A Patriot's History of the United States: From Columbus's Great Discovery to the War on Terror (66 page)

By that time, Lee had become the commander of the Army of Northern Virginia and McClellan’s main foe. Lee’s second in command, Stonewall Jackson, set the table for Union failure through a series of bold raids on Yankee positions all over the Shenandoah Valley. Jackson’s high theater struck terror in the hearts of Washingtonians, who were convinced he was going to invade at any moment, despite the fact that Jackson had only 16,000 men facing more than 45,000 Union troops. He succeeded in distracting McClellan long enough that the opportunity to drive into Richmond vanished. Instead, the Union and Confederate armies fought a series of moving battles throughout June and July of 1862, including the Battles of Seven Pines, Mechanicsville, Gaines’s Mill, Frayser’s Farm, and others. At Malvern Hill, McClellan finally emerged with a victory, though he still had not taken Richmond. Murmurings in Washington had it that he could have walked into the Confederate capital, but the last straw (for now, at least) for Lincoln came with a letter McClellan wrote on July seventh in which the general strayed far from military issues and dispensed political advice well above his pay grade.

At that point, a rising group of Republicans, known as the Radicals, emerged. Some of the Radicals had been abolitionists before the war, and they tended to view the conflict as not only about emancipation, but also about cleansing from the body politic the disloyal and treasonous plantation elites of the Democratic Party they saw as having brought on the war. Among the most prominent Radicals were Charles Sumner of Massachusetts, Thaddeus Stevens of Pennsylvania, Joshua Giddings of Ohio, and Union general Carl Schurz, all of whom wanted to severely punish the South as a region and the Democrats as a party for bringing on the war. When the Radicals heard of McClellan’s insubordination (not to mention, in their eyes, incompetence), they pressured Lincoln to remove him, and he acceded to their demands, replacing America’s Bonaparte with General John Pope. Demoted as supreme commander, McClellan remained in charge of the Army of the Potomac.

John Pope was a braggart who told Congress that if he had been in charge from the beginning, his forces would already be marching through New Orleans. Pope was soon humiliated more than McClellan. Despite victories over Pope, Lee had lost proportionately more staggering numbers of men. At the Seven Days’ Battles (Mechanicsville, Malvern Hill), for example, the South lost 5,700 men (13 percent of the force committed) and at Second Manassas it lost more than 9,000 men (more than 18 percent of the troops engaged). For the time being, however, Union congressmen’s anger at the outcome concealed from them the raw arithmetic of combat.

Water War

While conflict on land raged in the East, good news for the Union came from the war at sea. In September 1861, navy flotillas had captured the forts at Cape Hatteras, North Carolina, establishing a tiny beachhead in the South. Two months later, the U.S. Navy seized the South Carolina Sea Islands and Port Royal. The relatively easy conquest reflected both the North’s superiority at sea and, at the same time, the magnitude of the task that still remained. Jefferson Davis admitted as much. “At the inception of hostilities,” he pointed out, “we had no commercial marine, while their merchant vessels covered the ocean. We were without a navy, while they had powerful fleets.”
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Nevertheless, the Union had to cover more than three thousand miles if one measured in a straight line rather than calculated the space of every inlet and bay. Policing the entire coastline was impossible, but grabbing key ports was not.

