Never Call Retreat (2 page)

So the legend was flourishing, and the fine review at Murfreesboro would fit into it: but meanwhile the Confederate cause itself was displaying ominous symptoms, and that was why the President had come to Tennessee. He was not really worried about what this army at Murfreesboro might do, and he did not need to see the troops march past in order to know that they would give a good account of themselves when it was time to fight. But he had come to the Mississippi Valley just when the Federal Army of the Potomac was making another "forward to Richmond" campaign, and at such a moment Jefferson Davis did not leave the Confederate capital for any small reason. What had wrenched him away from Richmond was his recognition of the fact that no matter what happened in Virginia the Confederacy was very probably doomed unless it could reverse the tide that was besinning to flow in the west. The problem in the east could be left to Robert E. Lee; that in the west demanded immediate presidential attention.

The danger could be stated in simple terms. Thirty thousand veteran Federal soldiers led by the aggressive Major General Ulysses S. Grant were marching out of western Tennessee down the line of the Mississippi Central Railroad, heading for Vicksburg. Vicksburg, a one-time cotton-shipping port that sprawled up the slopes of a chain of hills overlooking a hairpin bend in the Mississippi, roughly halfway between Memphis and New Orleans, had been given river batteries of moderate strength and it was occupied by an inadequate garrison. It was one of the places which the Confederate nation had to possess if it were to win its independence.

As long as they held Vicksburg the Confederates owned a 150-mile stretch of the great river, the segment running south from Vicksburg to Port Hudson in Louisiana, where there were also fortifications and a garrison; and as long as this much of the river was held the Southern Confederacy was still a valid whole, an unbroken nation stretching from Virginia tidewater to the Rio Grande, the authentic cotton kingdom as planned by the founding fathers. But if this bit of the river were lost—as it would be if Vicksburg fell, for Port Hudson could not stand alone—then the Confederacy would begin to die, its western states broken off forever, all of the Mississippi Valley held by the government at Washington. Then there would be no good way to save what was left of Tennessee, or the Gulf States either, and once these were gone the remnant of the nation could hardly hope to survive.

Obviously, General Grant had to be stopped, and the President had come west to see about it. Yet if it was easy to say what had to be done it was extremely hard to say what it was going to be done with. To oppose General Grant there was in northern Mississippi a field army less than 24,000 strong, somewhat frayed from its experiences in the recent battle of Corinth. Elsewhere in the Department of Mississippi—the state itself, and that part of Louisiana which lay east of the river—there were no more than 10,000 men, most of them tied down in garrison duty at Vicksburg and Port Hudson. Unless help could be brought in from outside the Department the game was going to be lost. But all of the troops that might conceivably be brought in were urgently needed (according to their commanding officers) somewhere else, and could not be summoned without inviting disaster.
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To accept this argument was in effect to admit that the Confederacy was being tried beyond its strength, an admission Mr. Davis would never make. In Arkansas and in Tennessee the Confederacy had upward of 80,000 soldiers; surely, with the nation's life at stake, some of these could be brought into Mississippi? Surely, strategic brilliance could find a way to make up for lack of brute strength? Mr. Davis showed a cheerful face in public, but his generals were giving him very little to be cheerful about. It might be that strategic resources in these parts were as limited as resources of manpower.

Or it might be that Mr. Davis was calling for an answer that did not exist.

During the war, and after it, Mr. Davis was accused of failing to see the gravity of the Mississippi Valley problem; of interpreting all of the war in terms of what happened in Virginia, and of ignoring the catastrophe that began to take shape when Grant marched south across the Mississippi line. This charge does injustice to a sorely harried man. Mr. Davis understood perfectly the implications of the Federal drive to open the Mississippi Valley—after all he was a westerner himself, his own plantation lying only a few miles downstream from Vicksburg—and he gave the matter full attention the moment the campaign began. The real trouble was that the crisis called on him to take a gambler's chance and he did not feel that he ought to gamble.

Neither his vision nor his nerve was at fault. It simply seemed to Mr. Davis that it was necessary to win in front of Vicksburg without risking loss anywhere else, and although no general could show him how to do this (because in fact it could not be done) it had to be admitted that the situation in the western Confederacy now was most peculiar.

