Terrible Swift Sword (10 page)

The assault never came. Rosecrans moved
up to Little Sewell Mountain, examined its defenses, endured another torrential
rainstorm, concluded that Lee's position was too strong to be carried and that
a real advance through this mountain land was impossible anyway, and presently
drew his army back to Gauley Bridge.
¹¹
Lee found it impractical to
pursue, and soon after Mr. Davis called him back to Richmond. From a
Confederate viewpoint the campaign had been a distressing failure, and most of
the blame was ascribed to Lee. E. A. Pollard, the hypercritical Richmond
editor, wrote angrily that the losing campaign had been conducted by a general
"whose extreme tenderness of blood induced him to depend exclusively on
the resources of strategy, to essay the achievement of victories without loss
of life."
¹²
(Of all the criticisms ever made of Lee, this one
probably has the least validity.) Lee quietly accepted the criticism and made
no public reply, but he was stung and he wrote to Mrs. Lee: "I am sorry,
as you say, that the movements of the armies cannot keep pace with the expectations
of the editors of papers. I know they can regulate matters satisfactorily to
themselves on paper. I wish they could do so in the field. No one wishes them
more success than I do and would be happy to see them have full swing."
¹³

Altogether, the Federals had gained
something significant, and a youthful Confederate confessed: "A decided
reaction had taken place since the wonderful battle of Manassas. It had not
been followed up by the extermination of 'the Yankees,' as I expected it would
be."
¹⁴
The Northern government now held western Virginia
permanently; it would be West Virginia just as soon as the formalities could be
attended to, and a good third of the Old Dominion had been sheared away forever.
The Federals were not yet beginning to win, but they were taking the ground on
which they could begin to win a bit later. Imperceptibly, the scales were being
weighted in their favor.

It
was hard to see, at the time, because the summer and fall looked like a period
of unbroken Confederate successes. There had been Bull Run, overshadowing everything,
and there had been Wilson's Creek, with the unforgettable Lyon killed and his
army driven into a long retreat. Before September was over there was another
sharp Confederate victory in Missouri, bringing further discouragement to
Unionists and giving General Fremont a new portion of woe.

Shortly before Lyon met his fate, a
Union force had been thrust far up into the northwestern corner of the state to
occupy Lexington, an attractive little town on high ground bordering the
Missouri River, once a noted outfitting depot for trading expeditions to the
Rockies. This force was commanded by Colonel James A. Mulligan of the 23rd
Illinois—a regiment composed largely of Irish from Chicago, known at the time
as "the Irish brigade"—and included Mulligan's own regiment,
additional Illinois infantry, a regiment of cavalry, detachments of the
Missouri militia and a little light artillery; probably 3000 or 3500 men,
altogether. Mulligan was to hold the line of the upper Missouri, and also
prevent the state's secessionist government-in-exile from seizing specie held
by banks in that area. He seized the specie himself so that he could protect it
adequately, fortified a little hill on the edge of Lexington and awaited
developments, which came promptly in the shape of General Sterling Price and a
substantial army of Missouri state guards fresh from their triumph at Wilson's
Creek. Kept from destroying Lyon's beaten army by Confederate McCulloch's
refusal to campaign any longer in Missouri, Price had come up to pinch off this
isolated Union outpost. He had 18,000 men and unless Federal reinforcements
came up fast he could do exactly as he proposed to do.

The
nearest Union base was at Jefferson City, more than one hundred miles away,
commanded by a colonel with the unlikely name of Jefferson Davis. Learning
about Price's advance, Fremont, in St. Louis, tried to get a relief column in
motion, but Davis lacked transportation equipment, the Rebels had obstructed
the river, and Price had all the time he needed. As he approached Lexington
some of Mulligan's officers proposed a speedy retreat, but Mulligan was
scornful. "Begad, we'll fight 'em!" he cried. "That's what we
enlisted for, and that's what we'll do." Price hemmed Mulligan's camp in
closely, cutting off its water supply and ingeniously devising a set of movable
breastworks out of water-soaked bales of hemp. After two days of fighting,
Mulligan was compelled to surrender, on September 20. He had suffered about one
hundred casualties, he and all of his men were prisoners of war, and the
Missourians had recovered $900,000 in cash.
¹⁵
They also, to all
appearances, had won full control of all of the western part of the state.