The blockade also posed the danger that an aggressive Union captain would fire on a foreign ship or board a neutral vessel. At all costs, Lincoln needed to keep Britain and France out of the conflict. In May, Britain announced strict neutrality, allowing for the Confederates to fight for their independence, but also acknowledging the legality of the Union blockade. Thus the British could simultaneously recognize the Confederate and Union war aims as legitimate. Reality dictated that John Bull might, therefore, fall on the Union side, since British ships would not cross the blockade line. In November 1861, however, when Jefferson Davis dispatched John Slidell and James Mason as permanent envoys to Britain and France aboard a British ship, the
Trent
, U.S. Navy Captain Charles Wilkes, aboard the USS
San Jacinto
, stopped the
Trent
by firing shots across her bow. Boarding the vessel, Union sailors removed Mason and Slidell and transported them to New York City, from where they were declared prisoners of war and remanded to Fort Warren in Boston. British outrage not only produced a stern letter from the foreign minister, but was also followed by deployment of 11,000 redcoats to Canada and vessels to the western Atlantic. Wilkes’s unauthorized (and unwise) act threatened to do what the Rebels themselves had been unable to accomplish, namely, to bring in Britain as a Confederate ally. Seward, perhaps, relished the developments, having failed to provoke his multinational war of unification, but Lincoln was not amused. Scarcely a month after they were abducted, the two diplomats were released on Christmas Day, 1861. Britain considered this an acceptable apology, and the matter ended.
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All that remained of the naval war was a last-gasp Confederate attempt to leapfrog the North with technology. Had the roles been reversed, the North, with its industrial and technical superiority under pressure, might have successfully found a solution to a blockade. But for the already deficient Confederacy (despite its superlative naval secretary, Stephen R. Mallory), the gap between the two combatants became obvious when the Rebels launched their “blockade breaker,” the CSS
Virginia
. Better known as the
Merrimac
, the vessel was the Union steam frigate the Confederacy had confiscated when it took the Norfolk navy yard. Outfitted with four inches of iron siding, the ship was impressive compared to wooden vessels, yet hardly a technological marvel. (Britain had launched an ironclad—
Warrior
—in 1859.) The
Virginia
’s ten guns fired from holes cut in the iron siding, which could be closed off by hand. A single gun covered the bow and stern. Most of the superstructure was above water, including the smokestack, lifeboat, and the entire gun deck. In March 1862, the
Virginia
sortied out under the command of Captain Franklin Buchanan to engage Union blockading vessels at Hampton Roads. The astonished Yankee sailors watched as their cannonballs bounced harmlessly off the sides of the monster, which quickly sank the
Cumberland
and then the
Congress
, two of the navy’s best frigates. The Union itself had already had contracts for several variants of its own ironclads, known by the name of the lead vessel, the
Monitor
, whose design was the brainchild of a brilliant Swedish designer, John Ericsson. It surpassed the
Virginia
in almost every category. At 172 feet long, its hull barely sat above the waterline, leading to its description as “a crackerbox on a raft.” It boasted a revolving turret capable of withstanding ten-inch shot at close range and brandished its own two eleven-inch Dahlgren smoothbore cannons; it also had some fifty of Ericsson’s inventions aboard, including the first flushing toilets on a naval vessel. Upon the
Monitor
’s arrival at Hampton Roads, it was charged with protecting the larger
Minnesota.
On March 9, 1862, the
Virginia
sallied forth, and “Ericsson’s pigmy” engaged it.
⁶⁵
Blasting away at each other for hours, neither could gain an advantage, but the
Monitor
could position herself where the
Virginia
could not bring a single gun to bear. Still, neither could seriously damage the other, and the two ships withdrew, each for a different reason (the
Monitor
’s captain had been blinded by a shell, and the
Virginia
’s second in command, having replaced the wounded Buchanan, realized he could not outmaneuver or outshoot the
Monitor
with his current vessel). The
Virginia
’s draft was so deep that it continually ran aground, and efforts to lighten the ship so that it could better maneuver only exposed its hull. Subsequently, the
Virginia
was run ashore and burned when its commander feared that other ships like the
Monitor
were about to capture her. Later, in December 1862, the USS
Monitor
sank in a gale off Cape Hatteras, but many of her sisters joined the federal navy in inland waterways and along the coasts.

Confederate navy secretary Mallory, meanwhile, had funded other ironclads, and thirty-seven had been completed or were under construction by the war’s end. He also approved an experiment using a mine ram in an underwater vessel called the CSS
Hunley
, an unfortunate vessel that suffered several fatalities during its sea trials. Although not the world’s first submarine, the hand-cranked boat was the first to actually sink an enemy ship, the
Housatonic
—and itself—in February 1864. Yet these efforts smacked of desperation. The Confederacy had neither the resources nor a sufficient critical mass of scientific and technical brainpower or institutions to attempt to leapfrog the North in technology.

War in the West

While coastal combat determined the future of the blockade and control of the eastern port cities, and while the ground campaign in Virginia dragged on through a combination of McClellan’s obsessive caution and Confederate defensive strategy, action shifted to the Mississippi River region. Offensives in the West, where Confederates controlled Forts Donelson and Henry on the Tennessee and Cumberland rivers, held the key to securing avenues into Tennessee and northern Alabama. Implementing the Anaconda Plan down the Mississippi, then, depended on wresting those important outposts from the rebels.

