Terrible Swift Sword (15 page)
Chandler recorded his own thoughts in a
letter to Mrs. Chandler the next day.
"If Wade and I fail in our mission,
the end is at hand," he wrote. "If we fail I
may
take my seat in the Senate this winter, but
doubt it." He told about the meetings with McClellan and with Mr. Lincoln,
and went on: "If we fail in getting a battle here now all is lost, and up
to this time a fight is scarcely contemplated. Washington is safe now, and that
seems to be all they care for.
...
If
the South had one tenth our resources Jeff Davis would today be in Philadelphia
and before a month in Boston."
23
In the end, the mission succeeded. The
Senators apparently were just a little skeptical about McClellan's willingness
to make a quick move, but they had reached something of an understanding with
him and for the moment they were backing him. Scott's resignation was formally
accepted on November 1, his attempt to get Halleck as his successor was ridden
down, and McClellan was announced as the new general-in-chief, with authority
over the entire United States Army. Mr. Lincoln and cabinet paid a formal call
on General Scott, and when Scott left the city McClellan and his staff went to
the railroad station to see him off: a dark, rainy morning, the two soldiers
preserving the amenities and parting with courteous farewells, McClellan
inwardly touched by this melancholy close to "the career of the first
soldier of his nation." Then McClellan assumed his new responsibilities
and the capital prepared for action.
How the whole
business looked to the radical Republican element is set forth in a
confidential letter which the editors of the Chicago
Tribune
got from their Washington correspondent
shortly after this change took place.
"Matters have a better look,"
wrote the
Tribune
man.
"Scott is squelched and with him those who have been using his
disloyalty
to further and veneer their schemes for
deadening the progress of the war. A stormy week in the counsels of managers
of affairs here sees McClellan placed at the head of affairs. The people should
be made to thoroughly acquit him of the Edwards Ferry affair." (By
"Edwards Ferry," the writer referred to the Ball's Bluff business.)
"That, and the proposition to go at once into winter quarters here, and
suspend hostilities, broke the back of the opposition to him in the Cabinet
and the Army."
24
3.
The Hammering
of
the Guns
There were dimensions
to national strength which the impatient men in Washington were slow to
recognize. The armies perhaps could do it all, if they could be recruited,
organized, equipped, and properly led, but getting them into action was a long
process. Meanwhile, there were the ponderous black-hulled ships of the United
States Navy, growing obsolescent as they swung to their anchor chains, inviting
dry rot while lying "in ordinary"—vessels which before long would be
as archaic as Noah's Ark but which at the moment represented a hitting power
which the Confederacy could not possibly match. Even while McClellan and Scott
wrestled for mastery of the Army, this force went into action and began to
constrict the windpipe of the South: moving, if anyone had noticed it,
according to the design sketched out in Scott's Anaconda Plan.
Late in June, 1861, the Navy Department
convened a board of officers to consider how the rebellion might best be
stifled, and this board first of all cast its eyes on a 350-mile section of
neglected coastline—the long, lonely, windswept strip of sand that ran down
from the Virginia peninsula to the south of Cape Hatteras, cutting the North
Carolina sounds off from the sea, pierced by irregular tidal inlets:
"sterile and half-drowned," the board felt, cursed with abominable
gales, protecting a series of marshes and cedar swamps, protecting also a
number of small seaports which were ideal havens for Rebel blockade-runners. It
seemed to the Navy people that this long sandy emptiness ought to be possessed
by the Federal authorities without delay.
1
Accordingly,
on August 26 a flotilla left Hampton Roads bound south. It included five steam
warships and one ancient sailing frigate, a revenue cutter, two chartered
merchant ships carrying 900 seasick soldiers, and a tugboat named
Fanny,
sent along to be helpful wherever possible.
The warships had a good deal of muscle. The leaders were the steam frigates
Minnesota
and
Wabash,
built
of wood, until recently supposed to be able to lie in the line of battle
against anything afloat; 3000-ton craft armed with twenty-eight 9-inch guns,
fourteen guns of 8-inch caliber, and two 10-inch pivot guns. Next in line was
Susquehanna
mounting fifteen 8-inch guns and a few
smaller pieces. The other craft were lighter, although they were a good deal
stronger than anything the Confederates had afloat, and the whole was under the
command of Flag Officer Silas Stringham, a lean sailor with clean-shaven
face, a lengthy upper lip, cold eyes, and a stiff sense of duty. Army commander
was Major General Benjamin F. Butler, the one-time pro-slavery Southern sympathizer
from Massachusetts, whose recent suggestion that fugitive slaves be considered
contraband of war was proving highly corrosive to the peculiar institution.
Warships and transports, along with a couple of ancient hulks which were
supposed to do duty as landing craft, headed for a place known as Hatteras
Inlet, where the long sandy strip had been broken open by tidal currents and
the force of strong southeast winds—a shallow gap leading into Pamlico Sound
ten miles below Cape Hatteras, guarded by two makeshift forts, Forts Clark and
Hatteras. On the morning of August 28 Stringham pulled his big steam frigates
up and opened a bombardment.
The Confederates were so woefully
overmatched that it was really no contest although bad weather and Federal inexperience
with the intricacies of a combined operation stretched the job out through
twenty-four hours. Fort Clark was a mere outwork containing five guns, wholly
unfit to stand up to the fire of a strong fleet. Hatteras was bigger,
well-designed, containing perhaps a score of guns, but the guns were too light,
the supply of powder was defective, and Stringham kept his ships cruising in a
long oval which made it impossible for the Rebel gunners to register on their
targets. Toward evening an easterly gale came up and the warships drew offshore
for the night. Federal troops were sent ashore, with difficulty, the two hulks
drifting in through the breakers in imminent danger of shipwreck; after some
three hundred soldiers were landed the hulks pulled out into deep water and the
three hundred were left rationless and unprotected on the beach, and out in the
fleet men feared that during the night this landing party would be gobbled up.