Coming as it did on the heels of
Wilson's Creek this looked to Union men like a setback of shocking dimensions.
General Scott curtly notified Fremont that the President "expects you to
repair the disaster at Lexington without loss of time," and Frank Blair
(whom Fremont had put under arrest for insubordination) fumed that Fremont had
an ample force but that "he simply lacked the capacity of wielding
it."
¹⁸
But Price could not stay in Lexington and his
"control" over western Missouri dissolved before the month was out.
He marched south, and by late October he had got all the way to Neosho, in the
extreme southwest corner of the state—farther from the center of things,
actually, than he had been before the battle of Wilson's Creek. He had made a
dazzling raid, disheartening Northern patriots, depriving the Union army of
several good regiments and driving one more nail in General Fremont's coffin,
but that was all.

Price led no more than 7000 men to Neosho. He
had furloughed a number of people so that they could go home and provide for
their families—after all, nobody in particular was supporting his army—and a
good part of the force which he commanded at Lexington appears to have been
local talent, minuteman types who would turn out for a fight in their own
neighborhood but could not be counted as part of a permanent field army. At
Neosho, Price touched base with his government. Claiborne Jackson was there,
convening a fragment of the state's legislature—the minority that favored the
Southern cause—in extraordinary session; and on October 31 this legislative
fragment passed an ordinance of Secession, carefully complying with all of the
forms and electing Senators and Representatives to the Confederate Congress.
To the extent that they could speak for Missouri, Missouri at last was in the
Confederacy.
¹⁷

It
was no more than a gesture, because these men could not now speak for Missouri.
Victorious in two battles, the Confederates had nevertheless lost the state.
Seeming to win, they had been defeated; even while the vote was being taken,
Fremont—on the move at last!—was bringing an army of 40,000 men down to the
very town of Springfield which the Federals had had to evacuate six weeks
earlier. Governor and legislators decamped, their flight the visible symbol of
the shape affairs had taken.

There
were other symbols—guerrilla warfare at its ugliest flaming up and down the
western border, and a black and desolate path that marked Fremont's line of
march. A correspondent for the New York
Times
who
was with Fremont's army felt that "the country through which we pass seems
weighed down by something like a nightmare," with all the landscape
wearing "that same mark of desolation which is upon everything in this
state." The people seemed not so much hostile as apathetic. Many houses
were deserted, and a strange silence seemed to prevail; even the ring of the village
blacksmith's anvil was stilled, largely (the correspondent felt) because the
soldiers had stolen all of the blacksmith's tools.
¹⁸
To the west,
the whirlwind had cut a sharper swath. Here were the
"Jayhawkers"—Federal troops from Kansas, composed largely of
frontiersmen who had learned to hate slaveholding Missourians beyond all reason
during the wild times of the fifties, when newspapers a thousand miles away
had printed columns about Bleeding Kansas, the Border Ruffians, and the fearful
doings of Osawatomie John Brown. The Jayhawkers had been making war out on the
fringes of the country Price had marched through, descending on town after town
to ferret out Confederate sympathizers and confiscate their goods and chattels.
They were followed, as often as not, by non-military Kansans with wagons who
would glean where the soldiers had reaped, returning with wagons full of
plunder. Price's irregulars behaved in the same way whenever they had the
chance, and there were enough beatings, burnings, robberies, and shootings
along the Kansas-Missouri border to satisfy the most vengeful.

