enemy ground inside the works. More and more troops were to pour through, continually holding the upper rim of the blast zone open.

With the Union rushing inside, at worst, Lee should be forced to evacuate in confusion entirely out of Petersburg, where he could be further assaulted in the open ground beyond.

In short, the possibilities were thrilling. Or in that popular saying of the times, “brilliant.”

On the eve of the assault, Burnside’s plan was rocked by a change. Someone had become concerned that if this operation backfired and turned into a bloodbath for the invading forces, and if in that case it was primarily former slaves who died as a result, abolitionists would raise a cry to the stars, that blacks had been sent in as sacrifices. Employing this as an excuse, or in the most forgiving interpretation, as a noble reason, Meade demanded that another outfit lead the way, and Grant upheld him.

With that change, Burnside was deflated and seemed to lose all enthusiasm for the coming operation. To select a replacement unit for Ferraro’s, he called together the commanders of the three eligible white units and had the commanders draw straws for the lead position. The winner of the lottery was Brigadier General James H. Ledlie, who was a former artillerist and had little experience in this kind of combat. And that was not the worst.

The men under Ledlie who were to rush in had not been trained in this operation, and the most they would know was what they were told at the last moment. The night before the bomb was to go off, they were brought up into a jumping-off position that would set them up them as close to the opening about to be blasted in the enemy walls as they could occupy without risk of being damaged by the actual explosion when it went off.

Had Burnside remained connected to the operation, mentally, or one might hazard to say emotionally, he would probably have completed preparations for the assault. Instead, he failed to make arrangements to clear the route on the Union side, through which the invading federals were to enter the arena, leading to the projected blast site. The only route, without further preparation, was a ten foot wide corridor, which would break up any attempt at a massed invasion force. Ledlie’s men, would have to enter the blast zone virtually single file.

At three-thirty in the morning, the time appointed for the blast, nothing happened. For a few minutes, everyone waited, holding their breath, until finally, volunteers among the miners ventured in, found that a splice in the fuse cord had failed and reconnected it and lit the fuse again. This delayed the detonation until 4:44 in the morning, but when it happened, it was as spectacular as had been hoped for and desired.

This scenario, in which Ferraro’s colored unit was replaced by whites, was eerily reminiscent of the situation at the beginning of the entire siege, when black soldiers were poised to overrun Confederate defensive works at the Dimmock Line, and then to take Petersburg, then were likewise replaced. The problem now was that Ledlie’s men did not know the plan. Worse, when the 8000 pounds of black powder went off in a tremendous blast, they initially panicked and it was ten minutes before they could be reassembled in order to move forward soon as the smoke cleared and the debris that had been thrown into the air had settled.

As described above, Ferraro’s men had been trained to stay out of the center of the hole that would be blasted in the Confederate defensive wall, and instead, take to the high ground at the upper rim of the crater, fighting off any attempt by recovering Confederates to move back into the breach, thus holding the attacking line toward Petersburg open for succeeding troops to pour through, including more of their colleagues. Soon as the next units reached the site, those new arrivals would take over this duty at the rim so the initial forces could proceed with their invasion of Petersburg, behind Confederate lines, in something of a leap-frog fashion.

Ledlie’s men had no such instructions. Once into the nightmarish landscape of the crater, they did not even attempt to continue on and take the objective out beyond, in the town; amazed at the scene of devastation before them, and at the same time hearing the cries of Confederate survivors in the torn-up surface of the crater, they swarmed down into the hole itself.

If Ledlie, their commander, had been with them, he might have prevented much of this, but he was nowhere in the vicinity of the action. When the bomb went off, he had been hiding in a bunker far to the rear, drinking rum, with Burnside, according to some stories, completely disconnected from his men and their situation.

Obviously, the Confederate soldiers who had been standing atop the location of the mine would have blown away, badly hurt if not killed, and any within a certain radius would have been stunned, knocked down, possibly blown farther away. Many more would have fallen into the crater, dead, alive, wounded, and unwounded, to be buried among the rubble and in-falling debris. It was this latter collection of Confederates whose cries Ledlie’s men heard.

It would have been theoretically possible to do a scientific evaluation of the shock wave of the blast by observing the condition of Confederate soldiers at greater and greater distances from the blast, out to the point where those who had not been harmed in any way would be found, marking the limits of the blast’s effect.

One by one these levels of affected soldiers would recover and go to work, each one moving toward the scene of the cataclysm, intent on rescuing their own and on fending off the enemy. Quickly, they rushed to the brink of the crater, armed and angry beyond all measure. While helping their buddies, they also began pouring murderous fire into any blue coated being who showed his face in the area.

These were the very men, rushing to the edge of the crater, that Ferrero’s trained and disciplined black soldiers had been prepared to hold off, up along the rim of the hole, as part of their job to seize control of the entire scene, even while pressing on into Petersburg.

Because of the change, from Ferrero’s men to Ledlie’s, there was no such defending unit holding control over the rim of the crater. Ledlie’s men were all mired down in the center, in the soft, freshly churned-up ground, and the Confederates reaching the rim began wiping them out, in a manner too similar to shooting frogs in a barrel to make light of it even now. When the black troops and others were finally allowed to move in, it was too late, Ledlie’s men had given up the high ground to the Confederates and had failed utterly to take advantage of the situation and carry an invasion into Petersburg, never mind into the rear of Lee’s army. Incoming would-be Union invaders were forced down into the horror at the bottom of the crater, where at one point, some ten thousand were mixed up in the mess, being fired down upon mercilessly by the enraged Confederates above.

In addition to rifles, the Confederates now brought artillery and mortars to bear on the trapped Union soldiers and at nine thirty in the morning, Union high command gave up and called retreat.

Up to now, the color of the skin of Ferraro’s men had not mattered to anyone but the Union leaders who let themselves be stampeded into pulling them out of the initial charge. Suddenly, when they were finally sent in to try and clean up the mess made by Ledlie’s men, the color of their skin made an astonishing difference.

To Confederate soldiers holding the upper rim and already wiping out the Union troops trapped below them, the very idea of blowing up their people with a bomb was reprehensible enough, but now, in the midst of this perfidy, black men were sent to attack them. To Southern men, fighting among other things for the right to enslave black men, being attacked by that very class of men was more outrageous than the bomb itself.

Against Ferraro’s men, the Confederates above worked themselves into a frenzy of murder, killing those blacks who attempted to surrender, while pointedly capturing whites alive.

This kind of behavior had been seen before from Confederate soldiers in other venues, most notably the assault on Fort Pillow in the west, some time earlier. Nathan Bedford Forrest, the pre-war slave trader had been accused of just this thing at times past. In fact, in some cases, the treatment of black prisoners by the South had led to suspension of prisoner exchanges in the past.

All in all, the instance now, with the arrival of Ferraro’s troops in the mix down in the crater, was one of the most egregious cases of racial mass execution in the war. Shouts rippled up and down the rim of the crater among the Confederates, on the order of, “Take the whites, kill the niggers!”

For this reason above all, but certainly due to the failure of command at all levels on the Union side, “The Crater,” as this whole operation was nicknamed, proved to be one of the most sordid episodes in the war, and certainly the worst of the siege of Petersburg in 1864.

The Crater also proved to be the last major attempt by Grant to break into Petersburg and finish the war in 1864. Now, it was back to the siege, and ultimately, if the Confederacy was to have any chance of surviving, Lee would have to figure out how to break out of it or surrender to it. He would not try, however, until after winter.

Chapter Six

Although after the Crater, Lee and Grant would hunker down behind their respective works in the area right around Richmond and Petersburg for the rest of the year, the action out in wider Virginia was not yet over.

On June 11, Lee had set General Jubal Early into motion in the Shenandoah Valley. His first mission was to root out a Union general who was causing trouble for the local people in the valley, a Virginia native named David Hunter. When that bit of business was dispensed with, Early was tasked with working his way around to the north of Washington City, in hopes of diverting Grant from his “investment” of Petersburg by menacing the national capital, a mini-version of the plan to invade Pennsylvania in 1863 in hopes of drawing Grant from Vicksburg.

After confronting Hunter on June 17, and insuring that the Union raider had turned away into West Virginia, Early had his lane open to threaten Washington. On July 6, Early captured Hagerstown, Maryland and extorted twenty thousand dollars out of its citizens as protection money, under threat of burning the town to ashes.

So far, Early was meeting only small resistance, certainly not enough to appreciably slow him down, let alone discourage him in his grand mission.

After Hagerstown, on July 8, Early repeated the extortion gambit, now in Frederick, Maryland, this time demanding ten times what he had called for in Hagerstown, and receiving it.

Just south of Frederick, at the Monocacy River, Early ran into a hastily assembled, largely untrained force under General Lew Wallace. Early had eighteen thousand men and Wallace a third of that number and Early won the battle.

On paper, this seemed to bode well for Early’s program of threatening Washington. The problem was that Wallace’s mission had not been to particularly defeat Early, but merely to delay his progress enough to buy Grant time to deal with the situation without disrupting his operations at Petersburg, which was exactly the purpose of Early’s threatening posture around Washington. Certainly Lee hoped Early would cause Grant to siphon off so many men, to save the national capital, that Lee could take advantage to break the siege.

Early’s swing through the Shenandoah had not slipped under Grant’s radar. He recognized the danger Early posed and Grant had not sat idly by letting the situation develop without preparing a response. By the time Wallace had reached position north of the capital to face Early at Monocacy, Grant had moved the VI Corps from Petersburg, up into defensive position in the Washington area. Thus, by July 11, although Early had finally shrugged his way past Wallace and reached the outside walls of Washington, the VI Corps was waiting for him. The delaying action of Lew Wallace had bought the time necessary to bring the VI into place.

One must lament that if only Patterson at Winchester in July of 1861 had done his job of merely delaying Joseph Johnston as well as Wallace did now, the war would have been long over.

Confronted by the VI Corps, Early gave up his raid and having done all he could to try and help Lee, he set off for the Shenandoah Valley again.

Yet again, a raid north that was designed to cause Grant to let go of a siege had dismally failed. Far from breaking off his siege, Grant had simply transferred enough of his forces to flick Early aside like a gnat and that was the end of the problem.

When the overall scenario involving Early’s attempted raid on Washington is taken into account, he would prove to have done far more harm to the Confederate condition than he had helped. Having stirred up trouble twice in the Shenandoah, Early’s greatest accomplishment was to have been that of convincing Grant the time had come to concentrate on that area with greater strength and focus.

West of Richmond/Petersburg, a wide open, fan-shaped space was available to Lee if he ever chose to take it as an escape route. He might have gone straight to the mountains, or continued west to, say, Lynchburg then loaded his men on a train, to rush down into the Carolinas.

That back door was also an enticing route for an invading force by the Union, if Grant could spare the men, or could work them past Lee’s extended elements, especially past the Confederate cavalry, that could range that far. Lee’s men had solidified their defensive works in the area directly threatened by Grant, whose own men had responded with their matching trench system, but that vast area west of Richmond-Petersburg cities was still wide open country, in that only men and not defensive bulwarks protected the rest of the army and the cities. If Grant could work enough men into that space, they would have a more direct, open shot at Lee, and Lee knew it.

When Sherman arrived, if still needed, he could fill into that area and threaten Lee in that more direct lane.

While Sherman could enter that region from the South, serving to block Lee’s escape in that direction, another avenue by which Grant might move a force into the open space was from the north through the Shenandoah Valley.

In this scenario, the two birds were awaiting the proverbial single stone. Whatever force Grant dispatched into the Shenandoah Valley to neutralize Early would be in prime position to extend its presence farther south, into that interstice west of Richmond, perhaps far enough to fully block off a large segment of that pie shaped escape hatch for Lee, chopping down the corridor out of which he could flee to a more manageable size, or at least to present a perfect landing point for Sherman’s army when it arrived.

In fact, a third bird could be dealt with, by the force that Grant dispatched into this area. One of the sources of food for the deprived Army of Northern Virginia still continued to be the farms of the Shenandoah Valley. As long as the army had food, it could hold out. Deny them the Shenandoah and their deterioration would quicken.

Including Hunter’s, several Union forces had operated more or less independently throughout the valley for some time, but none had succeeded at controlling the field, witness Early’s almost complete freedom to pass through the region, into Maryland, and back to Washington. To put in a better effort, Grant would turn to the man who had emerged as his star of stars in terms of cavalry operations, Major General Phil Sheridan. Although “Little Phil” had also passed in and out of the Shenandoah over the course of the war, he had never yet been unleashed upon it.

That was about to change. Now, Grant ordered Sheridan to clamp an iron hand on the region, with the intention that it should be a final solution.

On September 19, Sheridan, with forty thousand men, seeking to take advantage of the fact that Early had sent some of his men back down to help Lee in Petersburg, turned to the offensive. For the third time in the war, a battle was fought at Winchester, with Sheridan against Early’s now twelve thousand men. After an initial scare, Sheridan routed Early and three days later chased him out of defensive works further south; Early fled to Staunton and Sheridan, satisfied that the Confederate raider was too damaged to put up much of a threat, set to work on his second mandate from Grant, to destroy the agricultural capacity of the valley to sustain the Confederate war effort.

Several issues reached a nexus in the operation Grant had devised for Sheridan.

That the Civil War evolved over its full course has been intimated in and some of the details reported in this volume. Most of that had to do with the methods in which the fighting aspect of the war was conducted.

The evolution, however, involved other factors as well, some of them psychological, some of them disconnected from actual combat.

What Sheridan was about to embark upon was something that was informally known as Total War, but his coming operations would come under a new title, one invented by Sherman, called Hard War.

Total and hard war were as close to the complete antithesis of McClellan’s soft approach to relations with civilians in a war zone as one could imagine. The emergence of total and hard war could be traced most directly to edicts released by General Pope when he moved to the Virginia theater in 1862.

GENERAL ORDERS NO. 5

HEADQUARTERS ARMY OF VIRGINIA
July 18, 1862, Washington,

Hereafter, as far as practicable, the troops of this command will subsist upon the country in which their operations are carried on. In all cases supplies for this purpose will be taken by the officers to whose department they properly belong under the orders of the commanding officer of the troops for whose use they are intended. Vouchers will be given to the owners, stating on their face that they will be payable at the conclusion of the war, upon sufficient testimony being furnished that such owners have been loyal citizens of the United States since the date of the vouchers. Whenever it is known that supplies can be furnished in any district of the country where the troops are to operate the use of trains for carrying subsistence will be dispensed with as far as possible.

By command of Major-General Pope:
GEO. D. RUGGLES,
Colonel, Assistant Adjutant-General, and Chief of Staff.

This obviously meant that whatever was needed by the occupying armies under Pope would be taken with a promise to at some future time pay the civilians whose property was raided, provided, of course, that those who were in effect being robbed could prove they were loyal from that point on. No matter one’s sympathies at the time, or now, it is difficult to put a kindly spin or a good name to this order.

It was similar to a spanking administered to a child for crying, accompanied by a demand that he not cry over being spanked. Taking precious food or other needed items from local families then promising to make it up to them if they declared loyalty to those who punished them seemed absurd and whether Pope seriously expected anyone who was on the side of secession in the first place acting in a loyal manner for an untold number of years afterward just in hope of receiving hated Yankee money that would come far too late to save them from starvation is unknowable.

One might argue that he was being kindly by offering rebels anything at all for what his army appropriated but on the other hand, the argument could be made that the offer was only a technicality to put a better face on the taking.

GENERAL ORDERS No. 7.

HEADQUARTERS ARMY OF VIRGINIA,
Washington, July 10 [?], 1862.

The people of the valley of the Shenandoah and throughout the region of operations of this army living along the lines of railroad and telegraph and along the routes of travel in rear of the United States forces are notified that they will be held responsible for any injury done to the track, line, or road, or for any attacks upon trains or straggling soldiers by bands of guerrillas in their neighborhood. No privileges and immunities of warfare apply to lawless bands of individuals not forming part of the organized forces of the enemy nor wearing the garb of soldiers, who, seeking and obtaining safety on pretext of being peaceful citizens, steal out in rear of the army, attack and murder straggling soldiers, molest trains of supplies, destroy railroads, telegraph lines, and bridges, and commit outrages disgraceful to civilized people and revolting to humanity. Evil-disposed persons in rear of our armies who do not themselves engage directly in these lawless acts encourage them by refusing to interfere or to give any information by which such acts can be prevented or the perpetrators punished.

Safety of life and property of all persons living in rear of our advancing armies depends upon the maintenance of peace and quiet among themselves and upon the unmolested movements through their midst of all pertaining to the military service. They are to understand distinctly that this security of travel is their only warrant of personal safety.

It is therefore ordered that wherever a railroad, wagon road, or telegraph is injured by parties of guerrillas the citizens living within 5 miles of the spot shall be turned out in mass to repair the damage, and shall, beside, pay to the United States in money or in property, to be levied by military force, the full amount of the pay and subsistence of the whole force necessary to coerce the performance of the work during the time occupied in completing it.

If a soldier or legitimate follower of the army be fired upon from any house the house shall be razed to the ground, and the inhabitants sent prisoners to the headquarters of this army. If such an outrage occur at any place distant from settlements, the people within 5 miles around shall be held accountable and made to pay an indemnity sufficient for the case.

Any persons detected in such outrages, either during the act or at any time afterward, shall be shot, without awaiting civil process. No such acts can influence the result of this war, and they can only lead to heavy afflictions to the population to no purpose.

It is therefore enjoined upon all persons, both for the security of their property and the safety of their own persons, that they act vigorously and cordially together to prevent the perpetration of such outrages.

Whilst it is the wish of the general commanding this army that all peaceably disposed persons who remain at their homes and pursue their accustomed avocations shall be subjected to no improper burden of war, yet their own safety must of necessity depend upon the strict preservation of peace and order among themselves; and they are to understand that nothing will deter him from enforcing promptly and to the full extent every provision of this order.

By command of Major-General Pope:

GEO. D. RUGGLES,

Colonel, Assistant Adjutant-General, and Chief-of-Staff.

The point of this order is difficult to misunderstand, and would have been equally almost impossible to obey by local people because they could not carry on their normal lives, as Pope demanded, yet keep an eye on their neighbors, or more impossibly, on “irregular” forces that might carry out the outrages Pope threatened to punish.

It must be borne in mind, in the case of these first two, and other orders to follow, that the Shenandoah Valley was a home to many people who were in fact loyalists, but if such orders as these were carried out as swiftly and mercilessly as called for, no time would be wasted determining who was a Unionist before his house was razed, and his property forfeited.

GENERAL ORDERS No. 11.

HEADQUARTERS ARMY OF VIRGINIA,
Washington, July 23, 1862.