General Ulysses Simpson Grant, an engineer from West Point who had fought in the Mexican War, emerged as the central figure in the West. This was surprising, given that only a year earlier he had failed in a series of professions, struggled with alcohol, and wallowed in debt. Grant took his Mexican War experience, where he compiled a solid understanding of logistics as well as strategy, and applied his moral outrage over slavery to it. His father-in-law owned slaves, and James Longstreet (Lee’s second in command at Gettysburg) was his wife’s cousin and an army buddy. But Grant’s own father had abolitionist tendencies, and he himself soon came to view slavery as a clear evil. When the Civil War came, Grant saw it not only as an opportunity for personal resurrection, but also as the chastisement he thought the slave South had earned. He was commissioned a colonel in the Illinois volunteers, and worked his way up to brigadier general in short order.

Grant did not take long to make his mark on the Confederates. Swinging down from Cairo, Illinois, in a great semicircle, he captured Paducah, Kentucky; then, supported by a river flotilla of gunboats, he moved on the two Confederate river-mouth forts that guarded the entrance to the western part of the Confederacy. On February 6, 1862, Grant’s joint land-and-river force took Fort Henry on the Tennessee River, and Fort Donelson, the guardian of the Cumberland River, fell a few days later. When the fort’s commander asked for terms, Grant responded grimly, “Unconditional and immediate surrender.”
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Given the army’s penchant for nicknames, it was perhaps unavoidable that he soon became known as Unconditional Surrender Grant. Donelson’s capitulation genuinely reflected Grant’s approach to war. “Find out where your enemy is,” he said, then “get at him as soon as you can, and strike him as hard as you can, and keep moving on.”
⁶⁷
Grant’s success laid open both Nashville and Memphis.

Northern journalists, inordinately demoralized by Bull Run, swung unrealistically in the opposite direction after Grant’s successes. The Chicago
Tribune
declared, “Chicago reeled mad with joy,” and the New York
Times
predicted that “the monster is already clutched and in his death struggle.”
⁶⁸
Little did they know that the South was about to launch a major counterattack at a small church named Shiloh near Pittsburg Landing on the Tennessee River. Confederate General Albert Sidney Johnston knew by then (if he had not beforehand) the difficulty of the task confronting him. He clung to a perimeter line almost three hundred miles long, largely bordered by rivers, fighting an opponent who commanded the waterways, while he lacked sufficient railroads to counter the rapid concentration of forces by the Union at vulnerable points along the rivers. Now the South’s reliance on river transportation, as opposed to railways, had come back to haunt the war effort.

Rather than dig in, Johnston (typically) attacked. Grant’s troops were spread out while the general was planning the next part of his offensive. He had no defensive works, nor did he have any real lines of communication or supply. His headquarters was nine miles away, on the other side of the Tennessee River. Although the troops at Shiloh and Pittsburg Landing were the most raw of recruits, they had the good fortune of being commanded by the able William Tecumseh Sherman. Early on the morning of April 6, 1862, Confederate forces quietly marched through the fog, nearly into the Yankee camp until warnings sounded and musket fire erupted. For the next six hours, the armies slammed into each other at hurricane force, with shocking casualties. In the Peach Orchard, both sides were blinded by a blossom snowstorm created by the din of rifle and cannon shot. By all accounts, the midday hours at Shiloh were the bloodiest of the war, with more Union and Rebel bodies falling per minute than in any other clash. Albert Sidney Johnston himself became a casualty, hit below and behind the knee by a musket ball. Aides could not locate the wound, which was hidden by his high riding boots, and the unconscious Johnston died in their arms. Fighting at Shiloh ended on the first day with a Confederate advantage, but not a decisive victory. The Yanks found themselves literally backed up to the banks of the Tennessee River. General Lew Wallace, later famous for writing
Ben-Hur
, finally arrived after confusing orders that had him futilely marching across the Tennessee countryside; General Don Carlos Buell arrived after steaming up the Tennessee River with 25,000 men. Grant himself had come up from the rear ranks, and on the second day, with the reinforcements in place, the counterattack drove the Rebels from the field and forced Johnston’s successor, P.G.T. Beauregard, to withdraw south to Corinth, Mississippi. It was a joyless victory, given the carnage. Grant recalled that he could “walk across the clearing in any direction stepping on dead bodies without a foot touching the ground.”
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