Before he left Richmond. Mr. Davis told General Lee that he had to go west "to bring out men not heretofore in service and to arouse all classes to united and desperate resistance," and after his departure a War Department official made an entry in his diary: "Private information from many sources represents the tone and temper of the Mississippi Valley as very unsound.
They are submitting."
Although he had spoken so bravely at Knoxville, the President sent a somber appraisal back to the Secretary of War: "The feeling in East Tennessee and North Alabama is far from what we desire. There is some hostility and much want of confidence in our strength."
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East Tennessee, to be sure, had long been recognized as an area badly infected with Yankeeism, but the worst report of all came from Mr. Davis' own state, Mississippi. Senator James Phelan said frankly that "the present alarming crisis," far from arousing the people, had made them despondent, and he went on to assert: "The spirit of enlistment is thrice dead. Enthusiasm has expired to a cold pile of ashes. Defeats, retreats, sufferings, dangers, magnified by the spiritless helplessness and an unchangeable conviction that our army is in the hands of ignorant and feeble commanders, are rapidly producing a sense of settled despair, from which, if not speedily dissipated by 'some bright event or happy change,' the most disastrous consequences may be apprehended." It was essential for the President to "plant your foot upon our soil" and, thus anchored, to "unfurl your banner at the head of the army"; and in fact Mr. Davis went to Mississippi as soon as he disposed of his business in Tennessee.

Unquestionably the command situation had caused trouble. Mr. Davis had recently taken steps from which he hoped good would come, but the generals who served the Confederacy in the west were oddly assorted and, in some cases, oddly selected as well. Collectively they presented a problem to each other, to the President, and to the country.

Until recently the Mississippi army had been in command of Earl Van Dorn, one of the President's favorite officers— curly-haired, alert, a man of much energy, not all of it properly channeled. It was Van Dorn on whom the Yankees had inflicted costly defeat at Corinth in October, and on Van Dorn the people of Mississippi now were blaming their troubles. Senator Phelan said frankly that in the common belief Van Dorn was "the source of all our woes," and he added that the man's private life as well as his military competence had been called into question: "The atmosphere is dense with horrid narratives of his negligence, whoring and drunkenness, for the truth of which I cannot vouch; but it is so fastened in the public belief that an acquittal by a court-martial of angels would not relieve him of the charge."
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Van Dorn knew what was being said about him, and grew despondent, writing to his wife that his command had brought him nothing but "misfortune, criticism, falsehood, slander and all the vile things belonging to the human heart." He recovered his bounce presently; before 1862 was out he would strike a blow that helped to compel Grant to beat a hasty retreat, and in the spring, unacquitted by angels, he would be shot to death by a Tennessee civilian who considered himself an outraged husband.
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Meanwhile his mere existence offended the patriotic.

But Van Dorn, after all, had been relieved weeks earlier, and now in December he commanded only cavalry. The Department of Mississippi was in the hands of Lieutenant General John C. Pemberton, a transplanted Yankee whose morals were above reproach but who could neither reassure civilians nor inspire soldiers; a man dedicated but wholly without good luck.

Pemberton was in his late forties, a Pennsylvanian with two brothers in the Northern army. He seems to have been in love with the South from boyhood. At West Point, where he was in the class of 1837, he was known as a states' rights advocate, most of his cadet corps chums were Southerners, and in 1848 he married a Virginia girl. When secession came he was a captain of engineers, and he apparently had impressed his superiors in the War Department because they offered him a colonelcy. He rejected it, resigned and went South, getting a commission from Jefferson Davis, whom he had also impressed. He rose rapidly in the Confederate service, commanded at Charleston in the summer of 1862, and in the fall struck Mr. Davis as just the man for Mississippi.