Commanders of army corps, divisions, brigades, and detached commands will proceed immediately to arrest all disloyal male citizens within their lines or within their reach in rear of their respective stations.

Such as are willing to take the oath of allegiance to the United States and will furnish sufficient security for its observance shall be permitted to remain at their homes and pursue in good faith their accustomed avocations. Those who refuse shall be conducted South beyond the extreme pickets of this army, and be notified that if found again anywhere within our lines or at any point in rear they will be considered spies, and subjected to the extreme rigor of military law.

If any person, having taken the oath of allegiance as above specified, be found to have violated it, he shall be shot, and his property seized and applied to the public use.

All communication with any person whatever living within the lines of the enemy is positively prohibited, except through the military authorities and in the manner specified by military law; and any person concerned in writing or in carrying letters or messages in any other way will be considered and treated as a spy within the lines of the United States Army.

By command of Major-General Pope:

GEO. D. RUGGLES,

Colonel, Assistant Adjutant-General, and Chief of Staff.

It is difficult to interpret this order as anything short of a declaration of war on all civilians who refused to prove loyalty to the Union. This was the essence of the new kind of war called Total War, in which everyone in the rebel territory was subject to military action even if they sat home doing the Union and its military no harm.

GENERAL ORDERS, No. 19.

HEADQUARTERS ARMY OF VIRGINIA,

Near Cedar Mountain, Va., August 14, 1862.

The major-general commanding discovers with great dissatisfaction that General Orders, No. 5, requiring that the troops of this command be subsisted on the country in which their operations are conducted, has either been entirely misinterpreted or grossly abused by many of the officers and soldiers of this command. It is to be distinctly under stood that neither officer nor soldier has any right whatever, under the provisions of that order, to enter the house, molest the persons, or disturb the property of any citizen whatsoever.

Whenever it is necessary or convenient for the subsistence of the troops, provisions, forage, and such other articles as may be required will be taken possession of and used, but every seizure must be made solely by the order of the commanding officer of the troops then present and by the officer of the department through which the issues are made. Any officer or soldier who shall be found to have entered the house or molested the property of any citizen will be severely punished. Such acts of pillage and outrage are disgraceful to the army, and have neither been contemplated nor authorized by any orders whatsoever; the perpetrators of them, whether officers or soldiers, will be visited with a punishment which they will have reason to remember; and any officer or soldier absent from the limits of his camp found in any house whatever, without a written pass from his division or brigade commander, will be considered a pillager and treated accordingly. Army corps commanders will immediately establish mounted patrols, under charge of commissioned officers, which shall scour the whole country for 5 miles around their camps at least once every day, and at different hours, to bring into their respective commands all persons absent without proper authority, or who are engaged in any interruption of citizens living in the country; and commanding officers of regiments, or smaller separate commands, will be held responsible that neither officers nor men shall be absent from camp without proper authority.

By command of Major-General Pope:

R. O. SELFRIDGE,

Assistant Adjutant-General.

This would appear to be a mitigating factor against individual escapades in search of personal gain in the lines, including rape. Had the bulk of these orders been carried out with the force they appeared to grant the military, it would have made little difference to the civilians whether the raids and other abuse inflicted upon them was legal according to Pope’s orders or not.

The positive thing in all this was that Pope was universally hated on both sides of the line and his men policed themselves to such an extent that little about these particular orders were carried out.

The point of bringing up what had occurred in 1862 is to introduce the notion that Sheridan was now carrying out under Grant’s orders, as part of the campaign to close out the war as soon as possible, what amounted to some of Pope’s edicts. In Georgia, Sherman would set out on the same mission, of removing as much from the local economy that supported the Confederate war effort as he could. This was the very core of Hard War. One could liken the process to snuffing out the fuel that fed a fire.

Only one positive served as a mitigating factor in this level of warfare. While the people whose food sources were taken would suffer for months, Sheridan’s action could shorten the war and place everyone who was involved back on a path to a more normal version of life all the sooner.

Certainly, that positive result was not at the forefront of Grant’s and Sheridan’s thinking, and it was cold comfort to those burned out. Still, nothing was as horrible for the life of people in that land as a war that never ended.

Beginning on October 6, Sheridan wiped out seventy miles worth of barns and agriculture, only sparing what his own men needed. As far as burning houses was concerned, the policy established by Pope had been the standard throughout the war, used solely as a method of reprisal for guerilla activity, reasoning that local citizens participated in and supported such operations. Where such guerrilla activity was found, houses were burned, and anywhere else, they were spared. Sheridan kept that arrangement in force.

With Sheridan on the rampage, Early backed off, maintaining a safe distance between himself and the Union cavalry, but refusing to leave the valley until he had no choice, harassing Sheridan when and where he could, using what weak and sporadic cavalry attacks he could manage, no matter how little effect they had.

October 11, Sheridan established a camp at Cedar Creek, well down the valley to the north of Staunton. On the Fifteenth, Sheridan temporarily absented himself from the army to confer with Grant in Washington about future operations and was on his way back by the Seventeenth. On the 19th, with Sheridan still en route to join his own command after that conference, Early, having been reinforced back up to 18,000 thousand men, staged a surprise attack that staggered the Sheridan-less men backward three miles. The Confederates captured equipment, supplies and cannon left behind by the fleeing Union forces, but instead of continuing the charge, the Confederate soldiers fell out to plunder the evacuated camps, forcing Early to halt the assault. Urged from Richmond to continue and destroy Sheridan’s army, Early declined.

From Winchester, Sheridan heard the sounds of battle and rode hard to join his men, finding some were holding their own and others were retreating in disorder. Through the force of both his authority as commander and his personal charisma, Sheridan pulled his army together and counter-charged, sending Early into retreat while recouping the ordnance and supplies that had been taken by Early during his advance.

In February of 1865, after winter hiatus, Sheridan picked up the fight and eventually broke Early’s army to pieces. At last, with no significant force in the way, Grant knew Sheridan’s army could finally move down and begin to close off that heretofore illusive “back door” west of Richmond, a position Union armies had been seeking and failed to achieve as far back as Pope’s Cedar Mountain and Second Manassas debacles.

From that position, Sheridan would also be able to throw his weight into the final phase of the war in a decisive way once it opened up after the winter stand-down, which had not been lifted yet for the larger army.

For Lee, this development seemed ominous. For Grant, it meant one more piece was in place for the ending of the war early in 1865.

Part XII: Sherman’s Grand Operation

Chapter One

May 7, 1864, Sherman set out on his mission of running Joseph Johnston to ground. By now, Johnston had superceded Hardee, who had replaced Bragg, in command of the last significant Confederate army outside of Virginia.

Sherman left out of Chattanooga with three units, the Armies of the Cumberland, Tennessee, and Ohio, comprising a hundred thousand men against Johnston’s roughly forty-five thousand. It was not by chance the number of men available to Sherman was exactly one hundred thousand. Having even more than that to chose from, he had pared his army down to what he called a “compact” force strong enough to beat Johnston yet mobile enough to move rapidly, without presenting too large a problem of logistics and supply.

Sherman arrived at a hundred thousand by this means: the Army of the Cumberland had 88,830 available for duty, out of which he would bring only fifty thousand. Of 64,957 available for the Army of the Tennessee, he would bring 35,000 and the corresponding numbers for the Army of the Ohio were 46,052, of which 15,000 would join him against Johnston.

By the time he began to march, minor adjustments had dropped the actual number to 98,797 men. These numbers, however, did not include cavalry.

Since their goal was coordination of effort for as long as possible, Grant and Sherman stayed in close contact, by telegraph and other means.

After waiting out bad weather and other preparations, Grant designated May 5, 1864 as the jump-off day for both offensives—his own onslaught against Lee, which became the Overland Campaign, already detailed herein—and Sherman’s forward advance against Joe Johnston.

And there it was, what had been missing for the whole war: a coordinated plan against both the “East” and “West” elements of the Confederate army.

In the months to come, of course, the two armies, Grant’s and Sherman’s, would operate without much regard to what the other was doing because day to day events in one theater had no bearing on the other. Only as the two armies began to squeeze their enemies down would closer coordination between the two matter. Indeed, as Sherman

proceeded with his own operations, his future moves would be discussed more and more with Grant, until a time came when that was no longer necessary. Indeed, at times, in the months to come, Sherman would maddeningly disappear entirely from Grant’s and Lincoln’s radar, only to pop up at the right place at the right time seemingly out of nowhere.

Initially, Sherman’s job was to see that Johnston did not break away, abandon the greater part of the South, and rush north to combine with Lee against Grant. Even if he had, Sherman could have followed him. Discussion has been made to suggest this would have been far to the benefit of the Union, with Grant and Sherman able to trap the Confederate army under Johnston when they approached Richmond. Grant did not want the situation to develop that way, however, so Sherman would cooperate to prevent it if he could.

As has been seen, in paring down his army to around 100,000, Sherman was leaving plenty of reserve manpower to deal with other forces that might show their faces in the region of Tennessee, Alabama, and Georgia.

Sherman was not required to defeat Johnston outright, although that would be preferred. All he was expected to do was box Johnston into a corner of the South from which he could not extricate himself without being totally destroyed.

In this endeavor, the issue of taking Atlanta, or any other city, still remained as a benefit from victory over Johnston, not a primary goal.

Rather than trying to manage one huge column, Sherman set his army in motion in three wings. While this had not worked very well for Rosecrans, against Bragg in the vicinity of Chattanooga, the circumstances were different now, and the wings that Sherman deployed were each large enough to take care of themselves if isolated. And with reserves left at Chattanooga and the only army that could threaten the Union hold on that city back-pedaling away from it, the use of the three columns did not surrender anything in the way Rosecrans’s operation had done.

Commanding one of these wings, Schofield headed south by way of the Tennessee town of Cleveland, toward Red Clay, Georgia, and beyond it Catoosa Springs. This would set Schofield up as an eastward guard force to contain Johnston if he veered off that way, which was to say, on a course that might take him to join with Lee via the Carolinas.

As Sherman came on, Johnston grudgingly gave ground and a clear pattern developed. Johnston was struggling to keep his army from being destroyed, trading terrain for survival, or in military terminology, space for time. Space was renewable, but time was not, so time almost always received first priority. Johnston had given way before Grant at Jackson, Mississippi, before the siege of Vicksburg and he repeated the tactic now, but contrary to his situation when he had relinquished Jackson, with Bragg somewhere to his rear at that time, in this campaign, he had nowhere to go, no other army with which to potentially join.

If Johnston were to end up making one ultimate last stand, it would likely be at Atlanta, and that was what Sherman counted on. If Johnston did not stand and fight there, then he would put himself in the very box into which Sherman desired to push him, down into the nether-land far in the south of Georgia, or else, back into Alabama, even farther from Virginia.

In these pages, it has been written before that Joseph Johnston seemed to be the most senior official in the Confederacy who truly comprehended the proper war plan the Confederacy should be conducting. In most of his operations, and where possible, he had carried on the grand defensive strategy of doing what damage he could to Union armies, while preserving men to the maximum—no big battles, give up ground grudgingly, while fighting for time.

He was in that mode now in his slow, mildly fighting retreat toward Atlanta.

In less than two weeks, he surrendered over fifty miles down the tracks from Chattanooga to Atlanta, leaving only another forty to go. His route roughly followed the rail lines between the two cities. In part, Johnston had little choice but remain loyal to those rail lines. Where rail lines had been hacked out of the rocky terrain, an army could also carry forward. While such a progression could conceivably lead to a trap, caught in narrow defiles, that kind of ground also offered protection, since in those regions, Sherman could not come at Johnston except through the same corridors.

Sherman had an advantage, however. Being the fox and not the hen, he had no need to seek protection of his flanks, and thus he could place his columns on either side of the rail lines and the canyons, and could in fact seek to work them ahead of Johnston and close in on him.

The problem in that case was that those columns required the same supply line Sherman’s main force used, and that was...the rail lines, linking to Chattanooga. His out-riding columns could not go too far ahead of their supply connection and never succeeded in closing Johnston off from the south.

Well aware of the logistic situation under which Sherman operated, Johnston tried to destroy the rail lines behind him, to deny them to Sherman’s in his advance, or as a supply line after Sherman had passed, but that was a futile game. Sherman had in his army excellent railroad engineers who supervised rapid repairs, men such as Grenville Dodge, who had a future ahead of him as a key engineer in the Transcontinental Railroad, so despite Johnston’s best efforts, the trains were barely slowed down for Sherman.

This was the very same line on which the famously hijacked engine, The General had made its run under the command of Union saboteurs. A comment passed among the Confederates that Sherman would hear of later amused him greatly. As it went, the Confederates reached a point when they considered it a waste of time to try and destroy the rails because soon as they wrecked a tunnel, Sherman seemed to pull a new one out of his pocket and replace it.

This was not to say the job of pursuing and struggling against Johnson was a cake walk for the Union army. While the term “mild” was used above to describe Johnston’s resistance, that referred to the scope of his fighting retreat, not the ferocity when battles did break out. The skirmishes that developed were violent and did not always go Sherman’s way. Inexorably, however, Johnston had no choice but to recede in the direction of Atlanta and Sherman relentlessly followed, overcoming everything Johnston could throw at him.

On July 17, Sherman had worked his way to a crossing of the Chattahoochee River in the northern outskirts of Atlanta. Soon, the fighting would change in character, and so would the leadership of the Confederate army in Georgia.

Chapter Two

Across the Chattahoochee, George Thomas, commanding one of the wings of Sherman’s army, prepared for battle along Peachtree Creek while McPherson and Schofield, the other two corps commanders moved toward Decatur and combined their forces, and approached Atlanta from the east as one unit.

By that same day, July 17, Jefferson Davis had reached the end of his patience with Johnston, who had retreated over ninety miles and was unable to reassure Davis he could stand and fight, so as to defend Atlanta.

This was Davis not understanding the situation, not Johnston failing to do what he could with his resources at hand. Davis seemed not to comprehend the need for Johnston to keep his army in one piece. Standing up to a fight with Sherman until all other options were exhausted was the last thing Johnston must do. It was not too soon to realize that Lee was being forced toward the defenses of Richmond and needed all the reinforcements he could get. For Johnston to just fight Sherman, to contest his advance, even to save Atlanta, would not gain much, if anything, given the additional Union forces lurking about ready to fill in if Sherman’s were damaged to any extent. Far more important was Johnston’s army as a source of those critical reinforcements, than as a force to be thrown away trying to slow Sherman down.

While not yet was it clear that the very survival of Lee’s army would depend upon Johnston’s arrival, it should have been obvious to Davis that Johnston wasting his army away against Sherman now was a senseless mission. Nevertheless, when Johnston did not do so, Davis fired him.

The replacement was a man who would put up a hard fight, whether that was the wise thing to do or not.

Hindsight insists that what Johnston should have been ordered to do now was give up Atlanta immediately, elude Sherman, and head for Lee as fast as possible.

Johnston’s deputy was John Bell Hood, who had received paralyzing injuries to an arm and lost a leg earlier in the war, and each time, had been written off as a dead man. Still, here he was, and despite his disabilities, he remained vigorous and could still lead and fight, and still do so from the back of a horse. It was to Hood that Davis handed command of the army for the defense of Atlanta.

George Thomas knew Hood and warned Sherman that he was a “fighter,” and the Union commander realized he was entering a new phase of the campaign and prepared for harder work ahead.

Indeed, Hood wasted no time confronting Thomas around Peachtree Creek and Buckhead, now a suburb of Atlanta. A furious battle broke out on July 20, but Joseph Hooker, who had remained with the force he had brought from Virginia to Chattanooga, in concert with Thomas, won the skirmish and the Confederates retreated into heavy defensive works in the area.

McPherson moved toward those entrenchments from the east, via Decatur and on the Twenty-First, he and Sherman were holding a counsel of war near the railroad when fighting broke out unexpectedly to their left. McPherson rode out to see what was going on and was shot down, his body found later. The attackers were from William Hardee’s corps, on a foray outside the Atlanta defenses to the south and east.

Sherman had thought McPherson was one of the rising stars and losing him was painful, both from a military standpoint and personally.

For some time, fighting raged in that area, on the east side of Atlanta, but the next day, July 22, Sherman’s men slowly beat Hood’s army back into Confederate defenses inside the city. This sequence of fights would be known as the Battle of Atlanta.

In the fight that day, the Twenty-Second, Sherman conducted an interesting exercise. He knew he was fighting only part of Hood’s army and he only allowed one of his own three armies, the Army of the Tennessee, to participate in that action, on the grounds that they could defeat Hood without help and would be “jealous” if any of the other two armies were called to their assistance.

Sherman summed up this ferocious, key battle in a report to Washington, which encompasses, as well, the death of McPherson,

Yesterday morning the enemy fell back to the intrenchments proper of the city of Atlanta, which are in a general circle, with a radius of one and a half miles, and we closed in. While we were forming our lines, and selecting positions for our batteries, the enemy appeared suddenly out of the dense woods in heavy masses on our extreme left, and struck the Seventeenth Corps (General Blair) in flank, and was forcing it back, when the Sixteenth Corps (General Dodge) came up and checked the movement, but the enemy’s cavalry got well to our rear, and into Decatur, and for some hours our left flank was completely enveloped. The fight that resulted was continuous until night, with heavy loss on both sides. The enemy took one of our batteries (Murray’s, of the Regular Army) that was marching in its place in column in the road, unconscious of danger. About p.m. the enemy sallied against the division of General Morgan L. Smith, of the Fifteenth Corps, which occupied an abandoned line of rifle-trench near the railroad east of the city, and forced it back some four hundred yards, leaving in his hands for the time two batteries, but the ground and batteries were immediately after recovered by the same troops reenforced. I cannot well approximate our loss, which fell heavily on the Fifteenth and Seventeenth Corps, but count it as three thousand; I know that, being on the defensive, we have inflicted equally heavy loss on the enemy.

General McPherson, when arranging his troops about 11.00 A.M., and passing from one column to another, incautiously rode upon an ambuscade without apprehension, at some distance ahead of his staff and orderlies, and was shot dead.

Sherman replaced McPherson with Oliver Howard, and on July 27, began a major shift, moving his forces all the way around Atlanta to the west side in the area of the Ezra Church. Almost immediately, Hood challenged this move with an attack.

Hood threw six charges against Howard, who beat each assault back. In these various battles so far, Hood was losing thousands of men at a time, exactly the converse of what any Confederate army ought to be doing at this critical juncture of the war. Although Sherman was also losing men in heavy doses, if ever a case existed in which one side could afford to trade casualties for victory, this was it.

