A Patriot's History of the United States: From Columbus's Great Discovery to the War on Terror (65 page)

Designed to take advantage of the Union’s naval power, Scott envisioned U.S. naval vessels blockading the ports on the Atlantic and Gulf coasts and the lower Mississippi River. Gradually, using gunboats and ground forces, the North would sever the western Confederacy from the eastern Confederacy by controlling the Mississippi. This would have the twofold effect of starving the Confederates and denying them additional men and horses on the one hand, and preventing aid from overseas from reaching the Rebels on the other. Lincoln’s advisers initially put far too much faith in the Anaconda Plan, hoping that it could strangle the enemy without the need for crushing all Rebel resistance. But the strategy of blockades and dividing the Confederacy in two along the Mississippi would prove vital when later combined with other strategic aims.

The blockade did have an effect. As early as July 1861, Jefferson Davis told James Chestnut in Richmond, “We begin to cry out for more ammunition and already the blockade is beginning to shut it all out.”
⁴⁶
But any fantasy that the North would simply cruise down the Mississippi River unopposed soon faded as the western Union commanders noted the Confederate troop buildups and fortifications along the river systems in Tennessee and Mississippi.

Once again, though, the Confederacy played to the Union’s strength, this time through its shortsighted diplomatic decision to embargo the sale of cotton to Europe. Rebel leaders mistakenly believed that a cotton-starved Britain or France might enter the war in a few months, echoing the old cotton-is-king mantra of the 1850s. In reality, the cotton embargo proved disastrous. The British easily shifted to new sources of cotton, especially India and Egypt, so as a consequence the strategy simultaneously deprived the Confederacy of income from the
only
significant product that could have brought in funds, while coalescing the planter elites around protecting their cotton investment. Planters kept their slave workforces growing cotton, when they could have been repairing railroads, building forts, or otherwise doing tasks that kept white soldiers from combat.
⁴⁷

Both the Anaconda Plan and cotton diplomacy clouded the real military picture. In 1861 few thinkers in either army clearly saw that only a comprehensive, two-front war in the west and Virginia would produce victory. Neither side ever approached the “total war” level of mobilization and destruction later seen in World War I, but the North gradually adopted what historian James MacPherson called hard war.
⁴⁸
“Hard war” meant two (and later, more) simultaneous fronts and the destruction of cities without, if possible, the slaughter of the inhabitants. It meant constant assault. It meant mobilizing public opinion. Most of all, it meant attacking the economic and commercial pillar of slavery that propped up the Confederacy. Lincoln only came to this understanding after a year of bloody battlefield setbacks.

At the outset, Lincoln had no intention of making emancipation the war aim, nor is it likely he could have persuaded his troops to fight to free blacks. Northerners went to war because the South had broken the law in the most fundamental way. After “teachin’ Johnny Reb a lesson” the war would be over. When it dragged on, a combination of other motivations set in, including retribution, a perceived threat to the Constitution, and later, emancipation. Southern soldiers, on the other hand, fought because they saw federal troops invading their home states. “Why are you fighting in this war?” Union troops asked a captured soldier. “Because you’re down here,” he replied.
⁴⁹

Bull Run and Union Failure

forward to richmond
blared a front-page headline from the New York
Tribune
in June 1861.
⁵⁰
Already impatient with the Anaconda Plan, Northern voices called for a speedy victory to capture the new Confederate capital of Richmond and end the conflict. Lincoln unwisely agreed to an immediate assault, realizing that every day the Confederacy remained independent it gained in legitimacy. He told the commanding General Irwin McDowell, who headed the Army of the Potomac, “You are green, it is true, but they are green also; you are all green alike.”
⁵¹
McDowell developed a sound plan, marching 36,000 men out of Washington and into northern Virginia on July 16, 1861. There, Confederate General Pierre Beauregard, fresh from his triumph at Fort Sumter, met him with a smaller force of 20,000 near a railroad crossing at Manassas, on the south bank of the river called Bull Run.

Another rebel force of 12,000, under Joe Johnston, operated in the Shenandoah Valley; the aged Union general Robert Patterson was instructed to keep Johnston from reinforcing Beauregard. Benefiting from the scouting of J.E.B. Stuart’s cavalry and from reliable spy reports, Johnston slipped away from Patterson and headed for Manassas. Thus, McDowell would find not one, but two Rebel armies when he finally arrived at Bull Run on Sunday, July twenty-first.