Pemberton was diligent and he took hold with a firm hand, reorganizing his staff departments, shaking up supply services, pushing the work on fortifications and organizing a steamboat line to bring foodstuffs from the trans-Mississippi. For the first time the department got competent administration, and a newspaper editor held that Pemberton had brought order out of chaos: "If after the well-nigh fatal blunders of his predecessor it is possible to defend ourselves against the Yankees we believe he will do it."
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Yet the man could not win people. In a spot that called for inspirational leadership he was uninspiring. He made no impact on the state's discontent; Senator Phelan morosely told Mr. Davis that hardly anyone in Mississippi so much as realized that Pemberton was in command, and some of those who did realize it recalled darkly that he was after all a Yankee, and doubted that his heart was in the Southern cause. Something flinty about his personality made him hard to work with. Across the river in Arkansas, grumpy Lieutenant General Theophilus Holmes wrote that although the government did well to remove Van Dorn its choice of Pemberton did not help matters much, "as Pemberton has many ways of making people hate him and none to inspire confidence."
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Holmes himself was one of the most baffling aspects of the command problem. He was in his late fifties, rigid, half-deaf; along the James River in the previous spring, in the midst of a thunderous Yankee bombardment, with his troops on the verge of panic from the fury of the shelling, he had emerged from his headquarters hut, hand cupped behind an ear, and innocently asked if he had not heard firing somewhere. He led a division without distinction during the Seven Days campaign, and he was one of the men Lee carefully weeded out as soon as that campaign ended. Now he commanded the whole Trans-Mississippi Department, and he was unhappily the sort of general who sees his difficulties clearly but is quite unable to do anything about them.

It must be admitted that enough difficulties were visible in Arkansas to frustrate almost anyone. The people of the state were discontented, Governor Henry M. Rector was loudly complaining that the troops his state sent east under Van Dorn in the spring had never been returned, and Holmes had grave command problems of his own. His chief lieutenant was Major General T. C. Hindman, who had done wonders during spring and summer in the way of raising and equipping troops, but who did not seem able to use them effectively. Early in September Hindman had led two divisions into southwest Missouri, and on September 30 these troops won an opening engagement at Newtonia and caused the more optimistic to hope that the long-anticipated reconquest of Missouri was at hand. But Hindman was called away to confer with Holmes at Little Rock, and while he was away the reinforced Federals advanced again; whereupon the little Confederate army hastily retreated and in its panic virtually fell apart. (It developed that of the two top officers Hindman had left behind, one was drunk when the Yankees advanced and the other had just ceased to be drunk and suffered from a massive hangover.) Hindman managed to put most of the army together again, but early in December he got into a battle with Federals led by Brigadier General James G. Blunt at Prairie Grove, Arkansas, near Fayetteville and not far from the old battlefield of Pea Ridge. Hindman was badly beaten, his army was driven off toward Little Rock, and now the Federals had practically all the state north of the Arkansas River.
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Still, no matter how defectively they were led, Holmes did have 25,000 troops in Arkansas, and he seemed the logical man to send help to Pemberton. Pemberton thought so, at any rate, and so did Van Dorn, and so for that matter did the Secretary of War. But Holmes had only the loosest grip on his department, and the Richmond government had an even looser grip on Holmes, and it turned out finally that although everyone agreed that Holmes' soldiers ought to go to Pemberton's rescue there was no power anywhere that could get them to do so. In October Secretary of War George W. Randolph tried to bring this about and succeeded only in disconnecting himself from his seat in the cabinet.

Randolph sent a telegram, suggesting that Holmes collect all available forces and take them across the Mississippi, assuming command of his own and Pemberton's troops in a campaign against Grant. This immediately got Randolph into trouble with Mr. Davis, who felt that Holmes should send troops east but that Holmes himself ought to stay west of the river, and who coldly rebuked Randolph for trying to move generals and armies on his own initiative. Offended, Randolph resigned; his resignation was quickly accepted, and his place presently was filled by a gaunt, aristocratic Virginia planter, James A. Seddon, who had a better understanding of the limits within which a Confederate Secretary of War must operate. Then, concluding that what the situation needed was an area commander with broad powers, Mr. Davis turned to General Joseph E. Johnston, who was recovering from a grave wound received in May at the Battle of Seven Pines. In effect, Mr. Davis gave Johnston control of everything west of the Appalachians and east of the Mississippi—control, subject of course to presidential approval —and instructed him to go west and restore the situation.
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