By now, Sherman’s operation had taken on the character of a siege, with Hood locked up within Atlanta and behind his defenses. Knowing, however, that he would either have to break out for supplies or surrender, Hood continued to dispatch assaults against the besieging army.

While all this time, Sherman had maintained his supply line by way of the railroads to Chattanooga, Hood possessed only one link to outside resources, the Macon railroad. Sherman had not yet succeeded in “breaking” that line, and in so trying, had already suffered the loss of one cavalry unit.

Now, in a bid to totally isolate Hood, Sherman would employ infantry to finish that task. While Howard contained Hood, by spreading his forces around much of Atlanta, Schofield was dispatched in a counterclockwise motion to lead a force of infantry in position on the Macon line.

With large Parrot guns he had brought in for the purpose, Sherman meanwhile bombed the city to drive Hood out. This was one of the paramount instances of “total war” in which civilians suffered collateral damage in the cause of military objectives. In the fictional movie Gone with the Wind, this bombardment was dramatized by showing Scarlet O’Hara visiting the hospital, with shells landing nearby, during which the doctor claimed that “Old Peg-leg,” meaning Hood, would not stand for this long. Hood, however, had little recourse to stop the bombardment short of surrender.

Otherwise, Hood was able to send William Hardee into the rear of Sherman’s forces, to try and put an end to his operations around the town of Jonesboro, (the area where Tara, the fictional O’Hara plantation of Gone with the Wind was situated.)

Hood was nearly beaten in the attempt but to Sherman’s chagrin Hardee’s force managed to slip away.

The entire scenario seemed to be building to on all-inclusive battle with Hood, possibly around Jonesboro. On September 20, still expecting to have it out for the city and the fate of Hood’s army, Sherman awoke to the sounds of what might be cannon fire but which quickly resolved themselves as heavy explosions in town. Shortly one of his commanders who had been working his way closer to the city reported that Hood was preparing to evacuate Atlanta.

Indeed, when Hood faced the fact that he could not hold Atlanta, and could not beat Sherman, and that the best outcome he could achieve was to escape the trap and elude Sherman while his army gained some breathing room, Hood set out destroying everything he was not willing to leave in Union hands, from ammunition to foundries, railroad equipment and useful warehouses. (This scenario, the deliberate destruction of Confederate munitions is also dramatically portrayed during Rhett Butler’s and Scarlet O’Hara’s harrowing escape through Atlanta in Gone with the Wind.)

On September First, Hood’s surrender of the city allowed Sherman to telegraph Lincoln that “Atlanta is ours and fairly won.” The capture of Atlanta would be the straw that pushed Lincoln to victory in his re-election over former general-in-chief George McClellan, in so doing, killing the very last hopes for Confederate independence.

Now, with the city in his hands, Sherman made a controversial decision. Across the South, he had been faced with leaving men behind on garrison duty, in order to hold and control the cities captured by his armies, and he considered it a waste of manpower.

By this time, most of the city’s population had evacuated Atlanta by their own volition, to avoid dying in the combat. Sherman ordered those who still remained to leave, turning Atlanta, for the duration of his army’s stay, into strictly a Union military town.

This was another aspect of the Total War that Sherman himself was defining, an outgrowth of Sherman’s theory that the Civil War was as much the fault of the Southern population, at least the aristocratic segment, as it was the politicians. If the enemy of the United States were considered rebels, then civilians of the South were to be counted among them. He knew from having lived in the South, all the way up to the time shortly before the initial acts of secession, that the majority of the population’s attitude had been a goad to the government to choose war as a route to independence, and that this population, especially the women, had spurred on the charge to war.

Contrarily, Sherman also had warm feelings toward the people of the South on some levels. He never set about on a program to incarcerate or execute civilians in the manner Pope had proposed; he reckoned that he would only somewhat inconvenience them for a time, even if they had more than that coming.

As for the city and its population, most of whom, as stated, had pulled out to save their lives, Sherman knew it had been made unlivable both by his own actions of shelling, and Hood’s destruction upon his exit.

This is his explanation for the decision:

I took up my headquarters in the house of Judge Lyons, which stood opposite one corner of the Court-House Square, and at once set about a measure already ordered, of which I had thought much and long, viz., to remove the entire civil population, and to deny to all civilians from the rear the expected profits of civil trade. Hundreds of sutlers and traders were waiting at Nashville and Chattanooga, greedy to reach Atlanta with their wares and goods, with, which to drive a profitable trade with the inhabitants. I gave positive orders that none of these traders, except three (one for each separate army), should be permitted to come nearer than Chattanooga; and, moreover, I peremptorily required that all the citizens and families resident in Atlanta should go away, giving to each the option to go south or north, as their interests or feelings dictated. I was resolved to make Atlanta a pure military garrison or depot, with no civil population to influence military measures. I had seen Memphis, Vicksburg, Natchez, and New Orleans, all captured from the enemy, and each at once was garrisoned by a full division of troops, if not more; so that success was actually crippling our armies in the field by detachments to guard and protect the interests of a hostile population.

I gave notice of this purpose, as early as the 4th of September, to General Halleck, in a letter concluding with these words:

If the people raise a howl against my barbarity and cruelty, I will answer that war is war, and not popularity-seeking. If they want peace, they and their relatives most stop the war.

I knew, of course, that such a measure would be strongly criticised, but made up my mind to do it with the absolute certainty of its justness, and that time would sanction its wisdom. I knew that the people of the South would read in this measure two important conclusions: one, that we were in earnest; and the other, if they were sincere in their common and popular clamor “to die in the last ditch,” that the opportunity would soon come.

It is difficult to deny the practical point of the decision to send the remaining population of Atlanta out of the city. Given the fact that Sherman offered them transportation, those who were allies of the Union could transfer up into Eastern Tennessee until the war was over, while those who intended to stand up as enemies of the Union, or one could say, true rebels—perhaps they could in fact be considered actual enemies—were lucky not to be made prisoners of war. It is of course difficult not to sympathize with the people thus displaced, but merely being sent away from a city whose services had been rendered almost non-existent was not the worst fate that might have befallen the citizenry.

Oddly, Hood and Sherman would exchange heated notes over this issue, which started out as a squabble over the exchanging of prisoners. These exchanges are contained in Appendix II of the present volume.

As to the war itself, having escaped Sherman’s clutches, Hood passed messages demanding that his captured men should be returned but Sherman had no interest in helping Hood reinforce his army with men who had already been taken away from him under valid combat conditions. Every prisoner released to the South who was physically able to fight would be certain to appear again on the other side somewhere else.

Sherman had in fact already transferred so many Confederate prisoners out of Georgia by train to Tennessee that he had too few left immediately on hand to trade even if he wanted to. Still, Sherman did make the gesture of offering up the few prisoners he had not already transported away, on an even-number exchange basis, but Hood demanded that all his men taken as prisoners must be released to him.

Unpleased with the result of that negotiation, Hood now also took up the issue of the forced evacuation of citizens from Atlanta. Sherman offered to transport all civilians who wanted to travel north into Tennessee on the railroad, and feed them on the way, but he challenged Hood to do the same for those who wished to go further south.

The language of the negotiations, as found in Appendix II is informative and intriguing.

Another issue concerning Hood would be a problem for Sherman. Despite his rough handling at Sherman’s hands, when Hood broke out of Atlanta, he still had enough numerical strength to do some damage if he rushed to Lee’s aid. If he managed to achieve that, Sherman’s entire campaign would have been a failure, at least as Grant would see it, with or without the taking of Atlanta.

After worming his way out of Atlanta, Hood took his army initially toward the northwest, managing on the way to disrupt Sherman’s railroad supply lines to Chattanooga. Sherman in turn tried to corner him, without success, although for a time the armies played cat and mouse in the northwestern corner of Georgia. Eventually, with Hood free to roam and evade a direct hit from Sherman, it became clear that neither would accomplish any more at this rate and the two generals, almost as if in agreement, broke off the game and headed in different directions.

The advantage in this dance went to Sherman because he had set a trap for just this contingency.

It will be remembered that Sherman had pared down his army to a hundred thousand and left the others back in Tennessee. Now, he additionally dispatched George Thomas and his corps up toward Nashville to ensure Hood would go no farther in that direction; Thomas was also called upon to deal with the small but rampaging cavalry of Nathan Bedford Forrest.

In the same time frame, Sherman set Schofield on the path to Chattanooga. With those two armies in key positions north of Hood, they formed a screen that should contain him in Alabama. As a result, despite having not been totally defeated, Hood was boxed in, and that, after all, was the name of the game. He could not go join Lee in Richmond without defeating Thomas and Schofield on the way.

The intriguing argument between Hood and Sherman is itself seldom mentioned in accounts of the war. Just as intriguing, and just as overlooked from this time frame, is a another set of negotiations in which Sherman became engaged, while still operating with his army in the vicinity of Atlanta. This exchange was with the governor of Georgia.

Sherman’s brother John happened to be a powerful United States Senator, and while Sherman retained headquarters in Atlanta at this time, two of Senator Sherman’s acquaintances, former US Congressmen, now Confederates, approached General Sherman there in Atlanta. One of the two had lost his son, fighting with Johnston, at Cassville, and sought permission to retrieve his body.

General Sherman readily agree with the request, and took dinner with the two men, ignoring the fact that they were theoretically enemies.

In conversation, one of the two men admitted the futility of the war at this point, as well as the hopelessness of the South’s standing up to Sherman’s army and expressed a wish that the governor of Georgia would demand the authority to withdraw the Georgia militia from Hood’s army.

Sherman promised the men that if Governor Brown would do that, by issuing a proclamation to that effect, Sherman would take his men through the state with as little further impact as he could manage. He would use roads, rather than marching across fields, and would pay for anything his men took along the way to sustain themselves. In effect, he was offering Governor Brown an end to war in Georgia, if the state would voluntarily declare itself no longer at war.

Unknown to Sherman until some time later, Governor Brown sent the following letter to Hood:

EXECUTIVE DEPARTMENT MILLEDGEVILLE, GEORGIA, September 10, 1864

General J. B. HOOD, commanding army of Tennessee.

GENERAL: As the militia of the State were called out for the defense of Atlanta during the campaign against it, which has terminated by the fall of the city into the hands of the enemy, and as many of these left their homes without preparation (expecting to be gone but a few weeks), who have remained in service over three months (most of the time in the trenches), justice requires that they be permitted, while the enemy are preparing for the winter campaign, to return to their homes, and look for a time after important interests, and prepare themselves for such service as may be required when another campaign commences against other important points in the State. I therefore hereby withdraw said organization from your command.

JOSEPH C. BROWN

In fact, Hood did release the militia and they did go conduct their agrarian mission. It also appears Brown called the legislature together over the issue of officially withdrawing Georgia from the war, but could not win a consensus. Although he earnestly attempted to cooperate with Sherman’s offer, the legislature sabotaged his effort, and as a result, Sherman went ahead and conducted the famous march to the sea in the harsher way he had threatened. It is a pity that this vignette is virtually never related in accounts of the war. Those who eagerly report Sherman’s march as a war atrocity tend to ignore the fact that he offered Georgia a way out and its legislature refused to take it.

In actual fact, Hood was more of a problem than Sherman would have preferred. Even somewhat corralled south of the defensive line Sherman had created using Schofield and Thomas, the situation was not ideal. If Hood had veered off and threatened to engage with Schofield, the possibility, no matter how slim, still existed that Hood might slip past Schofield, in which case he would truly be on the road to Virginia. If this happened, Sherman’s job would still be to contain him, delaying if not derailing his plan to cross George to the Atlantic, after which he, too, would move on the Virginia.

In short, if Hood should turn against Schofield before Sherman had set forth to the sea, he would have to turn back and face Hood again.

Over this subject, a low-key, very rare disagreement opened between Grant and Sherman, because Hood was still on the loose and Grant did not appreciate it. As late as November 1, Grant wanted Sherman to continue pursuing Hood until he was totally defeated, rather than begin his eastward march to “salt water,” as Sherman expressed it.

While Sherman agreed he would have to go after Hood if he turned to Chattanooga, he fretted that if such a move were only a feint to draw him north, Hood could reverse, return to Atlanta, continue east, and make the turn to join Lee from that direction instead.

Sherman believed that Hood would avoid a big fight down in this region and thus would not in fact threaten Schofield at Chattanooga. If Hood continued westward for a while, farther into Alabama, and then did turn north, he would not be in a position to slip past Schofield and Thomas and make a run to Virginia, and they would contain, and hopefully defeat him. These points, Sherman argued, made it unnecessary for him to now hunt Hood down because he had already taken the steps necessary to control him.

The argument which won Grant over to Sherman’s view was the point that with Schofield and Thomas holding the northern exit, rather than pursue Hood westward, the best thing Sherman could do was to stay in Georgia and keep Hood boxed in, until his next move was known beyond doubt.

On November 2, Grant accepted Sherman’s plan.

At that time, Schofield was at Pulaski, Tennessee, nearer the middle of the state, and Sherman was in Kingston, Georgia, a few miles east of Rome. Thomas had his forces scattered at key positions in a spread defensive line, ready and able to quickly gather them together at Nashville if Hood came that way, using interior lines. This certainly appeared to be a program that would keep Hood locked away from any route to Richmond.

These events were ongoing during the period of the crucial 1864 presidential election, when fears carried all the way to the White House that McClellan might win and threaten to close out the war under conditions favorable to the South.

With the hope that the soldiers in the field might play a key part not just by fighting but by voting, the government dispatched commissioners to the armies in the field, including Sherman’s, to collect their votes; in order to fully accommodate this process, Sherman put off his next move until the Tenth of November.

Chapter Two

Throughout this volume, Confederate generals have been criticized for wasting their men in unwarranted offensive operations. This criticism must be suspended in the case of John Bell Hood, after he was ousted from Atlanta and forced to squeeze his way into northern Alabama. The only use for his army at this time was to defend the Confederacy. That was what Confederate armies should have been saved for, because the Confederacy was now in dire jeopardy of disappearing. It has been demonstrated that only the existence of an army kept the Confederacy in business.

If Hood’s army did not conduct an offensive now, first to work itself out of the hole into which it had fallen, and then to defeat at least one Union Army, after which it should make its way to join Lee, Hood might as well quit. And Hood was not a general who would easily quit. Indeed, he would go all out to fight his way out of the box and try to join Lee.

Hood still recognized that a window existed for breaking out by defeating George Thomas, and if necessary, Schofield, before him, leaving a somewhat open route to join Lee.

On October 26, Hood reached Decatur, Alabama, hoping to cross the Tennessee River, but found it held against him by Union forces. Staying south of the river, Hood put a force across on October 30 at Florence, Alabama. Marching due north, on November 27, Hood encountered Schofield near Columbia, Tennessee. Schofield retreated to the north side of the Duck River and Hood marched around him at Spring Hill, hoping to trap and defeat Schofield before he could reach Nashville to support Thomas. Hood, however, failed to secure the town or the road up which Schofield might escape.

In a daring night march up that unsecured road, Schofield’s forces slipped right past Hood’s encampment, to Franklin, Tennessee. The next day, with Schofield dug in behind entrenchments that had been prepared ahead of time, Hood attacked and was beaten badly.

Undeterred now, Schofield continued north to Nashville, and Hood reckoned the combined forces would attack him before long. Out of ideas, all he could do was to set up south of the Tennessee state capital and prepare a stout defense and defeat Thomas/

Schofield when they came on against him.

Although he was nowhere nearly as finicky as McClellan had been on the subject, George Thomas was one of those generals who did not make a move until everything was arranged to his satisfaction, or as much so as he could achieve. His second nickname, aside from “the Rock of Chickamauga,” was “Old Slow Trot,” which had to do with his riding habits years earlier, but which seemed to fit his fighting style as well.

Now, Grant wanted him to attack out of Nashville and finish Hood, whom he well outnumbered, but Thomas stalled. When bad weather moved in, that at least provided Thomas a bona fide, if temporary reason to wait, and he waited.

Grant lacked the patience of Lincoln in dealing with generals who would not attack promptly, which was understandable because he was always quick to make a move himself, even if sometimes a little too impetuously. So disappointed did he become with Thomas over his dallying at Nashville instead of going after Hood that Grant actually set forth from Virginia in order to relieve Thomas from command in person. Fortunately for Thomas, he chose the right time to attack, on December 15, before Grant reached him with a pink slip.

Over two days of battle, the combined force of Thomas and Schofield routed Hood, who retreated to Tupelo, Mississippi. Finally, the only army left to the Confederacy that could help Lee against Grant had been reduced to a size that posed no concern, only about 19,000 men, and was locked up in a deep dim corner of the Confederacy, just where it had been holed up after the evacuation of Corinth, two years earlier.

At Tupelo, Hood resigned his command of the army, with the expectation that he would be replaced by Beauregard, but the latter apparently begged off due to his chronic poor health, leaving Davis to call Joe Johnston out of retirement. One can imagine the taste of bitter gall in Davis’s mouth at having to hand his last hopes back to a man he personally detested and whom he had recently fired, but he was in no position to turn up his nose now.

Reluctantly, Johnston accepted, and seldom had a commander taken over a more dismal situation in this war. Here, so close to the end, it would be difficult to find a way in which his army could contribute anything, especially from its place at what could very convincingly be called Square One.

At the time that Joseph Johnston again inherited the army, this time from Hood, the Confederacy extended only from Richmond to Danville, Virginia, and singularly Mobile, Alabama. While Union armies had not physically captured most of Florida and certainly not all of Georgia, there was little in the way of opposition in those quarters to give the Confederacy any legitimate claim any more. No actual government acted over most of the South, but life carried on by the efforts of local government personnel, who could be said to represent the Confederacy in name only. Not all the slaves in the areas that could be described as back in Union hands were free, only because the Union army could not physically cover every square mile and visit every plantation and force emancipation at direct gunpoint.

Still, the connection between the people of the South and the Confederacy was entirely broken. The Confederacy did not exist in any meaningful way in any places except those above described, which were the locations of viable Confederate forces.

Even the ranging of Nathan Bedford Forrest’s cavalry throughout the South did not define Confederate presence or control.

As for Johnston’s army at Tupelo, it would not be reasonable to describe it as being in control of anything except itself.

With Johnston’s army thus tied up in a bag for now, Sherman was completely free to set forth in his program to ultimately close the last escape hatch for Lee, in Virginia. Still, it would be a journey of many miles to put his army on Lee’s doorstep.

After dealing effectively with Johnston’s army, and wrapping up Atlanta, Sherman’s larger plan for some time had been to march across Georgia to an Atlantic port somewhere between Savannah and Charleston, to receive supplies by way of the federal navy, then turn north, to pass through the Carolinas to join Grant in Virginia.