Chief
of the Jayhawkers—as far as any one man was chief —was a singular character
named James H. Lane: a tall, lean, red-haired demagogue whom the good people of
Kansas had chosen to represent them in the United States Senate and to whom
Abraham Lincoln had given a brigadier general's commission and authority to
recruit Kansas regiments for the Union. Lane was out from under anyone's
effective control, although he did share Fremont's views about the need to
emancipate secessionists' slaves. "Confiscation of slaves and other
property which can be made useful to the Army should follow treason as the
thunder peal follows the lightning flash," he asserted, and wherever his
troops went confiscation took place—not merely of slaves, but of anything
valuable which could be carried off. Lane was said to have told his men that
"everything disloyal from a Shanghai rooster to a Durham cow must be
cleaned out," and his men did their best to obey orders. Swooping down on
the town of Osceola, where Price had left a quantity of supplies under guard,
Lane shot up the town, carried off or destroyed everything it contained, and
then set fire to the houses, ignoring the fact that much of the property thus
laid waste was owned by Loyalists. A newspaperman who saw Lane in action said
that he looked like "some Joe Bagstock Nero fiddling and laughing over the
burning of some Missourian Rome."
¹⁹

There was not very
much to laugh at. A band of Jay-hawkers would descend on a farm home, carrying
off Negroes, horses, and wagons, returning a few days later to sweep up all the
cows and sheep the farmer had, coming back still later to carry away the
bed-clothing from the house. Farmers thus molested formed armed bands to
protect themselves, laying ambushes in the dark by country roads and touching
off fights that never got recorded because they had not the least military
significance but which nevertheless took their steady toll of deaths. A woman
living near Westport, who had seen her once-prosperous home completely
despoiled, wrote despairingly: "Our property is all taken from us and I
am left without a home with four little children to take care of . . . what
will become of us God only knows . . . Times here are very hard; robbing,
murdering, burning and every other kind of meanness on every side."
²⁰
Without any question the Jay-hawkers made Confederates out of many who had not
been Confederates originally. The Jayhawkers' motives were mixed but their
minds were simple. They were moved by patriotism, by old grudges and by a
desire for loot, and when they made war they followed an uncomplicated rule:
the man who owned slaves was no doubt a Rebel, and so he was an enemy, and it
did not matter what happened to him. Like Ambrose Bierce's Indianians, the
Kansans considered the Rebel "a fiend accursed of God and angels,"
and they behaved accordingly.

6.
The Road to East
Tennessee

It worked both ways,
depending on geography. In western Missouri the country folk were harried by
Jayhawkers, and the smoke of their torment went up to the impassive heavens;
and far away in eastern Tennessee other country folk were getting the same treatment
from Confederate troops, whose methods were equally rough except that they ran
off with no slaves. East Tennessee was highland country, and like the people of
the Virginia highlands the Tennessee mountaineers were Unionists. Slavery had
never taken root in the mountains, and the people cared little for states'
rights, and when the state went out of the Union they lost no time declaring
themselves.

In mid-June there was a Union convention at
Greeneville, home town of Senator Andrew Johnson—an exceedingly hard-headed man
who was proud of his plebeian origins, hated the cotton aristocracy, and
considered himself still a member of the United States Senate no matter what
his state had done—and this convention adopted a bristling declaration of
grievances. The "disunion government," this declaration said, had
obstructed the right of free suffrage, fired on flags, and sent in "a
merciless soldiery" which insulted people, broke into their homes, shot
down women and children and arrested large numbers of people. This soldiery was
accused of foraging its horses in cornfields, of stealing hay and provisions,
and —according to a contemporary Northern account—of "offering the
people, male and female, every indignity that ruffian bands are capable
of." Because of all of this the convention named a committee to petition
the state legislature to let east Tennessee have a separate government of its
own.
¹

Such
a step the state legislature did not dream of taking, and when the voters of
Tennessee ratified the ordinance of secession the people in east Tennessee
grew slightly more quiet, with Andrew Johnson taking off for Washington to
argue his people's cause at the White House. But the lull was only temporary.
A Knoxville secessionist warned Governor Harris that he must act at once
"to repress a most fearful rebellion," and the Confederate
authorities began arresting Unionists, their most noteworthy prisoner being a
fiery itinerant preacher named William Gannaway Brownlow who had become editor
of the Knoxville
Whig,
denouncing
secession in every issue and keeping a United States flag flying over his own
house. His paper was suppressed, its type and presses destroyed, and Brownlow
was lodged in jail. General Polk wrote to President Davis from Nashville saying
that east Tennessee was held by 2000 Southern troops but that it needed a good
10,000, and a Mississippian told Mr. Davis that agents of the Lincoln government
had been dismayingly active, preaching sedition and arousing hatred to such an
extent that "the people only await the occasion to rise in revolt against
the Confederate government."
²