Nothing happened, however, better weather came with the dawn, and the warships
returned to reopen their bombardment.
It did not go with complete efficiency. One
of the ships vigorously bombarded a herd of beef cattle under the impression
that it was firing on Confederate cavalry. The soldiers moved into Fort Clark,
which had been abandoned during the night, just in time to come under fire from
their own fleet; a soldier in the
9th
New
York was wounded in the hand by a Federal shell fragment, and so became the
only Federal casualty of the entire operation. But these were mere incidents.
Confederate guns were quite unable to reach the warships, the volume of Navy
gunfire was devastating, and by noon the Confederate commanders did the only
sensible thing and surrendered. (There was a little mix-up, here; the
Confederates refused to surrender to the Army, which was at the gates, arguing
that they could have held out against mere soldiers all year and that it was
the big guns of the Navy which had beaten them. It was agreed at last that they
would surrender to the "armed forces" of the United States, without
specifying which arm of the service had done the job.) The Federals found that
they had won two forts, 670 prisoners, a thousand stand of small arms and
upwards of two dozen guns. The victory had been complete, inexpensive and
speedy.
2
Hatteras Inlet did not contain enough
depth of water to admit the big warships, and thus it appears that the
expedition had originally planned simply to block the passage by sinking
stone-laden schooners so that Confederate blockade-runners and privateers could
no longer use it. But both Butler and Stringham could see that this was an
important entrance to a stretch of water which offered striking opportunities
to the Federals. They detailed two regiments of infantry to garrison the
captured forts, together with some of the smaller warships to look after them,
and sailed back to Hampton Roads at once to arrange for supplies and
reinforcements and to induce the authorities to revise their plans.
3
Mindful, no doubt, of the merit automatically gained by the bearer of good
news, Butler hurried on to Washington, called on Montgomery Blair, and with
Blair and Assistant Secretary of the Navy Gustavus V. Fox paid a midnight visit
at the White House. Lincoln got out of bed and (according to Butler) received
the callers in his nightshirt, and found the news so good that he and Fox, who
was a good head shorter, danced gaily around the room together, the
presidential nightshirt all a-flutter.
4
. . . However all of this
happened, Washington agreed to exploit the victory. Reinforcements were ordered
to Fort Hatteras, and the War and Navy Departments began planning for
operations inside the Carolina sounds.
The victory was worth a White House jig. The
Navy had found a soft spot, and there was no way for the Confederates to repair
the damage or to avert more trouble. A Southern newspaperman at Raleigh, North
Carolina, asked dolefully: "What does the entrance of the Yankees into our
waters amount to? It amounts to this: The whole of the eastern part of the
State is now exposed to the ravages of the merciless vandals. New Berne,
Washington, Plymouth, Edenton, Hertford, Elizabeth City, are all now exposed,
besides the whole of the adjacent country. . . . Our state is now plunged into
a great deal of trouble."
5
As soon as they got around to
following up their victory the Federals would in effect control a good third of
North Carolina and a sizable portion of the Confederate seacoast; they would
eventually command the back door to Norfolk, the Dismal Swamp Canal which came
up from Elizabeth City, they would stop water communication between Virginia
and the South, and if they bestirred themselves they might even cut the main
railroad line that went south from Richmond. If Jefferson Davis felt that he
could not strip the southern coast of troops in order to reinforce Johnston and
Beauregard, what happened at Hatteras Inlet could only confirm him in his
belief.
6
But Hatteras Inlet was just the
beginning. It was followed by a much heavier blow which put the Confederacy at
a permanent disadvantage—a stroke which might even have inflicted a mortal
wound except for the ironic fact that the men who were almost tearing the
government apart with their demands for speedy action were quite unable to see
that such action did not necessarily have to take place under their eyes, in
northern Virginia.
The naval strategy board which had seen
the possibilities at Hatteras Inlet had also given thought to the matter of
tightening the blockade all along the line. The problem here was not that there
were so many seaports to be closed: actually, as Minister Adams pointed out to
the British Foreign Secretary, who had asked whether the United States really
meant to blockade everything from the Chesapeake to the Rio Grande, there were
hardly more than ten harbors in all those 3500 miles that needed to be plugged.
The real problem was the lack of bases. Vessels patrolling off Charleston or
Savannah, for instance, had to go to Hampton Roads or even back to New York to
get their coal; as a result they spent most of their time simply going and
coming, and a cruiser no sooner reached its station than its captain had to
begin to think about leaving.
In
addition, the coast below Cape Hatteras was more intricate than it looked, all
honeycombed by bays and sounds behind a series of swampy islets. A blockade
runner rarely needed to approach the main entrance of the seaport to which he
was bound; if his craft did not draw too much water he could slip in through
any one of a dozen little inlets and reach his destination by a side door,
letting the big cruisers lie-to in the deep water channels to their hearts'
content. (One Federal skipper remarked that when blockade-runners were caught,
in those early days, "it was due rather to the stupidity of the persons
attempting to run the blockade than to the effectiveness of the force employed
to prevent it.")
7
The Navy needed a swarm of shallow-draft
gunboats that could prowl into every river, creek and tidal marsh between
Florida and North Carolina; and these boats, being fragile and often quite
un-seaworthy, could not stay at sea indefinitely but needed a convenient place
to make minor repairs and escape bad weather.