Grant favored a variation of that plan, in which, instead of merely being re-supplied by ships, Sherman would board his men and sail to Virginia. This, Sherman opposed, and would win the case.

Although he could use supplies that would be brought to the coast, a coast no longer in the control of the Confederacy except in small pockets, until he did in fact reach “salt water,” Sherman was perfectly content to make do with what his army could bring along from its last depot, now at Atlanta, or could pick up from the land on the way. He felt he had sufficient ammunition for whatever he might run into until re-supplied on the coast, and knew the countryside would provide the rest of what he needed.

In the actual mechanics of crossing Georgia, Sherman would advance in two gigantic columns, made up of around sixty thousand men total. These two armies would move parallel to each other, each destroying the capacity of Georgia to supply its military in any way, while acquiring from the land what they needed to live on, themselves. The armies would operate sixty miles apart, fanning out somewhat in their foraging and destruction.

To Sherman, there was a difference between supplying his men off the land and destroying everything in their path, as his “march to the sea” is generally described, or even as he had hinted to the governor would happen if Georgia did not pull out of the Confederacy. The actual appropriation of food and supplies from the local people was only to be conducted by specifically assigned teams of foragers, not the entire army, who were meant to primarily march straight ahead and leave the land alone.

The foragers themselves were under very strict rules of conduct relative to the people of Georgia, black and white, male and female, children, adults, and the aged, with the rules to be enforced by their officers. Unfortunately, it would be impossible for officers to perfectly control such a widespread group and outrages were bound to happen and did. Nor were the officers perfectly under control themselves or particularly interested in making life less traumatic for the “rebels,” which they considered all loyal Confederates in the South to be.

Another scene from Gone with the Wind illustrated that scenario, when a “bummer,” an unauthorized forager/thief from Sherman’s army entered Tara and Scarlet dispatched him with a single shot.

On November 15, Sherman’s juggernaut began to move in a generally southeastern direction, pointing toward the port city of Savannah, Georgia. Much has been made about the march across Georgia and the idea that it might be considered a war crime. As has been mentioned, Sherman seemed to actually like the Southern people and had lived among them in military assignments before the war. He was in fact what would today be called a racist in that he truly believed the African-American people were inferior to whites and he did not seem to like them. (It is difficult to admit, but President Lincoln also apparently believed black people to be inferior to whites, although he had every kind intention toward them. Attitudes on race were products of the time, and one must be content to judge not the feelings or attitudes of white people but rather their actions. Sherman would be as accommodating and one could say kind to the blacks he encountered as one might be able to demand, despite his racist attitudes.

Along its route, Sherman’s army picked up a secondary army of its own, blacks leaving their owners and following the triumphant army, heading to freedom. This congregation became an irritant to Sherman but he dealt with the refugees as generously as he was able.)

As for the rebellious south, Sherman felt that the people in general had acted in an unconscionable way in triggering war against his country, and he believed they must be shown that war was so horrible that they would be insane to think of ever causing another.

To this day, Southerners hold Sherman accountable for acts such as deliberately burning family records, houses, stealing personal effects and other deprecations. Undoubtedly, far worse had been done by the Union army in Fredericksburg, but much worse still by Lee’s army in passing through Pennsylvania, where blacks were taken as slaves, and by Jubal Early’s raid in which he demanded protection money under threat of burning cities to the ground.

The primary damage done to the people of the South by Sherman’s army was the taking of farm animals and the destruction of crops, not wantonly, but as supplies for the army. And yes, the release of slaves. Since virtually no fighting took place on the march, there was no shelling of towns. Yet undoubtedly on a small scale, ugly crimes were committed, probably some of which will never see the light of day. Rape is a subject that seems to largely be unmentioned in chronicles of the Civil War, but it is likely that it was also perpetrated during Sherman’s march, and in other encounters of military with female civilians, from both sides. And beyond doubt, black women were ravaged by white men, from both armies, throughout the course of the war when circumstances created the opportunity.

No doubt it occurred as well on Sherman’s march.

As to destruction of property and buildings, deliberate and accidental, it will emerge that the worst damage to towns and capital cities as Sherman marched through may not have been carried out by the Union army at all.

After an almost uncontested march across Georgia, ending with a skirmish to chase out a garrison under William Hardee, Sherman chose to occupy Savannah, rather than Charleston, South Carolina, as he led some to expect.

In that city, the question over forwarding his men to Virginia by boat versus marching them overland again arose. Grant still favored the water route, but Sherman was concerned that accumulating the ships needed and carrying out the operation would take as long or longer than simply carrying on by foot northward. In so doing, he meant to inflict additional punishment upon the South, while keeping his men in better fighting trim in the process.

Amazingly, Joseph Johnston was able to slip his army past Thomas and Schofield, into the Carolinas, still imagining he might be able to throw up something that would resemble a roadblock for Sherman, before hopefully joining Lee.

Sherman, however, no longer worried about what was left of Johnston’s army, rag-tag and shrunken as it was after its encounters with Schofield and Thomas. How

much good it could do Lee now, even if it got past Grant and into the defended realm of Petersburg and Richmond was debatable. Despite the fact that Lee never gave up on the hope of a junction with Johnston, it loomed much larger as a hope in his eyes than it was any longer a problem in Sherman’s.

If Johnston should join with Lee, given that Sherman would be joining Grant almost immediately or sooner, adding 18,000 for Lee against 60,000 for Sherman would be no bargain for the Confederate side. That was true in the assumption that Johnston would even survive to join Lee. Unfortunately for the Confederates, Grant was certainly capable of intercepting Johnston before he could even reach the passage of the Appomattox River, let alone making it to combine with Lee. All Grant need do would be to move into Johnston’s path and let Sherman come up from behind and Johnston would either be smashed between or have to turn off from the path to join Lee and disappear into some place of oblivion, perhaps the mountains to the west.

All in all, the prospects for Lee and Johnston were not especially favorable.

On February 1, 1865, Sherman’s army set out northward from Savannah into the Carolinas. Until Johnston’s Army of the Tennessee could arrive on the scene and present whatever small threat it was able, only scratch forces stood in opposition to Sherman. What hindered Sherman more were the natural obstacles of the region, such as swamps, but even those did not particularly slow him down, and he moved inexorably against Columbia.

It was taken as an article faith that South Carolina was the villain of the Civil War, the first state to secede and the first to fire on Americans. Sherman had vowed to do the greatest damage to South Carolina as punishment, and even Georgians appealed to him to serve Carolina at least as harshly as he had them. And so he did.

Even in his time of maximum potency, against the piddling threat any Confederate army could offer him, Sherman still avoided telegraphing his intentions. Before turning for Columbia, he made moves that suggested he might still go for Charleston, or the interior of the state, two totally different directions. In his own mind, however, no doubt existed about what he wanted to do now. Sherman smelled blood in Virginia and all things pointed to the final confrontation with Lee. That course set Columbia, South Carolina across his path. He arrived there February 6, 1865.

A Confederate cavalry general, Wade Hampton, abandoned Columbia ahead of Sherman. In order to deny cotton to the Union, Hampton ordered his men to burn bales of it in the city streets. When the winds whipped up the fire out of control, it threatened to burn out the entire downtown, including the capitol. Ironically, it was Sherman and his men who had to risk their lives and fight the fires, to save the capital city of the state they had planned to devastate.

To this day, Carolinians blame Sherman’s army for loss of records in Columbia as a result of the fire, and it remains a hopeless task to try and convince them it was Confederate cavalry who were responsible.

This assertion must be qualified, however, because some commentators have questioned whether this is entirely true, that Sherman’s men only put out the fires and had no initial responsibility for them. The argument is unlikely to ever be settled to everyone’s satisfaction.

Once in North Carolina, the violence Sherman’s army committed against the land and property was somewhat curtailed. On March 11, he took Fayetteville. Elements of Johnston’s Army of Tennessee were starting to arrive in the area, and they succeeded in putting up more than a token opposition to Sherman’s operations, but never enough to stop the Union advance.

On March 21, a final battle took place between Sherman and Johnston, and although Sherman could finally have trapped and crushed Johnston, he saw no sense in wasting the time and energy in defeating an army that was no longer relevant and he declined to conduct a direct attack.

Nevertheless, the two armies shadowed each other, both with the similar goals of joining their corresponding allies in Virginia. By now, the end of the war was only days away, and soon, Sherman would meet with Johnston in person.

If things were not bad enough for Johnston, and for that matter, Lee, Schofield’s army, having marched from Tennessee, March 23, re-united with Sherman’s at Goldsboro.

Part XIII: The End Game

Chapter One

There was no mystery to the strategy on the part of the Union now, and the grand plan that had been formulated when the war began no longer applied. It was Grant’s and Sherman’s game plan that dictated everything now, although the way it was played out would depend on what Lee might try from his position inside Petersburg.

Although his game pieces were moving inexorably into position, Grant was still not at all easy about the outcome, as assured as it seemed. He suggested later that he woke up every day afraid he might learn that in the night, somehow Lee had completely slipped out of Petersburg and had gotten away.

Soon, Lee must try exactly that. Short of surrendering where he was, he had no other choice. Grant, on the other hand, only had to keep Lee boxed in until Sherman arrived or starvation drove every man over the wall with his hands in the air, begging the enemy for something to eat. And that process was well along anyway.

More directly than Sherman as a threat, it was Sheridan who loomed over the Confederate army in the near term. Sheridan had worked his way around, through the Shenandoah, had chased Early in, and if he managed to cut the Danville Railroad, Lee might just have to surrender from within the Petersburg defenses long before Johnston, or for that matter Sherman could arrive. Clearly, something desperate must be done, a break-out had to be tried, food had to be located to feed the Confederate army, and the junction with Johnston must be brought about.

Or must it? One other potential option still remained for Lee and the Confederate armies. To be realistic, this option offered a better prospect of at least prolonging the war than a combination with Johnston and an all-out fight with Grant on flat land. While in a way, this option meant giving up the dream of Confederate independence for a period of time, it could conceivably lead to its resurgence later.

The core of this idea was for Lee’s army to flee from Petersburg and Richmond, into the mountains to the west, the southern extension of the Appalachians, and then disperse the into smaller bands, and continue to fight an “irregular” or guerrilla war for years, even decades. Once Lee’s immediate army abandoned the last city that still mattered—

Richmond—they could fight without concerning themselves with defending cities at all, in other words, they would be cutting loose from the rest of the Confederacy.

Johnston’s men could join them, along with all other remaining units, such as Forrest’s, and they could carry out hit and run attacks long after the federal government had moved back into the South and begun reasserting its authority again.

If the Confederate army took up that option, the Union army would not be able to demobilize because the guerrilla army would and could attack anywhere, all the time. The entire collection of lands that had been called the Confederacy could never be peaceful and the whole United States would be tied down with war—albeit not in the same form as it had existed—for as far into the future as the guerrillas could sustain themselves and continue operating. The war, in a new phase, would drag on until someone was elected in Washington who would put an end to it, on Confederate terms. That was the theory.

Based in the mountainous regions, roving guerrilla outfits could disappear and reappear, using the mountains as their sanctuary, and Union representatives would never be safe in the South. Ironically, the raid John Brown had attempted at Harpers Ferry had been designed to support just such a guerrilla war in exactly that venue, beginning in the mountains west of Virginia, with the difference that it was to be conducted by escaped slaves, in support of the efforts of abolitionists. The plan under Brown had been to so bedevil the slave owners and citizens of the South that they would hopefully give up the Peculiar Institution. The Confederate version would revolve around so be-devilling the Union that it gave up on holding onto the South.

Worse, under the Confederate guerrilla war scenario, the irregular forces could eventually menace the North as well, ranging at least into Pennsylvania and Ohio, if not farther. In that way, Southern irregulars could penetrate and wreak havoc over the total nation. This meant they would have to subsist by robbing and stealing, perhaps eventually from their own population base as well. As youngsters of the South grew up, they too could be continually recruited into this army as long as it managed to stay operational. In that case, the guerrilla army might in fact continue to swell as a new generation slipped out of the cities to join it. Under this scenario, virtually every southern city must be garrisoned by Union troops, to combat the existence of virtually a gigantic band of outlaws.

If this scenario developed, however, it might prove impossible for the lands that had formed the Confederacy ever to normalize. A state of war, under severe stress, would continue to exist as long as hit and run bands of outlaw/partisans survived.

From a practical point of view, the idea, as romantic and powerful as it seemed at first blush to a Southern sympathizer, was probably only another Lost Cause hope.

What would most likely happen, unless a president gave in and set the Confederacy free, was that the guerrilla movement would have eventually evaporated under the strain of necessity, and the Union would conduct a campaign similar to what it would choose to do in the West against an even larger irregular fighting force: Native Americans.

And just as the greater power of the federal armies eventually defeated the Indians, they would most likely have eventually put an end to the irregular Confederate campaign. The whole affair might have lasted twenty years, or even into the new century, and it would have set back the “reconstruction” of the South perhaps that long or longer. On the other hand, that later reconstruction might have taken a different form than it did in reality, for worse or, who can say, for better.

Furthermore, innovations in warfare and weaponry would come first to the regular army of the Union and would eventually overwhelm the by-then outmoded equipment of the irregulars, who would have a difficult time even outfitting themselves with ammunition for what guns they did possess.

All in all, unless a president put an end to the situation by surrendering to the South after all, the Union would surely have eventually prevailed, and all that the guerrilla campaign would have accomplished would be even greater torment for the nation and especially the people of the South over a course of months, years, or decades.

Even if this guerrilla nightmare had been played out, slavery would long since have been ended by the presence of federal soldiers throughout the South, thus the very point of Southern, or at least Planter-South independence would be lost. The situation would turn more into a policing issue than a military one, under the Union army acting in the South as virtually an occupying force.

Still, sufficient numbers of Southerners, including those still in uniform, remained so staunchly loyal to their cause, that they seemed willing to put themselves through all this rather than quit.

Key among those was General Porter Alexander, the longtime commander of Longstreet’s artillery, and in the last days of the Confederate army, he attempted to convince Lee to take this alternative to surrender.

If this contingency were to be followed, however, it had better be soon or there would not be much of a guerrilla army left from among Lee’s men. Indeed, the number of defections and surrenders had already become staggering to the hopes of Lee and his generals, as men became more loyal to their stomachs than the cause.

The decider of the issue would be Lee. By this time, Jefferson Davis had become almost irrelevant, squatting in his offices up in Richmond. It was Lee, not the nominal Confederate president, who Southern people and the Confederate army would follow, to whatever end he took them. While extremists such as Forrest and Alexander advocated the permanent war plan, after giving it due consideration, Lee rejected it. And what Lee decided for his army was what would be.

Yet in actual fact, some among the army had already made an attempt at creating a guerilla army in the hills. Many men who were reckoned as deserters from the Confederate army had already moved into the nearby mountains, not finished fighting the Union, just finished fighting in the conventional way. Indeed, this was a core around which the potential irregular army could have gathered, but in leaving prematurely, they had already done damage to Lee’s regular army attempt to pull victory out of the fire. In that way, their desertion, even with the intention of fighting as guerrillas, actually benefited only Grant.

In refusing to accept the plan to carry on an irregular war, Lee was essentially left with the hopes of a junction with Johnston. Instead of counting on Johnston to come to Virginia now, however, Lee was thinking in terms of escaping Grant and joining with Johnston in the Carolinas. There, with the combined armies, he might do what he could to defeat the oncoming Sherman first, before turning back to take on Grant. At that time, however, the political core of the Confederacy, Richmond, would be in Union hands and unless luck attended them, so would the Confederate leadership.

Those were not overly realistic options, but it was the best Lee could hope for if he were to continue to make life miserable for the Union army as long as possible.

If it seemed impossible for Grant to “get at” Lee inside his Richmond/Petersburg defenses, because of the wide open spaces west of the two-city complex, it should have seemed easy, or at least feasible for Lee to bolt in that direction and get away if he moved soon enough. In reality, it would have been far from easy. Perhaps to move a few men, maybe a cavalry squad out of Grant’s loose containment and proceed far enough to join Johnston might have been feasible, but the entire army, such as it was now, could not be swift enough on their feet to make it away cleanly. All they would have achieved in trying escape to the west would have been to finally deliver themselves to Grant in open country where his numbers could overwhelm them.

Inside his defensive works, Lee remained safe from Grant for now. Two conditions existed which limited the time for which that would be true: the dual specters of Sherman and Sheridan, closing in on the open western approaches to Richmond; and the starvation of Lee’s men.

If Lee reached a point when he must attempt the break despite the odds, by moving his army out of the arc of defensive works, into open ground, his army’s survival would depend on their speed. They must fulfill Grant’s nightmare of slipping out and getting away before Grant knew it, but no good reason existed to believe his men were in any condition to outrun Grant’s army for long.

As will be seen, Lee’s possibilities once he did escape would be limited by a search for food, and eventually he would be forced to try to reach Lynchburg, where he might find something for his men, before he could contemplate the next move, either into the mountains or south to reach Johnston.

By that time, Sheridan could block any other moves that weren’t already covered by Grant’s infantry. With Sheridan in complete control of the Shenandoah Valley, that meant for Lee that turning northward was out. The remaining options would be the run on into the mountains to the west, or a hard left turn toward the Carolinas.

The decision to abandon Petersburg and Richmond would be a wrenching one but it was inevitable. If he were to have a chance at evading Grant, Lee must first freeze him in place, buying some time. This meant creating a diversion away from the direction of escape, and to do this, he would send a smaller force in a break-out attempt on the east side of the parallel defensive lines, his and Grant’s. The men who were to carry out this operation were to slip through Grant’s defensive works and once outside, threaten Grant’s supply base at City Point on the James River, something that would surely cause Grant to bring men around from the far side, hopefully weakening his line enough that the rest of Lee’s army could get past.

That was the theory, a smaller version of the grand attempt to lure Grant away from Vicksburg that had been the Gettysburg campaign, and it is well known how unsuccessful that was. Grant’s history of dealing with such diversions, including Early’s in 1864 should have suggested that failure was bound to be the result, but Lee was so desperate, he must try again.

Several “forts” had been built along the complex of defenses which Grant had caused to be erected partway around Petersburg. These forts were not the kind of fort one envisions in the West during the days of Indian fighting, with log stockades and lookout posts on raised supports, and wooden gates swinging open. They were instead merely nodal points in the line of defenses, with quarters dug into the ground beneath, and gun emplacements on the surface.

As a representative of such links, Fort Stedman was not one of the best, and the Confederates had selected it as a weak spot in the Union defenses. After “pioneers” had surreptitiously torn down the defensive works between the two lines, to allow a route through which the attackers could pass, the advance squads appeared at Stedman in the guise of deserters, and were to be followed by enough men to “roll up” the Union forces along the defenses, take over the gun emplacements, and open up room for a surge of around twelve thousand men to break out of the confines of Petersburg.