New regiments were
sent in, from Nashville and from Richmond, and Brigadier General Felix Kirk
Zollicoffer was put in general command of the troubled area. Zollicoffer was
one of Tennessee's leading citizens; a newspaperman and a politician, who had
served in Congress and had edited the influential

Nashville
Banner,
and who had had some military experience
during the Seminole War. He was quiet, frail and unassuming, just turning
fifty, a former Whig who had voted for the mildly Unionist Bell-Everett ticket
in 1860 and had turned down command of the state's troops in the spring, taking
a commission from the Richmond government a bit later. He hurried to the mountain
country, found that until the reinforcements arrived he would have only
thirty-three companies of infantry and six companies of cavalry, most of them
untrained, to cover a large tract of wild country and overawe a most
intractable populace. Understandably, General Zollicoffer felt that the
assignment was a hard one.
⁸

Washington would have been delighted to
do for east Tennessee precisely what it was doing for western Virginia; the
trouble was that east Tennessee was very hard to get at. It was shielded, to
begin with, by Kentucky, which throughout the summer was a neutral no man's
land not to be crossed by Federal troops. It was shielded even more by its own
peculiar geography—by the great mass of mountains which lay over it like a
turtle's shell, sealing it off from the North, complicating the long miles of
bad roads with an almost impenetrable tangle of peaks, valleys, and forests.
As a practical matter, people usually got into this part of Tennessee from due
east or due west, or they stayed out. Unless some extraordinary effort could be
made, Lincoln's soldiers would have to stay out.

But it was most important to get them
in, because east Tennessee promised a great deal to the Union cause. Here was
the asset President Lincoln had looked for in vain elsewhere in the South—a
solid nucleus of Unionists who would rally around a Federal army the moment
such an army appeared. The highland people were loyalists, and the central
highlands ran over into North Carolina and down into northern Georgia and Alabama
as well; establish a Union army in the upper Tennessee Valley, and the
Confederacy might well begin to disintegrate at the core. Mr. Lincoln had
believed—often rather against the evidence—that the Confederacy was not the
monolithic unit its leaders said it was. Here was one place where he could
prove it.

Whatever had really driven the people of
the South to secede, it was undeniable that loyalty to the old Union ran
strong wherever the slave population was small. In the Southland, as a whole,
there was one slave to every two white people; in east Tennessee there was one
slave to twelve whites. Most people were small farmers, poor, cut off from the
main currents of Southern life, feeling no kinship whatever with the wealthy
slave-owning class. In his distrust of the plantation aristocracy, Andrew
Johnson accurately reflected the viewpoint of his own people. Most of them,
probably, were willing to submit passively to Confederate authority, but they
would do nothing whatever against the Union and they would rejoice openly if
Confederate authority were removed.
⁴

There was another matter of great practical
importance. The most significant railway line in the South was the one that
threaded the length of Tennessee, giving Richmond its connection with the west.
If a Union army could be planted permanently across that railroad line the
Confederacy would be in a dire fix; as a Richmond editor pointed out, in such
case "the empire of the South is cut in twain and we become a fragmentary
organization, fighting in scattered and segregated localities, for a cause
which can no longer boast the important attribute of geographical unity."
⁵
Before Bull Run, President Lincoln had been aware of the strategic
possibilities here, and late in September he wrote that he wanted an expedition
"to seize and hold a point on the Railroad connecting Virginia and
Tennessee, near the mountain pass called Cumberland Gap."
⁶
Cumberland
Gap meant the old Wilderness Road, the historic highway of pioneer America.
Daniel Boone had blazed the trail long ago, and slow caravans had followed,
peopling Kentucky and opening half a continent to the young American nation.
Now the flow would be reversed, with strange new caravans coming down to the
gap from the north and west to restate the notion of a continental destiny.
During the summertime of Kentucky's neutrality nothing very concrete could be
done, but the administration and the east Tennesseeans could make certain
arrangements—a strategic plan or a dark conspiracy, depending on the point of
view.