Expecting an entertaining victory, hundreds of Washington civilians, including congressmen and tourists, arrived at the battlefield with picnic baskets in horse-drawn carriages. What they saw, instead, was one of the worst routs of the Civil War. General Johnston arrived and, aided by General Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson, drove the Yankees from the field. Federal forces fell back across the river, where they encountered the gawking civilians, now scrambling to pick up their lunches and climb into their carriages ahead of the retreating army. One congressman, who had come out as a spectator, reported

 

There was never anything like it…for causeless, sheer, absolute, absurd cowardice, or rather panic, on this miserable earth…. Off they went, one and all; off down the highway, over across fields, towards the woods, anywhere they could escape…. To enable them better to run, they threw away their blankets, knapsacks, canteens, and finally muskets, cartridge-boxes, and everything else.
⁵²

 

An orderly retreat soon turned into a footrace back to Washington. A reporter for the London
Times,
W. H. Russell, who accompanied the reserves, had just started forward when terrified soldiers shot past him in the opposite direction. “What does this mean?” he asked a fleeing officer, who replied, “Why, it means that we are pretty badly whipped.”
⁵³
The road back to the capital was strewn with muskets, backpacks, caps, and blankets as men, tripping and stumbling, grabbing wagons or caissons, dashed for safety.

In the first of many missed opportunities on both sides, however, Johnston failed to pursue the Union Army into Washington and possibly end the war. While the South had a stunning victory, it also had six hundred deaths (matched by the federal casualties), making it the most costly battle fought on American soil since 1815. Within months, each army would long for the day when it marked its casualty figures in the hundreds instead of the thousands. Despite the North’s shocking defeat, Bull Run proved indecisive, producing “no serious military disadvantage for the North, nor gain, except in terms of pride…for the South.”
⁵⁴
The South did find a new hero—Stonewall Jackson—whose nickname derived from the moment in the battle when a South Carolina general pointed to him, saying, “There is Jackson, standing like a stone wall.”
⁵⁵
Aside from that, the Rebel army was a mess. Johnston lamented it was “more disorganized by victory than that of the United States by defeat.”
⁵⁶
The South learned few lessons from the clash, but did comprehend the tremendous advantage railroads provided. Had the Confederacy carefully assessed the situation, it would have avoided any battlefield situation that did not provide close interior lines of support. The South also decided it had to change uniforms: the U.S. Army wore blue, as did many Southern units that had just recently resigned from the Union, leading entire units to come under friendly fire at Bull Run. The Confederates soon adopted the gray uniforms of the Virginia Military Institute.

Meanwhile, as Lincoln and his advisers soberly assessed the situation, the setback actually stimulated their war preparations. Some Lincoln critics assail him for not calling up a larger army sooner, whereas others castigate him for being overly aggressive. In fact, prior to the first musket balls’ flying, Lincoln hoped to demonstrate his goodwill to the South by not mobilizing for an invasion. Bull Run obviously dashed such hopes, and Lincoln reconsidered the military situation. The Union quickly fortified Washington, D.C., with a string of defenses. “Troops, troops, tents, the frequent thunder of guns practising, lines of heavy baggage wagons…all indications of an immense army,” noted one observer.
⁵⁷
Another, using his spyglass to take detailed notes, recorded 34 regiments (more than 80,000 men) encamped, and on another day saw 150 army wagons on Pennsylvania Avenue alone.
⁵⁸

A massive manpower buildup was only one sign, though, of the Union’s resolve. In July 1861, Congress passed the Crittenden-Johnson Resolutions, declaring support for a war “to defend and maintain the supremacy of the Constitution, and to preserve the Union with all the dignity, equality, and rights of the several states unimpaired.”
⁵⁹
Sponsored by Crittenden and Tennessee Democrat Andrew Johnson, the resolutions provided a broad-based warning from Northerners and border-state politicians of both parties that, if not addressed and punished, secession would lead to a collapse of law and order everywhere. Between the lines, the resolutions warned Lincoln that the war could not appear to be a campaign against slavery itself.