The attempt was made on March 25, 1865, but it was an abysmal failure. The initial diversionary attack was easily crushed, and rather than causing Grant to remove forces from the section out of which Lee planned his main escape, it made not much of a ripple in the Union alignment at all.

Having committed everything to a full-scale bail-out from Petersburg and Richmond simultaneous with the Stedman raid, Lee suffered bitter disappoint to his hopes of escape.

Grant was quick to recognize that for so many Confederates to be massed at one point in the failed escape, Lee must have pulled them from elsewhere inside the defenses, leaving a weakness that could be exploited. He responded by ordering a heavy assault at the right extreme of Lee’s defenses, against A.P. Hill at Hatcher’s Run.

Thirty-five hundred men were lost to Lee one way or another in the Stedman debacle and now, Hill’s position was overrun and Lee lost another thousand plus. Now, more than ever in the war, the count of losses was adding up in a powerful way against Lee. Worse, the position Hill had occupied now belonged to Grant, who could use it to make further inroads against the Confederate position.

The choice facing Lee was to surrender in place, or to make the best attempt at a breakout he could despite the failure of the Stedman gambit.

On March 26, Lee sent messages to Richmond telling the government that he saw no hope of keeping Grant and Sherman from combining against him.

Even before the Stedman attempt, Grant had arranged to continue shifting forces to the west, working with Sheridan, in a process of methodically closing off the last of Lee’s escape hatches. In the latest orders to Sheridan, Grant suggested that after his current move was done and the last opening was sealed, Sheridan would be “cut loose” and sent to join Sherman. Sheridan read this with dismay, but Grant took him aside and let him know the part of the orders sending him out was a ruse, designed to cover in case the real plan to come should fail. He absolutely assured Sheridan he wanted him right there in the thick of things against Lee, and he added that what he was up to now was not just a move to deprive Lee of his escape hatches, this was IT, this was the final blow to knock Lee out of Petersburg and beat him and Sheridan was key to that.

Hearing that, Sheridan agreed this was the big moment coming and enthusiastically embraced his part in it.

On March 31, Lee moved first, sending Pickett against Sheridan at Dinwiddie Court House out southwest of Petersburg in the open area beyond the system of trenches.

Nearby, Confederate General Bushrod Johnson hit General Gouverneur Warren, but after darkness the Confederate forces withdrew, satisfied with their success.

Sheridan was not dismayed that Pickett had scored a small victory. Quite the contrary, he was ecstatic because this meant Lee was desperate and was sending his forces outside the secure defenses, and Sheridan knew that sooner or later, as long as Pickett stayed out there, Sheridan would reach him and beat him.

Still, Sheridan needed some infantry to support his planned devastation of Pickett and for this, Warren’s division was dispatched to join him. By daylight, however, Warren’s men had not arrived and Sheridan was livid. He already did not trust Warren and in fact had tried to have his division replaced by another but Grant had no one else close enough to send who was not needed elsewhere. Now, Sheridan’s misgivings were proving well founded.

Pickett was farther west now, at Five Forks, and Sheridan’s plan was to come up from the southeast to threaten Pickett’s front, while Warren slipped his way between Pickett and the Confederate defensive works, and cut him off. Warren had as many men in his own corps alone as Pickett had total so the outcome should have been clear.

But Warren wasn’t there.

In the afternoon, lulled into the belief that no action was pending, that he had control of his front and that no force was moving behind him, Pickett left his men while he joined other officers for a fish fry, and thus he was absent when the attack finally began and he could not make his way back to his men before the battle was essentially over.

If ever the forces manning the walls of the Confederate works were thin enough for a successful attack, it must be now. That night, Grant ordered a continual bombardment of Petersburg, to loosen up the Confederate lines even more, then before dawn, he sent his forces against some of the thinned-out positions and achieved several breakthroughs. When dawn arrived, he finished the job, ordering a 60,000 man all-out assault.

Lee could just as well figure out that Grant was ready to come in after him, and he knew the end of his time inside of Petersburg was at hand. He set his main army on the move, heading south and west toward whatever escape they could find from the trap that had been Petersburg. As he prepared to abandon the cities, Lee advised the Confederate government to make its own escape while it might.

With this warning, Jefferson Davis caught the “Danville Train,” and the Confederate government was now on the run, as much without a capital as had been Governor Jackson’s rump Confederate government back in Missouri in the early days of the war.

This was the night that “drove old Dixie down,” as a popular song tells it. The evacuation of Richmond by the government, while the Confederate army fought on, once and for all gave the lie to the long held assumption that if Richmond were captured, the war was over.

By now, desertions of Confederate soldiers had reached an epidemic, due primarily to conditions inside the defenses of Petersburg. The entire army was in a deteriorated condition, which was no surprise. Conditions for civilians, in Petersburg as well as Richmond, were severe enough that food riots had broken out, led by women, suppressed by harsh military force. By all means, one of the primary elements of a siege was the denial of supplies to the army caught on the inside, and in this Grant had succeeded as well as he had at Vicksburg.

Lee thought he had arranged for food stored in Richmond to be moved down the remaining tracks to the west, to Amelia Courthouse, where he would feed his men as well as possible. When the army arrived at Amelia, however, the only supplies on the train were munitions and weapons. The 33,000 men who remained in the army had marched forty miles, expecting to be fed, and now found all they had to eat was what they had carried with them out of Petersburg.

Lee sent out desperate requests to local citizens to feed his army but there was little forthcoming.

The failure to obtain food for his men at Amelia threw Lee’s hopes into a tailspin. In his escape from confinement, he had enjoyed the head start he had hoped for over the bulk of Grant’s army, but having to wait at Amelia for food to reach them from somewhere would chew up his lead. When his foragers, seeking food locally, returned mostly empty handed, Lee knew he must send for provisions from elsewhere. Danville seemed the best bet.

Nor could he remain longer at Amelia. He must get his poor men back on their feet and impel them on, to some next hopeful site where food might reach them.

For this, he intended to intercept the Richmond and Danville railroad at the town of Burkeville, to the south. This position happened to be on the route that Lee anticipated Joseph Johnston’s army would follow if they escaped Sherman and came to join him. Unfortunately for those hopes, Grant had already gotten forces into place to close off that avenue.

With that plan foiled, Lee directed his men toward Jetersville, but also found it held against them, and knew the railroad on which the rations would come was likewise blocked. His hopes of food coming up from Danville were dashed and now his remaining possibility was Lynchburg, much nearer, to the west, in the direction of the mountains. If he could reach there and feed his men, he still could then turn southward, back on track to meet up with Johnston.

The travails which had befallen Lee’s men, beginning back in Petersburg, and now magnified by the desperation march, had turned them into a wretched collection of starving skeletons. Some no longer had the strength to carry their rifles, which they dropped along the way. Rapidly, they were being transformed from an army to a parading rabble of hungry beggars. And when they were forced to keep moving even in the dark, to try and stay ahead of the Union army, sleeplessness added to hunger to create what must have been a zombie-like sensation among most of the men.

In this frame of mind, the columns of Ewell and Anderson fell into a trap near Farmville in a battle called Sayler’s Creek. Lee lost six thousand men as prisoners and another two thousand killed there; and Ewell himself was captured.

Seeing the inevitability of the situation, the near-certainty of victory, Sheridan sent a message to Grant that concluded, “If the thing is pressed I think Lee will surrender.”

Grant relayed that message on to Lincoln, who responded, “Let the thing be pressed.”

Lee, however, would not surrender quite that soon. Perhaps, however, he had passed the point at which he could turn south and reach Johnston. Perhaps the flight into the mountains, the Appalachians, beyond Lynchburg, was really his last chance to remain in the war.

With the southern escape hatch closed to Lee, Sheridan also now looked to the west, to Lynchburg itself, just as Lee must do. Sheridan determined that any train coming to Lee from that town now must be intercepted and the next opportune location to do so would be at a stop called Appomattox Station.

In addition to Sheridan, Grant had 40,000 men crossing the Appomattox River to close on Lee from the east and the same number maneuvering ahead, in order to pass Lee and box him in from the West. The game now came down to setting up the pen and waiting for the Confederates to walk into the enclosure. Lee was on the way to falling into a trap made up of well over 80,000 men, not even counting Sheridan’s cavalry, and that was only the number of those already nearing position to confront Lee. Many thousands more were back nearer Richmond, ready to join the fun when needed.

What seemed to be developing, Grant could see, was a final battle, of all his men against the rapidly deteriorating number making up Lee’s army. People would die, on both sides, of course, but it was now distinctly possible that Lee’s army could be completely obliterated, that the awful arithmetic might actually add up, when the last shot was fired, to zero. That was bad enough, but it was sickening to think of men who had survived this far, on both sides, who might die in the last fight, the fight to end the war.

Grant was at last in the position he had sought for so many months, of forcing Lee to that final fight on flat ground, the fight to the finish. Now, more than ever, a true finish would be possible, total defeat, perhaps total obliteration of the entire Army of Northern Virginia.

Grant did not need that. He only needed total surrender. He had no need to wipe the enemy out to the last man. The best outcome for both sides, whether the South would agree or not, would be to save as many lives on both sides as he could manage without a final horrendous bloodbath, while still ending the war.

Acting upon that principle, at some time in the afternoon of April 7, 1865, Grant suddenly announced to his staff that he had it in mind to “summon” Lee to surrender. And more than thinking about it, he took pen in hand and wrote a message.

Headquarters Armies of the United States

April 7, 1865——5 p.m.

General R.E.Lee,

Commanding C.S. Army.

General: The results of the last week must convince you of the hopelessness of further resistance on the part of the Army of Northern Virginia in this struggle. I feel that it is so, and regard it as my duty to shift from myself the responsibility of any further effusion of blood by asking of you the surrender of that portion of the C.S. Army known as the Army of Northern Virginia.

Very respectfully, your obedient servant,

U.S. Grant, Lieutenant General

Commanding Armies of the United States

Grant sent the message under a white flag through the easternmost of his two armies closing in on Lee. The message did not reach Lee until ten that night, and when it did, Lee was accompanied by his top commander and aide, James Longstreet, back in action after somewhat recovering from his wounding in the Wilderness.

Longstreet knew Grant personally, even considered him a friend, as Lee did not, and was in fact an in-law, and he had a feeling about Grant’s intentions. He suggested to Lee that it was premature to accept the surrender demand yet, that if Lee waited longer, he could obtain better terms than Grant might present on this, his first attempt.

Lee could not afford to simply ignore Grant’s initiative, however, and better yet, he should already begin negotiations by trying to draw out of Grant an understanding of what that initial offer of terms might be. To that end, he sent a reply:

7th Apl’65

Genl

I have recd your note of this date. Though not entertaining the opinion you express of the hopelessness of further resistance on the part of the Army of N. Va. I reciprocate your desire to avoid useless effusion of blood, & therefore before considering your proposition, ask the terms you will offer on condition of its surrender.

Very respy your obt Svt

R.E. Lee, Genl

At this time, the size of Lee’s army had deteriorated so shockingly in numbers that three corps commanders were no longer needed—Richard Anderson, Bushrod Johnson, and George Pickett. Lee authorized the trio to go home then report to the War Department, now presumably still operating in some version, out of Danbury, Virginia. The last part of the instructions were merely for form, however. Lee was retiring these men for the rest of the war.

Anyone could see that the overall situation of Lee’s army was worsening by the hour. Not only was it being surrounded by the Union army even as the men marched peacefully along, but in their position, even the land was conspiring against them.

In that part of Virginia, the upper stretches of the James and Appomattox Rivers happened to flow in such a way that they moved closer to each other, forming a constriction through which any army heading for Lynchburg or beyond would be confined. It was not as if the army would suddenly find two rivers on either side, yards away, but their freedom to range north or south was limited to only a few miles, forcing them through a smaller region westward until they could reach the level of the Appomattox where it was fordable on a wide scale, and then turn south.

In other words, for miles ahead, the Confederate army was being herded into a smaller and smaller space, and Lee knew it. Lacking the use of trains now, in order to reach Johnston, the army must clear this hurdle, and Grant would close in even sooner.

On April 8, a group of Confederate generals met and discussed this situation, and came to the conclusion that Lee ought to surrender, and that they should petition him to consider it. This session took place without the officers being aware that the process of surrender had already been begun by Grant and that Lee was entertaining the possibility. By their words, they seemed to think that the notion of surrender had not occurred to Lee at all.

These men carried deep feelings of affection for Lee and wished to relieve him of the humiliation of having to be the one who called for capitulation. Willing to take that disgrace upon their own shoulders, they wrote a note on the subject and approached Longstreet, who was not initially involved in their deliberation, but who on the other hand was of course aware of Grant’s overtures to Lee and his response.

These generals asked Longstreet to represent their wishes to Lee, knowing he was a man who was at Lee’s side much of the time now.

Longstreet, who was not at liberty to discuss what was developing between Lee and Grant, knew he must find a way to deal with this proposition by the generals without saying too much. He did so by gently reminded them that it was a capital offense for officers to attempt to force surrender upon their commander, in essence something that could be construed as a form of mutiny, but he softened it by adding, “If General Lee doesn’t know when to surrender until I tell him, he will never know.”

One of the generals, Pendleton, however, did dare to directly approach Lee with the request. Lee did not mention having received Grant’s communiqué, and instead, he put up a brave front, insisting there was no cause to speak of surrender.

His response, as recollected by Pendleton, was more revealing for other points than his refusal to admit he was negotiating with Grant.

“General Lee was lying on the ground. No others heard the conversation between him and myself. He received my communication with the reply, ‘Oh, no, I trust that it has not come to that,’ and added, ‘General, we have yet too many bold men to think of laying down our arms. The enemy do not fight with spirit, while our boys still do. Besides, if I were to say a word to the Federal commander, he would regard it as such a confession of weakness as to make it the condition of demanding an unconditional surrender, a proposal to which I will never listen.’”

Then to Pendleton’s mind, Lee added the kicker:

“‘....I have never believed we could, against the gigantic combination for our subjugation, make good, in the long run, our independence, unless foreign powers should, directly or indirectly, assist us.

“‘....But such considerations really make with me no difference. We had, I was satisfied, sacred principles to maintain, and rights to defend, for which we were in duty bound to do our best, even if we perished in the endeavor.’

“Such were, as nearly as I can recall them, the exact words of General Lee on that most critical occasion. You see in them the soul of the man. Where his conscience dictated and his judgment decided, there his heart was.”

It is almost shocking to hear, this close to the end, Lee’s admission that he had not expected to win the war without foreign help. It is impossible to know if he had truly believed that all along or merely found it the right thing to say to Pendleton now.

In any case, for the moment, the army marched on, but growing numbers of men simply sat down, waiting for the Union army to come collect them as prisoners, and more importantly, to take the responsibility for feeding them. Longstreet saw them falling out and apparently made no attempt to order them back into ranks. Of course he was well aware that with the surrender negotiations under way, the war was probably in its last hours and saw no good in punishing or harassing men who were merely beating the rush to give up.

As night came on, the column was approaching Appomattox Court House, three miles short of Appomattox Station. As Lee arrived in town, a messenger caught up with him, bringing Grant’s response concerning conditions of a surrender. The only condition Grant presented was that the men surrendered to him would be “disqualified” from taking up arms against the United States until “properly exchanged.”

The message continued,

I will meet you, or will designate officers to meet any officers you may name for the same purpose, at any point agreeable to you, for the purpose of arranging definitely the terms upon which the surrender of the Army of Northern Virginia will be received.

Lee responded,

In mine of yesterday, I did not intend to propose the surrender of the Army of N. Va., but to ask the terms of your proposition. To be frank, I do not think the emergency has arisen to call for the surrender of this Army, but as the restoration of peace should be the sole object of all, I desire to know whether your proposals would lead to the end. I cannot therefore meet you with a view to surrender the Army of N. Va.; but as far as your proposal may affect the C.S. forces under my command, and tend to the restoration of peace, I shall be pleased to meet you at 10 a.m. tomorrow on the old stage road to Richmond, between the picket lines of the two armies.

Shortly after the courier bearing this message left, a cavalry artillery fight broke out, and Lee soon found out that the rations he had expected had been hijacked by the Union, so whatever occurred on the coming day, whether more marching or a fight, would again be done without food for the Army of Northern Virginia. If the Union army had gotten beyond Appomattox, hidden in the dark, then the way through the bottleneck between the rivers was blocked.

In fact, General George Armstrong Custer, a cavalry commander under Sheridan, had placed his men on the only road available for Lee’s use to break out of the trap. That, by itself, would likely have been enough to seal the Army of Northern Virginia’s doom, although it would have resulted in a bloody fight. Worse, however, the second group of 40,000 Union men which had circumvented Lee’s army, and curled around so as to come from the west, were well on their way to reaching a closing position, which would even more hermetically seal off that neck of land between the rivers from use by Lee’s army.

Sheridan sent Grant a message that if that 40,000 man unit could “get up” that night, the end would have to come the next day.

Grant read Lee’s answer as indicating that Lee intended to fight to the very end. Now, an intriguing diplomatic game played out, but not directly between Grant and Lee. John Rawlins had been Grant’s most reliable aide for most of Grant’s tenure as a general, and Rawlins had always spoken plainly and frankly to his boss, especially over the issue of his personal conduct, and most particularly his drinking habits.

Now, Rawlins analyzed the letter from Lee with a lawyer’s eyes. He said Lee was asking Grant to do more than he had the authority to do, which was to arrange peace. From Lincoln, Grant only had the power to bring about the surrender of Lee’s army, or to defeat it absolutely. Peace negotiations were not within Grant’s purview and Rawlins pointed that out now. In short, he alerted Grant to the fact that Lee was trying to wheedle more from Grant than he had the right to offer, and Grant was forced to agree. Still, Grant said he must answer the letter somehow.

Your note of yesterday is received. I have no authority to treat on the subject of peace; the meeting proposed for 10 a.m. today could lead to no good. The terms upon which peace can be had are well understood. By the South laying down their arms they will hasten that most desirable event, save thousands of human lives, and hundreds of millions of property not yet destroyed. Seriously hoping that all our difficulties can be settled without the loss of another life, I subscribe myself, &c.

US Grant, Lieutenant General

While waiting for this to “take” with Lee, Grant decided to ride around the concentration of the rebels, to the “front,” or west side where Sheridan was operating, and throughout his ride, he could hear heavy guns and wondered what it meant.