These
plans were devised in Washington at about the time General Polk was ending
Kentucky's neutrality (which of course opened the way for direct action in
respect to Tennessee). One of the most active of the Tennessee Unionists, William
B. Carter, went to Washington and met with President Lincoln, Secretary Seward,
and General McClellan, and promised to set up what a later generation would
have called a fifth column. At a given moment during the fall (it was agreed)
armed bands of east Tennesseeans would go swarming out to destroy all of the
bridges on that vital railroad line; simultaneously, Washington would send an
army under General George H. Thomas down through the gap to protect these
guerrillas (whom the Confederates otherwise would unquestionably obliterate)
and to occupy Knoxville and the surrounding area. Federal money was provided
to finance the uprising; it was arranged that the numerous mountain men who had
fled into Kentucky to escape Confederate arrest would be organized into Federal
regiments, and Carter's brother Samuel, hitherto a lieutenant in the Navy, was
made colonel and acting brigadier general to command them. William Carter was
to go back to Tennessee shortly after the middle of October to get his people
in motion, and General Thomas was to begin his march within a week thereafter.
⁷

So ran the plan. If it had worked it
might have affected the course of the war most materially, but it did not work;
instead it went off half-cocked, disastrously, causing some of Carter's patriots
to get hanged and bringing profound discouragement and renewed oppression to
all east Tennessee loyalists.

To
begin with, General Zollicoffer moved forward through Cumberland Gap as soon as
he learned about the Confederate advance in western Kentucky, and he
established his troops at a ford on the Cumberland River, thirty miles inside
of Kentucky, by the middle of September.
⁸
General Zollicoffer, to
be sure, could eventually be taken care of; was taken care of, quite
effectively, a few months later. More important was a singular combination of
factors which the planners in Washington had not been able to take into
account—the ill health of General Robert Anderson, the excellence of the bluff
staged by General Albert Sidney Johnston, and the nervous uncertainty which
almost incapacitated that supposedly self-assured soldier, General William T.
Sherman.

It began with Anderson. The hero of Fort
Sumter had been living on his nerves for months, and it had been too much for
him. While Kentucky was still neutral Anderson's doctors warned him that his
brain might be affected if he remained on duty, and he spent part of the
summer at Cresson, Pennsylvania, trying to restore his strength. The rest and
the mountain air helped, but the doctors insisted that it would be dangerous
for him to return to active duty before the end of the year. He had no sooner
received this verdict, however, than a delegation of Tennessee Unionists led by
Andrew Johnson and Congressman Horace Maynard came to put pressure on him. He testified
later that they insisted that if he resumed active command along the border,
"20,000 mountain boys would rally to my flag and follow me anywhere."
He told them what his doctors had said, and added: "If I break down as
they threaten me I cannot break down in a better cause," and he went back
to his post just in time to witness the end of Kentucky's neutrality.

Anderson made his headquarters at
Louisville and tried to cope with the situation, but it was too much for him.
He went through the motions but he accomplished nothing, and friends at last
induced his brother, Larz Anderson of Cincinnati, to come and tell him bluntly
that the breakdown the doctors spoke about was actually taking place. He
consulted the doctors afresh, and at last—on October 6, in a carefully worded
telegram from Winfield Scott—he was relieved of his command and told to report
for duty in Washington "as soon as you may without retarding your
recovery." Anderson turned the command over to Sherman, expressing the
hope that Sherman could destroy "the marauding bands who, under the guise
of relieving and benefiting Kentucky, are doing all the injury they can to
those who will not join them in their accursed warfare."
⁹
Then
he went off stage, seeking the recovery that never came. He had seen the war
begin, on the ramparts of Fort Sumter, and in a sentimental finale, four years
later, a wreck of a man in a ruined fort, he would hoist his flag there again;
but except for that his part in the war was finished.