Theoretically, this put Lincoln in a bind, though one of his own making. He had held at the outset that the Confederacy represented a rebellion by a handful of individuals, and that the Southern states had never legally left the Union. That meant these states could be restored with constitutional protections intact, including slavery, if or when the Southern states returned. Congress, however, had already provided Lincoln a means of leveraging the war toward abolition at some future point. In May 1861, Union General Benjamin “Beast” Butler, having conquered Fortress Monroe, Virginia, announced his intention to retain slaves as “contrabands” of war, including any fugitive slaves who escaped behind his lines. Three months later, the Congress—with the Democrats in almost unanimous opposition—passed the First Confiscation Act, which provided for the seizure of property the Rebels used to support their resistance, including all slaves who fought with the Confederate Army or who worked directly for it.

Confiscation hurt Lincoln’s efforts to keep Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri in the Union. Not long after Congress acted, General John Fremont in Missouri issued orders to confiscate any Rebel slaves there, implying that the act amounted to a declaration of emancipation. Fremont’s impetuous interpretation prompted a quick response from the president, who instructed Fremont to bring his orders in line with the letter of the Confiscation Act. This edict probably kept Kentucky in the Union.

Meanwhile, Lincoln responded to the Bull Run debacle by shaking up the command structure, replacing McDowell with General George B. McClellan, who then was elevated to the position of general in chief of the army after Scott’s retirement in November 1861. McClellan, who likened himself to Napoléon, was an organizational genius whose training of the Union Army no doubt played a critical role in preparing it for the long war. Intelligent and energetic, occasionally arrogant, McClellan did indeed share some traits with Napoléon. But he completely lacked Napoléon’s acute sense of timing—where the enemies’ weaknesses were, where to strike, and when. Not wishing to risk his popularity with the men, McClellan was reluctant to sacrifice them when the need arose. Worse, he viewed his own abilities as far superior to those of Lincoln, a man he viewed as possessing “inferior antecedents and abilities.”
⁶⁰
A Douglas Democrat, politics were never far from George McClellan’s mind, although, ironically, no general did more to educate Lincoln in the academic elements of strategy and tactics. Lincoln’s wisdom in perceiving the overarching picture in 1862 and 1863 owed much to the Union’s Napoléon.

McClellan’s weaknesses were not apparent in mid-1861, when, even before his first big battle, he was touted as a future president. But he lacked aggressiveness, a trait fostered by his perfectionist nature. The general constantly complained he lacked adequate troops (often asserting that he needed an unreasonable ten-to-one advantage before he could attack), supplies, and artillery, where, in contrast, Napoléon had fought while outnumbered on numerous occasions, using the overconfidence of the enemy to defeat him. Secretary of War Edwin Stanton disparagingly said of McClellan, “We have ten generals there, every one afraid to fight…. If McClellan had a million men, he would swear the enemy had two million, and then he would sit down…and yell for three.”
⁶¹

McClellan did have two traits that made him too popular to replace easily. He fed his army well and displayed it on parade whenever possible. McClellan obtained good rations and established new examination boards that produced better quality officers, raising his reputation among the line soldiers. His frequent parades and displays of discipline instilled a public affection that would only dissipate after his first major loss. Lincoln bore a considerable degree of responsibility, however, for the McClellan monster: the president’s unaffected manner of speaking, his penchant for storytelling to make a point, and above all his lack of social refinement led McClellan to misjudge him. The general wrote that Lincoln was “not a man of very strong character…certainly in no sense a gentleman.”
⁶²
Lincoln’s deference finally reached its end. Unhappy with McClellan’s dithering, in January 1862, Lincoln issued the “President’s General War Order No. 1,” instructing McClellan to move forward by February. As he had throughout most of the previous few months, McClellan outnumbered his Rebel opponents by about three-to-one. Yet he still advanced cautiously in what has been labeled the Virginia Peninsula Campaign of 1862. Rather than approach Richmond directly, McClellan advanced obliquely with an army of 112,000 along the peninsula between the York and James rivers where the Union Navy could provide cover. As McClellan neared Richmond, things fell apart. First, Lincoln unwisely reduced McClellan’s command by withholding Irwin McDowell’s entire corps in a reorganization of the army, placing McDowell south of Washington to protect the capital. Second, McClellan wasted valuable time (a month) capturing Yorktown. Begging Lincoln for McDowell’s men, who finally headed south toward Fredericksburg, McClellan reluctantly moved on Richmond.