After noon, Grant and his entourage stopped for a rest and on the road, approaching from behind, a rider rushed up, saluted smartly and presented an envelope, which Rawlins accepted for Grant. Reading it, Rawlins handed it to Grant, who then allowed Rawlins to read it to the others present.

April 9th, 1865

General: I received your note of this morning on the picket line, whither I had come to meet you and ascertain definitely what terms were embraced in your proposal of yesterday with reference to the surrender of this army. I now request an interview, in accordance with the offer contained in your letter of yesterday, for that purpose.

Very respectfuly, Your obt servt

R.E. Lee.

Lee had seen the end. He had 12,500 men left who could put up any kind of a fight, which barely matched just what Sheridan’s cavalry by itself could boast. Any others who could be still be called Confederates were simply present, scattered all over the countryside, barely actual members of the army any more. That morning, the last breakout attempt had occurred, which was the cause of the unidentified gunfire Grant had noted with puzzlement. Gordon’s men had charged a Union cavalry squad, and although the cavalry lost ground and a few men, when they parted, suddenly appearing behind them were two units of 15,000 thousand infantry each, waiting for Gordon’s men to come on.

It was set, this was the end, the “last ditch” the Confederates had spoken of long ago. At this hour, in this situation, no one wanted to die when there was no longer any sense to it. This was not just the last chance for any kind of a fight, this was the very last remnant of the once great Army of Northern Virginia, this group of men standing off and doubly out-manned against only a fraction of Grant’s army. This was the scenario in which, if they meant to make a fight of it, virtually every remaining Confederate man in arms under Robert E. Lee would end up dead, wounded, or captured. This was the moment when the awful arithmetic could indeed reach zero on the Confederate side. At no point in the war before this had a situation developed when an entire army stood to be eradicated, until now.

The war had evolved, in large part due to the development of weaponry, into new varieties, starting from that of double rows of men blasting away at each other from a few dozen yards away, into broken field fighting, to bayonet charges, to attacks by waves of men against fixed defenses, to trench warfare, to siege warfare, but now, the war was back to square one, in which the last battle would be fought as the first, with rows of men standing yards apart, about to blast away at each other for all the winnings.

If one last fight must occur, it would be like the first ones, men firing almost point blank. The superior numbers of the men in blue would prevail, but to many of those who had marched hard to close this trap—those literally on the front line of the Union army—this seemed the cruelest fate of all, to be the last ones killed or mutilated, in order to finish off the rebel army. Of all the times to die, this would be the most horrid.

Yet to those unaware of the negotiations taking place high in the stratosphere between their two august leaders, this coming standoff appeared to be a nightmare that could not be derailed.

The pugnacious Phil Sheridan was one who was ready for it, but then he was not one who would have to stand at the front and die at this eleventh hour. He set his cavalry men in order, off to the side, telling them that if this was the last fight, the cavalry were to dig into the left of the Confederate line and “smash” them, as if that would really be needed.

The “thing” that Sheridan had wanted to “press” was poised, the very last moments of the Army of Northern Virginia, but the final clash seemed unstoppable.

Lee asked what was the status of the army, and with everything ready for the last fight, but frozen in space and time for a few heartbeats, Gordon sent a message saying he could do nothing if Longstreet could not get up to support him. But the other 40,000 Union men were coming from behind, to completely enclose the pitiful remnant of the Army of Northern Virginia, and when that note reached Lee, he announced that there was no more left to be done but to go see General Grant.

At this time, Lee still planned to meet Grant between the lines, but first he counseled again with Longstreet.

All that came of that talk was the recognition that surrender was inevitable. On the way to that meeting in the field, Lee received the message from Grant in which he denied such a meeting would be useful. And now it was that Lee wrote the note asking for an interview on the issue of surrender, the note Grant would receive and hand to Rawlins to read aloud.

Lee believed, from the tone of Grant’s note, that he faced unconditional surrender, but he was out of options.

The events that followed were confusing to most of those involved on the ground near Appomattox Station, and if certain hotheads had gotten their way, such as Sheridan, the last, needless slaughter would still have occurred.

In the standoff in the field, the Confederate commander on the scene, Gordon, asked for a cease fire until the situation could be better understood, and during this lull, Gordon’s troops had fallen back into the town, opening some distance between the two lines, although they were still ultimately surrounded. Sheridan heard of the cease fire that had been asked for from Gordon’s side and was not pleased, and prepared to ignore it, claiming that had it come an hour later he would have “bagged” them all. But General E.O.C. Ord, on the spot in command of the infantry, who outranked Sheridan, honored the white flag.

Above Ord however was Meade, and from his position behind the lines, unaware of the very high level negotiations going on, he sent orders to prepare the infantry to move against the remaining force. Skirmishers began advancing and Lee himself tried to open a new cease fire, announcing that it was for the sake of surrender. The Union commanders on the scene, however, indicated they would not stop, so Lee and his staff withdrew.

Longstreet tried to brace his men for the Union attack that seemed inevitable, but word finally reached Meade of the diplomatic negotiations in process and he authorized a one hour hold. He also passed word to Lee through the lines, recommending a different route he should take to find Grant.

Lee rode to the front lines and composed another note calling for an “interview” at Grant’s choice of time and location, “to discuss the terms of the surrender of this army.”

Lee joined Longstreet while they waited and Lee fretted that Grant might have stiffened his terms. Now, however, Longstreet tried to convince him that Grant would demand no more nor less than Lee himself would do were the roles reversed. Lee could not be mollified, however. He sent his aide ahead to find a place for the meeting, which would be in the nearby town of Appomattox Courthouse. He also arrayed himself in his best available dress uniform, prepared to hand over his sword and be arrested.

Wilmer MacLean had owned a farm at the site of First Manassas and had moved out because of the battle and had settled on this town of Appomattox Courthouse for a home, because it seemed far out of the way of armies, a place he could live on with his family in peace. Now, it was in his new home here, in Appomattox, that Lee and Grant sat down to complete the surrender.

Known since the capture of Fort Donelson as Unconditional Surrender Grant, the general-in-chief surprised Lee with extremely lenient terms, perhaps even more so than Longstreet had anticipated:

General:

In accordance with the substance of my letter to you of the 8th inst., I propose to receive the surrender of the Army of N. Va. on the following terms, to wit: Rolls of all the officers and men to be made in duplicate. One copy to be given to an officer designated by me, the other to be retained by such officer or officers as you may designate. The officers to give their individual paroles not to take up arms against the Government of the United States until properly exchanged, and each company or regimental commander sign a like parole for the men of their commands. The arms, artillery and public property to be parked and stacked, and turned over to the officer appointed by me to receive them. This will not embrace the side-arms of the officers, nor their private horses or baggage. This done, each officer and man will be allowed to return to their homes, not to be disturbed by United States authority so long as they observe their paroles and the laws in force where they may reside.

When Lee asked about the horses of the Confederate cavalry, which, unlike federal horses, belonged personally to the riders, Grant caused him alarm at first by noting that he had not stipulated they would be allowed to keep them. Then he just as quickly assured Lee that although he had not written it in the terms, they would be allowed to keep the horses just the same. Grant additionally queried Lee over the number of rations his starving men required and arranged to provide them.

Lee stated he had no real idea how many men were left, but when Grant suggested 25,000 rations could be made available, Lee thought that would be ample. (Longstreet would tally up all the men who surrendered and came to a number of over 28,500, but above the 12,500 actually able to fight, the others were invalids, many being those lying at the side of the road waiting for the end.)

Grant and Sherman had carried out frank discussions with Lincoln in earlier meetings when it was obvious the Union was on the way to winning the war. Lincoln had made it clear he intended to conduct leniency toward the South upon surrender, going so far as to unofficially but unquestionably indicate his wish that Jefferson Davis would be allowed to leave the country, uncaught and unpunished. Grant thus knew the president’s mind and acted accordingly as he wrote the surrender terms. From Mexico, the war in that country two decades earlier, Grant had once written his wife Julia that he believed in fighting hard with an enemy, then when the war was over, making friends. With his surrender terms to Lee, Grant had taken a major step now in Wilmer MacLean’s parlor toward that purpose.

Out on the field, the two armies, staring at each other from yards away, sat down in the interregnum of the cease fire and when word arrived the surrender was done, spontaneously wandered into each others’ lines and there were accounts of the Rebels greeting and welcoming the Union men as if they were of the same outfits. The men in blue opened their haversacks and shared food with the starving ex-enemies even before the rations arranged for in the surrender were provided, but such immediate apparent cessation of animosity would not carry over to the two sections of the nation as a whole.

The war was not officially at an end, but it was effectively over when Robert E. Lee walked out of the MacLean house with articles of surrender signed. Joseph Johnston would meet in days with Sherman and receive even more amicable terms than Grant had presented to Lee, but the federal government rejected them, forcing Sherman to meet with Johnston again and toughen the conditions somewhat. Unfortunately, in that period, the great man, Abraham Lincoln had been assassinated and the new president, Andrew Johnson, would not uphold Lincoln’s wish for leniency toward the South, and that attitude begin with Sherman’s original terms as offered to Joseph Johnston.

Remaining were a couple more surrenders to be completed across the South, of even smaller, but no more real fighting would occur. Less than a month later, despite President Lincoln’s desires, Jefferson Davis and his cabinet would fall into Union hands.

The war was over but the long, terrible peace to come had only just begun.

Afterward

Many attempts have been made to explain why the Confederacy lost the war, and it is true there were avenues by which it might have achieved independence if certain scenarios had developed. On the other hand, ample reasons exist and have been pointed out in these pages why the Confederacy could easily have lost even sooner than April of 1865.

More controversy surrounds the question of why the South did lose the war than around the manner in which the war began. On one hand, it can be pointed out that Davis and Lee did manage to keep their side afloat in the war long enough for Lincoln to be defeated in 1864, but to paraphrase Grant’s jovial comment in the Wilderness, prior to the opening of that battle in 1864, Lincoln did not become a party to the agreement.

Perhaps much of the reason Lincoln won re-election in 1864 was because the soldiers themselves voted. McClellan’s prediction that the Emancipation Proclamation would turn the army against Lincoln had failed, with McClellan himself the victim of the soldiers’ loyalty to Lincoln. Another main reason Lincoln won must have been the fact that the Northerners were as steadfastly behind Lincoln at that point as the Southerners were behind their cause. And a final reason Lincoln won was likely due to the fact that by November, an end to the war could be seen in the not so far distance, an ending that would save the Union, and rather than waste all the lives lost so far, the people of the North were willing to lose more to finish what had been started.

Is it possible to pinpoint one distinct factor to account for the loss by the Confederacy, or was it necessary for many factors coming together to all conspire against the South?

Before that can be answered, something must be considered. Either the Confederacy lost by a wide margin, and never entertained a true chance to prevail, or the margin of victory was in fact quite narrow when all factors were considered.

In the first case, then it does not matter which killing blow ended the hopes of Confederacy triumph, because one thing or another would have sealed their doom and it would be impossible to pinpoint a single such factor.

On the other hand, if the margin was slim, some single key factor had to have been, in coarse parlance, the last straw.

Finding or selecting an ultimate cause for the loss of freedom by the South does not mean the fatal factor came into play only at the end of the war. It does not mean the siege by Grant was the deciding factor. The siege only completed the act of attrition in which the Confederacy ended with two few men in arms to defend itself, but in that case, the ultimate outcome was preordained by numbers and the actual completion of that process of attrition could have come in other ways.

This work will not advocate for either case, that is, that on one side, the South was pre-ordained to lose, or on the other, its margin of loss was so slim that some single factor made the difference. The very name of the work, however, suggests the author’s own tendency, that is, to believe the overbearing factor was the difference in manpower, North versus South, combined with the reckless expenditure of soldiers by the Confederate leadership. All other things being equal, as the saying goes, by that criteria, the South was always doomed.

An intangible exists, however, that cannot be ignored: rather than barely winning after four years, it has been strongly suggested in this work that on numerous occasions, the Union could have and reasonably should have defeated the Confederate armies far sooner than April of 1865, had in each case one decision or action been taken differently. On and on, this list goes, from Patterson’s failure to prevent Johnston joining Beauregard at First Bull Run, to any number of failures by McClellan to defeat the Army of Northern Virginia, to Meade’s failure to finish Lee after Gettysburg and so on. By this theory, the Confederacy survived far longer, living on borrowed time, than it should have and only by the poor quality of several federal generals did the Confederacy in fact last long enough for the 1864 election to come into play.

That is the author’s opinion, but the reader is encouraged to consider all those things which may or may not have been equal and come to his/her own conclusion of why the South lost the war. Indeed, that is one of the joys, if one may call it such, of studying the war at all, to obtain the information necessary to form one’s own opinions on such unanswerable questions.

Let a point be offered, however, with regard to the other chances that the South may have had to win, other than the disparity in manpower.

One can argue that the Confederacy in fact survived, with the total number of men who ever entered combat, much longer than it ought to have, only by luck. Had Lincoln made just one better choice of overall commander at the beginning of the war, the Confederacy would not have seen its second winter. Had Lincoln not continued to choose badly all the way up to 1864 in his supreme uniformed commanders, the war could have ended at several points, to the detriment of the South. Even had France and England interceded, either by recognizing the South, or by making some small but direct military intervention, no guarantee exists that the South would have ended up independent.

Had either the 1862 or the 1864 elections gone against Lincoln’s interests, no proof exists that the war would not have continued. Even given McClellan’s own tendencies, had he been elected, no proof exists that he would have ended the war to the total benefit of the Confederacy.

Yes, in these cases, the indications are that the South would have become independent but there is no absolute certainty. Even if McClellan had won the election in 1864, he would not take office until a month before the war in fact ended. Whether he could have dared call Grant off, and how Grant would in fact have responded is never to be known. Grant might have used his army as some had feared McClellan himself might do earlier, to defy the new government, under McClellan himself, and finish the defeat of the South, then turn and demand that the government accept the terms he and Sherman presented to the South.

That may be farfetched, but it is not provable as impossible, and thus must be considered possible.

No perfect record of the total number of men who fought on each side has been compiled, but best estimates place the Southern count over the entire war at 850,000, and the Union at 2,100,000 men. That being so, it seems almost unnecessary to seek other factors to explain why the Union outlasted the South. Rather, the question that should be posed is just what could the South have done to possibly overcome such a disparity and win, without outside help, no matter how incompetently the Union fought through much of the war, at least in the East?

Many had argued that because no nation had ever put down a rebellion of the scope of the Confederate rebellion, and especially when the rebels held so much physical space that the mother country must recapture, it was the Union that had no chance to win the war. That argument failed to address the fact that no mother country had access to such resources, in men, agriculture, and industry, to support it against its rebellious section. Indeed, the Union did actually expand its agricultural and industrial capability in the midst of such a wide war.

The model of the Revolutionary War does not stand up well to the argument that such a large rebellion could not be put down successfully. The British had much more going against them in trying to defeat the colonists than the North had in defeating the South, not the least being the distance, an entire ocean, over which they must transport troops and supplies, and a communications gap between the fighting forces and the capital, in London that was weeks in duration. Still, were it not for the intervention of the French, it is most likely the United States would have remained a Commonwealth nation. That is to say, those who argue that the inability of the British to defeat so large a rebellion as an argument that the United States ought not to have been able to defeat the Confederacy are not considering all the factors.

In the Civil War, the United States did not have to sail across the ocean to bring all its forces to bear. The United States was not in fact fighting two wars simultaneously as England was during much of the Revolutionary War. The technological advances that made warfare a different kind of event, between the Revolution and the Civil War, all favored the Union and multiplied, in effect, its advantages over the South.

The very society and economic systems of the two sections favored the North. This is not a deliberately chauvinistic comment, it is fact, that the South was far less diversified in culture, economics, agriculture, and industry and had far less in those spheres to draw upon from one area of its landmass to another, compared to the North.

The list can go on, but the point is that the Union in fact had better reason to believe it could defeat such a large rebellion and territory in rebellion than even its own people did believe in the beginning. In fact, much of the difficulties of the Northern effort revolved around the great differences in opinion and attitude among its people over the whole society, compared to those of the more politically monolithic South. Yet even those differences were eventually overcome.

If the South had an advantage, it was the factor of fighting from both a physical and mental defensive position. The South had more to fight for, in its desperation, trying to survive, than the North did. The concern of most in the North over losing the Southern states to independence could not compare to the desperation of the Southern states in feeling that if they lost the war, they lost everything that mattered to them. Just as has been pointed out in these pages, to assault a force dug in behind strong defensive works, an attacking force ought to have been three times as large, one could reckon the entire South to be dug in behind a grand defensive works, as much in a mental/emotional way as in a physical way. Never mind the Unionists scattered among the South, and the slaves, the power of the angry, determined...one might hazard to say fanatical...planter society was a formidable object, almost a physical object on the side of the Confederate cause, that the Union must overcome.

The fragmented attitude of the whole North was a weakness in this respect, in prosecuting the war, and that societal fragmentation had to be overcome by other factors, and of course was in fact.

All in all, one is left with the notion that the real question should not be why the Confederacy did lose the war, but rather that of what factors caused the Union to fail for so long to make use of its huge advantages and end the war in a much more bearable time frame.

And rather than dwelling on their lost cause, which is still done by many not just in the South but around the nation by many to this day, the people of the South would have served themselves better to accept a quick defeat and a quick return to the Union rather than put themselves in for the nightmarish emotional, economical, and political struggle that is also not over even today.

Indeed, the failure of entrenched Southern-minded people, no matter where they actually dwell in the landmass of the United States, to accept defeat in the Civil War, which means to accept loss of the Confederacy, still haunts the face of the nation to this day, certainly in a political way. It is difficult to surrender the suspicion that had the war ended much sooner and with far less horror, hatred, destruction, and certainly death among the Southern family of humans, the attitude among proclaimed Southerners even today might be far different and the political landscape correspondingly different than it is. Whether that is for the better or worse is for every individual to decide. Still, it is difficult to see any good that came for anyone, survivor or victim, for the prolongation of the war one minute more than necessary.

APPENDIX I

A FURTHER EXAMINATION OF GETTYSBURG

The controversy surrounding James Longstreet’s actions at Gettysburg seem to revolve around his activities after the war, in which he cooperated with Federal reconstruction operations and served under President Grant diplomatically.

The failures of Lee, especially but not confined to Gettysburg, could never be admitted by the Lost Cause supporters, and therefore a scapegoat was required and who better than someone they considered a turncoat after the war. Among others, Longstreet was quickly seized upon for that role. In some circles, he was called “the most controversial Confederate general.”

By no means was Longstreet perfect, and the following is not intended as an apology for him; every general made mistakes during the war and he was no different. The so dearly revered Stonewall Jackson failed miserably at times during the Seven Days battles, but that is seldom pointed out by Southern sympathizers, probably in large part due to his untimely death.

The actions of Robert E. Lee, with regards to his competence as a general, are part of the issue surrounding Longstreet at Gettysburg, and while Lee was admittedly a great general overall, he had his moments of clear failure, and was often bailed out by the even more dismal generalship of his opponents. The point is, no general in the Civil War was even close to perfect, and Longstreet may well have been as able and competent as any and more so than most.

As the supreme commander on the field, however, when Lee failed, he was failing not just on behalf of a corps, as Longstreet did, but for the entire army, so his failures were of far graver impact for the army and the Confederacy as a whole. The purpose of this discussion, however, is not to fix blame for the loss at Gettysburg but rather to fully explore the issues from both sides—Lee’s and his defenders, and Longstreet and his—all in the name of more thoroughly understanding Gettysburg and its part in the war.

To set up the first stage of the scenario, Longstreet described the situation as he saw it:

I said, "We could not call the enemy to position better suited to our plans. All that we have to do is to file around his left and secure good ground between him and his capital." This, when said, was thought to be the opinion of my commander as much as my own. I was not a little surprised, therefore, at his impatience, as, striking the air with his closed hand, he said, " If he is there to-morrow I will attack him."

In his official account, General Lee reported,—

" It had not been intended to deliver a general battle so far from our base unless attacked. But coming unexpectedly upon the whole Federal army, to withdraw through the mountains with our extensive trains would have been difficult and dangerous."

When he rode away from me in the forenoon he made no mention of his absent cavalry, nor did he indicate that it was not within call. So I was at a loss to understand his nervous condition, and supported the suggestion so far as to say, " If he is there to-morrow it will be because he wants you to attack," and queried, " If that height has become the objective, why not take it at once ? We have forty thousand men, less the casualties of the day, he cannot have more than twenty thousand." Then it was that I heard of the wanderings of the cavalry and the cause of his uneven temper. So vexed was he at the halt of the Imboden cavalry at Hancock, in the opening of the campaign, that he was losing sight of Pickett's brigades as a known quantity for battle. His manner suggested to me that a little reflection would be better than further discussion, and right soon he suggested to the commander of the Second Corps to take Cemetery Hill if he thought it practicable, but the subordinate did not care to take upon himself a fight that his chief would not venture to order.

This last line is critical to much of the controversy, especially the first day of Gettysburg. Lee would later place some blame on Ewell for not attacking Culp’s Hill, despite his having not positively ordered him to carry out the attack. If Lee had intended the “suggestion” as an order, he had failed to make it clear enough to Ewell.

This is how Longstreet explained that point:

Colonel Taylor claims that the attack by the Confederate right should have been sooner, and should have met the enemy back on his first or original line, and before Little Round Top was occupied. But Little Round Top was not occupied in force until after my battle opened, and General Sickles's advance to his forward lines was made in consequence of the Confederate threatening, and would have been sooner or later according as that threatening was made. He calls the message of General Lee to General Ewell on the afternoon of the 1st an order. General Lee says,—

" The strong position which the enemy had assumed could not be attacked without danger of exposing the four divisions present' exhausted by a long and bloody struggle, to overwhelming numbers of fresh troops. General Ewell was thereupon instructed to carry the hill occupied by the enemy if he found it practicable."

It is the custom of military service to accept instructions of a commander as orders, but when they are coupled with conditions that transfer the responsibility of battle and defeat to the subordinate, they are not orders, and General Ewell was justifiable in not making attack that his commander would not order, and the censure of his failure is unjust and very ungenerous.

By the end of the first day at Gettysburg, the First of July, Lee had issued no orders about what was to happen the next day. By then he had only spoken, as related above, vaguely about Culp’s Hill.

When Longstreet reported to Lee before dawn on the second day, July 2, Lee had still issued no plans about that day’s action. However Lee had personally taken a ride to the east, around the end of the Union lines at Cemetery Hill to observe the situation, pondering in which direction he wanted to make his grand attack. He was advised by Jubal Early that the other side, the right side of his line, which was the far southern end, would offer the better chance, so he dispatched a captain of engineers named Johnston to assess that line.

Engineers, in the military of the time, had the job of studying the land and evaluating how it could be fought on, how defenses could be set up, how artillery could be used, and that was what Johnson would be looking for, but inherent in that job was also the assessment of where the enemy’s strengths and weakness lay.

Based on what Johnson told Lee, and what he had seen on the left, it was not until eleven in the morning that Lee gave any orders about the day’s attack. Accusations against Longstreet include that he was ordered to carry out an attack early in the morning, in the hours around daybreak, and failed.

This is only a part of Longstreet’s rebuttal to that accusation:

Letters from the active members of General Lee's staff and from his military secretary, General A. L. Long, show that the sunrise battle was not ordered, and a letter from Colonel Fairfax shows that the claim that it was so ordered was set up after General Lee's death.

Let Longstreet describe the situation at the time that the attack was supposed to be made, according to those defending Lee after the fact:

Gettysburg—Second Day

THE stars were shining brightly on the morning of the 2d when I reported at General Lee's head-quarters and asked for orders. After a time Generals McLaws and Hood, with their staffs, rode up. After sunrise their commands filed off the road to the right and rested. The Washington Artillery was with them, and about nine o'clock, after an all-night march, Alexander's batteries were up as far as Willoughby's Run, where he parked and fed, and rode to head-quarters to report.

As indicated by these movements, General Lee was not ready with his plans. He had not heard from his cavalry, nor of the movements of the enemy further than the information from a despatch captured during the night, that the Fifth Corps was in camp about five miles from Gettysburg, and the Twelfth Corps was reported near Culp's Hill. As soon as it was light enough to see, however, the enemy was found in position on his formidable heights awaiting us.

About nine o'clock he rode to his left to be assured of the position there, and of the general temper of affairs in that quarter. After viewing the field, he held conference with the corps and division commanders. They preferred to accept his judgment and orders, except General Early, who claimed to have learned of the topographical features of the country during his march towards York, and recommended the right of the line as the point at which strong battle should be made. About ten o'clock General Lee returned to his head-quarters, but his engineer who had been sent to reconnoitre on his right had not come back. To be at hand for orders, I remained with the troops at his head-quarters. The infantry had arms stacked; the artillery was at rest.

That is enough to set aside the complaint against Longstreet that he failed to bring about battle at dawn or any time in the morning.

Another accusation is that one of Longstreet’s divisions, under Evander Law, arrived late and caused the attack that Lee insisted upon to be carried out even later than morning.

At the intimation that the battle would be opened on the right by part of the First Corps, Colonel Alexander was asked to act as director of artillery, and sent to view the field in time to assign the batteries as they were up. It was eleven o'clock when General Lee's order was issued, but he had ordered Law's brigade to its division, and a wait of thirty minutes was necessary for it to get up. Law had received his orders at three in the morning, and had marched twenty-three miles. The battle-ground was still five miles off by the route of march, but Law completed his march of twenty-eight miles in eleven hours,— the best marching done in either army to reach the field of Gettysburg.

Lee insisted that the attack could not begin until Law’s men were present. Therefore the only complaint he could have made about the lateness of their arrival concerned the lateness that they were set forth on their march, and for this, he blamed Longstreet. In response, Longstreet claimed that he received no order from Lee indicating that Law’s division was needed in any attack, and the only reason Law arrived as promptly as he did was because Longstreet on his own had foreseen the need for him and summoned him on quickly. Thus it was that in two ways, Lee was further to blame for the lateness of the onset of the attack, in failing to call for Law, and then in waiting until he arrived. The only alternative to that argument is that Longstreet was not honest about his part in it and there is no indication this is true.

The entire question of when the attack began, however, was actually a smoke screen for the bigger issues: the wisdom of carrying out the attacks at all, on both the second and third days of the Gettysburg battle.

Longstreet was accused of dragging his feet, of not acting crisply in setting up the attacks and carrying them out and the accusations, as Longstreet expressed it, were “disingenuous.”

Longstreet’s own charges, about the failures of the attack on the second day revolve around the issue of support he did nor did not receive for the attack.

First, on day two, the Second of July, Hood, one of Longstreet’s division commanders, found the ground in front of him to be in very poor condition for conducting an advance and assault, and several times he requested permission to shift to the right, where he would have better ground, and each time Lee refused to allow it. Longstreet says that Lee never showed his face in that part of the field, and remained at his quarters five miles away, thus had no first hand knowledge of conditions. Had he checked out the situation, he would have seen the need of Hood’s shift and the attack might have turned out differently.

Now, for the harsher charges that Longstreet makes. He says that during the entire second day attack, when Lee promised support from the Second and Third Corps, those corps did nothing until after dark, leaving the brunt of the entire attack on Longstreet’s 17,000 men, against Meade’s forces, now reinforced to 60,000. This does not even take into account Longstreet’s urging the day before that any attack be made while Meade’s presence was much smaller.

He was saying that Lee called for an attack, failed to make decisions or allow decisions by commanders on the spot to be made that would have saved the day, and then failed to use all the men at his disposal to insure the attack was supported. In a way, this sounds more like McClellan at Antietam than Robert E. Lee.

Consider the third, fateful day, the Third of July. In the morning, Lee set up orders calling for another assault, this time on the Union center, and he initially intended to lead with McClaw’s and Hood’s units, which were depleted from the day before. Longstreet pointed out that Meade now had men on the right side of his line that would tear up his own left, and that Hood and McClaw needed to be kept out of the larger assault in order to fend off these forces to the right. Lee prescribed that the great assault would be carried out by George Pickett’s men, who had not seen fighting yet at Gettysburg, and were well rested, augmented by a few thrown-in units, to create an assault force of only 15,000 men. Meantime, the added men on Meade’s side had raised his numbers to 75,000.

Longstreet was astounded. If 17,000 had been unable to beat 60,000 the day before, why did Lee believe 15,000 would now beat 75,000, and do so by crossing a wide, open field longer than the one the Union had been forced to cross at Fredericksburg?

Aside from the overriding issue Longstreet had made, that the Confederates should not be fighting at Gettysburg at all but ought to have gone around Meade and forced him to chase them, this was the next biggest argument Longstreet made concerning Gettysburg.

Lee grew petulant and refused to listen any further and simply ordered the attack and that was that.

Very reasonably, Longstreet made clear he was not supportive of the attack, and since two thirds of this force that would carry it out was made up of men from other corps, some other commander who was more agreeable to the assault in the first place, such as Jubal Early, should lead it. This addressed later accusations that Longstreet did not have his whole heart in the attack. Well he did not, he admitted it, and he tried to put the charge in the hands of someone who did believe in it.

Lee was intransigent on the subject, however, insisting Longstreet must lead it. Longstreet further intimated that the very best person to direct his attack was Lee himself.

Fitzhugh Lee, nephew of the general and one of Longstreet’s greatest critics, later indicated, long after the battle, that Lee again never showed his face where the assault force was being set up, and Longstreet called that “a singular indifference” on Lee’s part. How Longstreet’s lack of enthusiasm for the assault was worse than Lee’s detachment is hard to understand.

Much was made of the “snit” which was attributed to Longstreet in this period leading up to what became known as “Pickett’s Charge.” According to Longstreet, Lee ordered Longstreet’s artillery chief, Colonel Porter Alexander, to bombard the Union line until in his judgment, the federal troops and artillery had been thrown back on their heels as much as possible, then he was to signal to Longstreet that the assault should begin. Alexander, however, confided to Longstreet that he feared he would be unable to tell the effects of his bombardment because of the smoke that would cover the field and the fact that the targets were beyond a ridge out of his view. He added that he only had enough ammunition for one sustained barrage and if that did not do the job of softening up the Union line, there was no second chance. Alexander asked Longstreet if there were any alternative to his orders from Lee.

Longstreet said there was no alternative, the orders stood from Lee and in essence, indicated they both were stuck with it.

Indeed, after that famous barrage that boomed across the field for minutes, up and down the line of cannon, Alexander felt he had not done enough damage to the Union, pointing out that eighteen Union guns were still firing from the cemetery, but he told Pickett that if he were going to call for the great charge, he might as well do it immediately.

This was a famous moment over which much has been made. Receiving the word from Alexander that the time had come, Pickett reported to Longstreet for permission to initiate the assault. Well aware of the horrible disaster about to occur, Longstreet admitted that he could not bring himself to say the words necessary to authorize the charge and could do no more than nod.

Pickett’s Charge, of course, famously failed, and the Confederate hopes broke against the rock wall on Cemetery Ridge.

The denouement to this came in later years, in letters Lee wrote to Longstreet and others, in which he admitted that had he followed Longstreet’s advice and left the field, cutting south across Meade’s lines of supply, it would have been the right course to take.

Longstreet quoted the following, contributed to a Blackwood’s Magazine about Lee’s feelings:

“But Lee’s inaction after Fredericksburg was, as we have called it, an unhappy or negative blunder. Undoubtedly the greatest positive blunder of which he was ever guilty was the unnecessary onslaught which he gratuitously made against the strong position into which, by accident, General Meade fell back at Gettysburg. We have good reason for saying that during the five years of calm reflection which General Lee passed at Lexington, after the conclusion of the American war, his maladroit manipulation of the Confederate army during the Gettysburg campaign was to him a matter of ceaseless self-reproach.

“‘If,’ said he, on many occasions, ‘I had taken General Longstreet’s advice on the eve of the second day of the battle of Gettysburg, and filed off the left corps of my army behind the right Corps, in the direction of Washington and Baltimore, along the Emmitsburg road, the Confederates would to-day be a free people.’”

It makes a fascinating speculation, whether, by just slipping out in the night and heading south, Lee’s army could have indeed moved completely ahead of Meade’s to reach Washington first, beating the forces Meade had left behind, without having to turn sharply into the nearest section of Virginia for material support. It was possible, but whether it worked out exactly that way or not, certainly, as Nathan Bedford Forrest might have said, the Confederate army would have “put the skeer” into the people of Maryland and Washington itself, and could by all means claim to have carried out a successful raid into the north. Perhaps, just perhaps, that scare would in fact have caused Lincoln to summon all the forces at Grant’s disposal in the West away from Vicksburg to come save Washington.

Perhaps, furthermore, after bypassing Gettysburg, Lee could have been the first to reach favorable high ground and turned to fight Meade, forcing him to either make a costly charge of his own, or let him get away again, and in so doing, possibly cut Meade off from his own supplies and do great damage to him in detail.

APPENDIX II

CONTROVERSY BETWEEN SHERMAN AND HOOD OVER GEORGIA AND ATLANTA

Sherman opened the issue by sending the following message to Hood after the Battle of Atlanta:

HEADQUARTERS MILITARY DIVISION OF THE MISSISSIPPI IN THE FIELD, ATLANTA, GEORGIA, September 7, 1864.

General HOOD, commanding Confederate Army.

GENERAL: I have deemed it to the interest of the United States that the citizens now residing in Atlanta should remove, those who prefer it to go south, and the rest north. For the latter I can provide food and transportation to points of their election in Tennessee, Kentucky, or farther north. For the former I can provide transportation by cars as far as Rough and Ready, and also wagons; but, that their removal may be made with as little discomfort as possible, it will be necessary for you to help the families from Rough and Ready to the care at Lovejoy’s. If you consent, I will undertake to remove all the families in Atlanta who prefer to go south to Rough and Ready, with all their movable effects, viz., clothing, trunks, reasonable furniture, bedding, etc., with their servants, white and black, with the proviso that no force shall be used toward the blacks, one way or the other. If they want to go with their masters or mistresses, they may do so; otherwise they will be sent away, unless they be men, when they may be employed by our quartermaster. Atlanta is no place for families or non-combatants, and I have no desire to send them north if you will assist in conveying them south. If this proposition meets your views, I will consent to a truce in the neighborhood of Rough and Ready, stipulating that any wagons, horses, animals, or persons sent there for the purposes herein stated, shall in no manner be harmed or molested; you in your turn agreeing that any care, wagons, or carriages, persons or animals sent to the same point, shall not be interfered with. Each of us might send a guard of, say, one hundred men, to maintain order, and limit the truce to, say, two days after a certain time appointed.

I have authorized the mayor to choose two citizens to convey to you this letter, with such documents as the mayor may forward in explanation, and shall await your reply. I have the honor to be your obedient servant.

W. T. SHERMAN, Major-General commanding.

Hood’s indignant response led to even more intriguing exchanges.

Major General W. T. SHERMAN, commanding United States Forces in Georgia

GENERAL: Your letter of yesterday’s date, borne by James M. Ball and James R. Crew, citizens of Atlanta, is received. You say therein, “I deem it to be to the interest of the United States that the citizens now residing in Atlanta should remove,” etc. I do not consider that I have any alternative in this matter. I therefore accept your proposition to declare a truce of two days, or such time as may be necessary to accomplish the purpose mentioned, and shall render all assistance in my power to expedite the transportation of citizens in this direction. I suggest that a staff-officer be appointed by you to superintend the removal from the city to Rough and Ready, while I appoint a like officer to control their removal farther south; that a guard of one hundred men be sent by either party as you propose, to maintain order at that place, and that the removal begin on Monday next.

And now, sir, permit me to say that the unprecedented measure you propose transcends, in studied and ingenious cruelty, all acts ever before brought to my attention in the dark history of war.

In the name of God and humanity, I protest, believing that you will find that you are expelling from their homes and firesides the wives and children of a brave people. I am, general, very respectfully, your obedient servant,

J. B. HOOD, General.

HEADQUARTERS MILITARY DIVISION OF THE MISSISSIPPI IN THE FIELD, ATLANTA, GEORGIA, September 10, 1864.

General J. B. HOOD, commanding Army of Tennessee, Confederate Army.

GENERAL: I have the honor to acknowledge the receipt of your letter of this date, at the hands of Messrs. Ball and Crew, consenting to the arrangements I had proposed to facilitate the removal south of the people of Atlanta, who prefer to go in that direction. I inclose you a copy of my orders, which will, I am satisfied, accomplish my purpose perfectly.

You style the measures proposed “unprecedented,” and appeal to the dark history of war for a parallel, as an act of “studied and ingenious cruelty.” It is not unprecedented; for General Johnston himself very wisely and properly removed the families all the way from Dalton down, and I see no reason why Atlanta should be excepted. Nor is it necessary to appeal to the dark history of war, when recent and modern examples are so handy. You yourself burned dwelling-houses along your parapet, and I have seen to-day fifty houses that you have rendered uninhabitable because they stood in the way of your forts and men. You defended Atlanta on a line so close to town that every cannon-shot and many musket-shots from our line of investment, that overshot their mark, went into the habitations of women and children. General Hardee did the same at Jonesboro, and General Johnston did the same, last summer, at Jackson, Mississippi. I have not accused you of heartless cruelty, but merely instance these cases of very recent occurrence, and could go on and enumerate hundreds of others, and challenge any fair man to judge which of us has the heart of pity for the families of a “brave people.”

I say that it is kindness to these families of Atlanta to remove them now, at once, from scenes that women and children should not be exposed to, and the “brave people” should scorn to commit their wives and children to the rude barbarians who thus, as you say, violate the laws of war, as illustrated in the pages of its dark history.

In the name of common-sense, I ask you not to appeal to a just God in such a sacrilegious manner. You who, in the midst of peace and prosperity, have plunged a nation into war—dark and cruel war—who dared and badgered us to battle, insulted our flag, seized our arsenals and forts that were left in the honorable custody of peaceful ordnance-sergeants, seized and made “prisoners of war” the very garrisons sent to protect your people against negroes and Indians, long before any overt act was committed by the (to you) hated Lincoln Government; tried to force Kentucky and Missouri into rebellion, spite of themselves; falsified the vote of Louisiana; turned loose your privateers to plunder unarmed ships; expelled Union families by the thousands, burned their houses, and declared, by an act of your Congress, the confiscation of all debts due Northern men for goods had and received! Talk thus to the marines, but not to me, who have seen these things, and who will this day make as much sacrifice for the peace and honor of the South as the best-born Southerner among you! If we must be enemies, let us be men, and fight it out as we propose to do, and not deal in arch hypocritical appeals to God and humanity. God will judge us in due time, and he will pronounce whether it be more humane to fight with a town full of women and the families of a brave people at our back or to remove them in time to places of safety among their own friends and people. I am, very respectfully, your obedient servant,

W. T. SHERMAN, Major-General commanding.

HEADQUARTERS ARMY OF THE TENNESSEE September 12, 1864

Major-General W. T, SHERMAN, commanding Military Division of the Mississippi.

GENERAL: I have the honor to acknowledge the receipt of your letter of the 9th inst., with its inclosure in reference to the women, children, and others, whom you have thought proper to expel from their homes in the city of Atlanta. Had you seen proper to let the matter rest there, I would gladly have allowed your letter to close this correspondence, and, without your expressing it in words, would have been willing to believe that, while “the interests of the United States,” in your opinion, compelled you to an act of barbarous cruelty, you regretted the necessity, and we would have dropped the subject; but you have chosen to indulge in statements which I feel compelled to notice, at least so far as to signify my dissent, and not allow silence in regard to them to be construed as acquiescence.

I see nothing in your communication which induces me to modify the language of condemnation with which I characterized your order. It but strengthens me in the opinion that it stands “preeminent in the dark history of war for studied and ingenious cruelty.” Your original order was stripped of all pretenses; you announced the edict for the sole reason that it was “to the interest of the United States.” This alone you offered to us and the civilized world as an all-sufficient reason for disregarding the laws of God and man. You say that “General Johnston himself very wisely and properly removed the families all the way from Dalton down.” It is due to that gallant soldier and gentleman to say that no act of his distinguished career gives the least color to your unfounded aspersions upon his conduct. He depopulated no villages, nor towns, nor cities, either friendly or hostile. He offered and extended friendly aid to his unfortunate fellow-citizens who desired to flee from your fraternal embraces. You are equally unfortunate in your attempt to find a justification for this act of cruelty, either in the defense of Jonesboro, by General Hardee, or of Atlanta, by myself. General Hardee defended his position in front of Jonesboro at the expense of injury to the houses; an ordinary, proper, and justifiable act of war. I defended Atlanta at the same risk and cost. If there was any fault in either case, it was your own, in not giving notice, especially in the case of Atlanta, of your purpose to shell the town, which is usual in war among civilized nations. No inhabitant was expelled from his home and fireside by the orders of General Hardee or myself, and therefore your recent order can find no support from the conduct of either of us. I feel no other emotion other than pain in reading that portion of your letter which attempts to justify your shelling Atlanta without notice under pretense that I defended Atlanta upon a line so close to town that every cannon-shot and many musket-balls from your line of investment, that overshot their mark, went into the habitations of women and children. I made no complaint of your firing into Atlanta in any way you thought proper. I make none now, but there are a hundred thousand witnesses that you fired into the habitations of women and children for weeks, firing far above and miles beyond my line of defense. I have too good an opinion, founded both upon observation and experience, of the skill of your artillerists, to credit the insinuation that they for several weeks unintentionally fired too high for my modest field-works, and slaughtered women and children by accident and want of skill.

The residue of your letter is rather discussion. It opens a wide field for the discussion of questions which I do not feel are committed to me. I am only a general of one of the armies of the Confederate States, charged with military operations in the field, under the direction of my superior officers, and I am not called upon to discuss with you the causes of the present war, or the political questions which led to or resulted from it. These grave and important questions have been committed to far abler hands than mine, and I shall only refer to them so far as to repel any unjust conclusion which might be drawn from my silence. You charge my country with “daring and badgering you to battle.” The truth is, we sent commissioners to you, respectfully offering a peaceful separation, before the first gun was fired on either aide. You say we insulted your flag. The truth is, we fired upon it, and those who fought under it, when you came to our doors upon the mission of subjugation. You say we seized upon your forts and arsenals, and made prisoners of the garrisons sent to protect us against negroes and Indians. The truth is, we, by force of arms, drove out insolent intruders and took possession of our own forts and arsenals, to resist your claims to dominion over masters, slaves, and Indians, all of whom are to this day, with a unanimity unexampled in the history of the world, warring against your attempts to become their masters. You say that we tried to force Missouri and Kentucky into rebellion in spite of themselves. The truth is, my Government, from the beginning of this struggle to this hour, has again and again offered, before the whole world, to leave it to the unbiased will of these States, and all others, to determine for themselves whether they will cast their destiny with your Government or ours; and your Government has resisted this fundamental principle of free institutions with the bayonet, and labors daily, by force and fraud, to fasten its hateful tyranny upon the unfortunate freemen of these States. You say we falsified the vote of Louisiana. The truth is, Louisiana not only separated herself from your Government by nearly a unanimous vote of her people, but has vindicated the act upon every battle-field from Gettysburg to the Sabine, and has exhibited an heroic devotion to her decision which challenges the admiration and respect of every man capable of feeling sympathy for the oppressed or admiration for heroic valor. You say that we turned loose pirates to plunder your unarmed ships. The truth is, when you robbed us of our part of the navy, we built and bought a few vessels, hoisted the flag of our country, and swept the seas, in defiance of your navy, around the whole circumference of the globe. You say we have expelled Union families by thousands. The truth is, not a single family has been expelled from the Confederate States, that I am aware of; but, on the contrary, the moderation of our Government toward traitors has been a fruitful theme of denunciation by its enemies and well-meaning friends of our cause. You say my Government, by acts of Congress, has confiscated “all debts due Northern men for goods sold and delivered.” The truth is, our Congress gave due and ample time to your merchants and traders to depart from our shores with their ships, goods, and effects, and only sequestrated the property of our enemies in retaliation for their acts—declaring us traitors, and confiscating our property wherever their power extended, either in their country or our own. Such are your accusations, and such are the facts known of all men to be true.

You order into exile the whole population of a city; drive men, women and children from their homes at the point of the bayonet, under the plea that it is to the interest of your Government, and on the claim that it is an act of kindness to these families of Atlanta.” Butler only banished from New Orleans the registered enemies of his Government, and acknowledged that he did it as a punishment. You issue a sweeping edict, covering all the inhabitants of a city, and add insult to the injury heaped upon the defenseless by assuming that you have done them a kindness. This you follow by the assertion that you will “make as much sacrifice for the peace and honor of the South as the best-born Southerner.” And, because I characterize what you call as kindness as being real cruelty, you presume to sit in judgment between me and my God; and you decide that my earnest prayer to the Almighty Father to save our women and children from what you call kindness, is a “sacrilegious, hypocritical appeal.”

You came into our country with your army, avowedly for the purpose of subjugating free white men, women, and children, and not only intend to rule over them, but you make negroes your allies, and desire to place over us an inferior race, which we have raised from barbarism to its present position, which is the highest ever attained by that race, in any country, in all time. I must, therefore, decline to accept your statements in reference to your kindness toward the people of Atlanta, and your willingness to sacrifice every thing for the peace and honor of the South, and refuse to be governed by your decision in regard to matters between myself, my country, and my God.

You say, “Let us fight it out like men.” To this my reply is—for myself, and I believe for all the free men, ay, and women and children, in my country—we will fight you to the death! Better die a thousand deaths than submit to live under you or your Government and your negro allies!

Having answered the points forced upon me by your letter of the 9th of September, I close this correspondence with you; and, notwithstanding your comments upon my appeal to God in the cause of humanity, I again humbly and reverently invoke his almighty aid in defense of justice and right. Respectfully, your obedient servant,

J. B. HOOD, General.

Following this, the mayor of Atlanta appealed to Sherman to relent, and this give and take with Sherman is itself fascinating.

ATLANTA, GEORGIA, September 11, 1864 Major-General W. T. SHERMAN.

Sir: We the undersigned, Mayor and two of the Council for the city of Atlanta, for the time being the only legal organ of the people of the said city, to express their wants and wishes, ask leave most earnestly but respectfully to petition you to reconsider the order requiring them to leave Atlanta.

At first view, it struck us that the measure would involve extraordinary hardship and loss, but since we have seen the practical execution of it so far as it has progressed, and the individual condition of the people, and heard their statements as to the inconveniences, loss, and suffering attending it, we are satisfied that the amount of it will involve in the aggregate consequences appalling and heart-rending.

Many poor women are in advanced state of pregnancy, others now having young children, and whose husbands for the greater part are either in the army, prisoners, or dead. Some say: “I have such a one sick at my house; who will wait on them when I am gone?” Others say: “What are we to do? We have no house to go to, and no means to buy, build, or rent any; no parents, relatives, or friends, to go to.” Another says: “I will try and take this or that article of property, but such and such things I must leave behind, though I need them much.” We reply to them: “General Sherman will carry your property to Rough and Ready, and General Hood will take it thence on.” And they will reply to that: “But I want to leave the railroad at such a place, and cannot get conveyance from there on.”

We only refer to a few facts, to try to illustrate in part how this measure will operate in practice. As you advanced, the people north of this fell back; and before your arrival here, a large portion of the people had retired south, so that the country south of this is already crowded, and without houses enough to accommodate the people, and we are informed that many are now staying in churches and other out-buildings.

This being so, how is it possible for the people still here (mostly women and children) to find any shelter? And how can they live through the winter in the woods—no shelter or subsistence, in the midst of strangers who know them not, and without the power to assist them much, if they were willing to do so?

This is but a feeble picture of the consequences of this measure. You know the woe, the horrors, and the suffering, cannot be described by words; imagination can only conceive of it, and we ask you to take these things into consideration.

We know your mind and time are constantly occupied with the duties of your command, which almost deters us from asking your attention to this matter, but thought it might be that you had not considered this subject in all of its awful consequences, and that on more reflection you, we hope, would not make this people an exception to all mankind, for we know of no such instance ever having occurred—surely never in the United States—and what has this helpless people done, that they should be driven from their homes, to wander strangers and outcasts, and exiles, and to subsist on charity?

We do not know as yet the number of people still here; of those who are here, we are satisfied a respectable number, if allowed to remain at home, could subsist for several months without assistance, and a respectable number for a much longer time, and who might not need assistance at any time.

In conclusion, we most earnestly and solemnly petition you to reconsider this order, or modify it, and suffer this unfortunate people to remain at home, and enjoy what little means they have. Respectfully submitted JAMES M. CALHOUN, Mayor. E. E. RAWSON, Councilman. S. C. Warns, Councilman.

HEADQUARTERS MILITARY DIVISION OF THE MISSISSIPPI IN THE FIELD, ATLANTA, GEORGIA, September 12, 1864.

JAMES M. CALHOUN, Mayor, E. E. RAWSON and S. C. Wares, representing City Council of Atlanta.

GENTLEMEN: I have your letter of the 11th, in the nature of a petition to revoke my orders removing all the inhabitants from Atlanta. I have read it carefully, and give full credit to your statements of the distress that will be occasioned, and yet shall not revoke my orders, because they were not designed to meet the humanities of the case, but to prepare for the future struggles in which millions of good people outside of Atlanta have a deep interest. We must have peace, not only at Atlanta, but in all America. To secure this, we must stop the war that now desolates our once happy and favored country. To stop war, we must defeat the rebel armies which are arrayed against the laws and Constitution that all must respect and obey. To defeat those armies, we must prepare the way to reach them in their recesses, provided with the arms and instruments which enable us to accomplish our purpose. Now, I know the vindictive nature of our enemy, that we may have many years of military operations from this quarter; and, therefore, deem it wise and prudent to prepare in time. The use of Atlanta for warlike purposes is inconsistent with its character as a home for families. There will be no manufactures, commerce, or agriculture here, for the maintenance of families, and sooner or later want will compel the inhabitants to go. Why not go now, when all the arrangements are completed for the transfer,—instead of waiting till the plunging shot of contending armies will renew the scenes of the past months. Of course, I do not apprehend any such thing at this moment, but you do not suppose this army will be here until the war is over. I cannot discuss this subject with you fairly, because I cannot impart to you what we propose to do, but I assert that our military plans make it necessary for the inhabitants to go away, and I can only renew my offer of services to make their exodus in any direction as easy and comfortable as possible.

You cannot qualify war in harsher terms than I will. War is cruelty, and you cannot refine it; and those who brought war into our country deserve all the curses and maledictions a people can pour out. I know I had no hand in making this war, and I know I will make more sacrifices to-day than any of you to secure peace. But you cannot have peace and a division of our country. If the United States submits to a division now, it will not stop, but will go on until we reap the fate of Mexico, which is eternal war. The United States does and must assert its authority, wherever it once had power; for, if it relaxes one bit to pressure, it is gone, and I believe that such is the national feeling. This feeling assumes various shapes, but always comes back to that of Union. Once admit the Union, once more acknowledge the authority of the national Government, and, instead of devoting your houses and streets and roads to the dread uses of war, I and this army become at once your protectors and supporters, shielding you from danger, let it come from what quarter it may. I know that a few individuals cannot resist a torrent of error and passion, such as swept the South into rebellion, but you can point out, so that we may know those who desire a government, and those who insist on war and its desolation.

You might as well appeal against the thunder-storm as against these terrible hardships of war. They are inevitable, and the only way the people of Atlanta can hope once more to live in peace and quiet at home, is to stop the war, which can only be done by admitting that it began in error and is perpetuated in pride.

We don’t want your negroes, or your horses, or your houses, or your lands, or any thing you have, but we do want and will have a just obedience to the laws of the United States. That we will have, and, if it involves the destruction of your improvements, we cannot help it.

You have heretofore read public sentiment in your newspapers, that live by falsehood and excitement; and the quicker you seek for truth in other quarters, the better. I repeat then that, by the original compact of Government, the United States had certain rights in Georgia, which have never been relinquished and never will be; that the South began war by seizing forts, arsenals, mints, custom-houses, etc., etc., long before Mr. Lincoln was installed, and before the South had one jot or tittle of provocation. I myself have seen in Missouri, Kentucky, Tennessee, and Mississippi, hundreds and thousands of women and children fleeing from your armies and desperadoes, hungry and with bleeding feet. In Memphis, Vicksburg, and Mississippi, we fed thousands upon thousands of the families of rebel soldiers left on our hands, and whom we could not see starve. Now that war comes home to you; you feel very different. You deprecate its horrors, but did not feel them when you sent car-loads of soldiers and ammunition, and moulded shells and shot, to carry war into Kentucky and Tennessee, to desolate the homes of hundreds and thousands of good people who only asked to live in peace at their old homes, and under the Government of their inheritance. But these comparisons are idle. I want peace, and believe it can only be reached through union and war, and I will ever conduct war with a view to perfect and early success.

But, my dear sirs, when peace does come, you may call on me for any thing. Then will I share with you the last cracker, and watch with you to shield your homes and families against danger from every quarter.

Now you must go, and take with you the old and feeble, feed and nurse them, and build for them, in more quiet places, proper habitations to shield them against the weather until the mad passions of men cool down, and allow the Union and peace once more to settle over your old homes at Atlanta.

Yours in haste,

W. T. SHERMAN, Major-General commanding.

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Sunday, August 28, 2011

Subjects covered in TAA that lie outside usual scope of Civil War narratives

This is a partial list of the subjects that The Awful Arithmetic challenges, beyond the full coverage and analysis of the major battles

Alternate explanation of why the Civil War was fought, based on Lincoln's first inaugural address
Exploration of several myths of the Civil War, in order to prove or debunk them
Exploration of numerous controversies, such as between generals, between political leaders,
       and of decisions concerning campaigns, the true motives of commanders in the war
"Lost chances" of the war--scenarios in which by one wrong decision, commanders failed to
       follow up on operations, campaigns, or battles that would have resulted in significantly shortening
       the war, sometimes by as much as nearly four years
An analysis of reasons the North won the war, some of which contradict "conventional wisdom"
An in depth analysis of the manner in which the Union did win the war, primarily by its successes in
      the "Western Theater" compared to the relatively poor performance of Union armies in containing
      Lee in Virginia
An analysis of the defensive lines erected in Virginia by Lee, and Sidney Johnston in Kentucky and
     Tennessee, as part of Jefferson Davis's "cordon defense" and how they lines fared over the course
     of the war
A strong argument against the conventionally accepted statement that the Civil War began with the
     Confederate attack on Fort Sumter on April 12, 1861
An in depth analysis of the leadership of the Confederate armies that fought the Union at Shiloh
Disproof of the myth that in 1862, the Confederate leadership directed armies in the West under Bragg
     and Kirby Smith, and Lee in Virginia to undertake joint campaigns, usually described as "raids," into
     the North; in fact, the field commanders, Bragg/Smith, and Lee decided to conduct the raids totally
     independent of each other and the leadership in Richmond made no input
Analysis into the reasons Lee marched his army north into Pennsylvania in what becamse the Gettysburg
    campaign, which makes clear the campaign was a desperate attempt to save Vicksburg from Grant,
    rather than a true attempt to win the war for the Confederacy in one bold operation
An in depth analysis of the true motives of General George B. McClellan, in his numerous failures to
    defeat the Confederate army, or to capture Richmond
The fact that the first skirmishes of the war took place not between Union and Confederate armies, but
    between militias of the state of Virginia and militias of other states in the area of Harpers Ferry, before
    Virginia legally seceded




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