Terrible Swift Sword (26 page)

If
the Confederates left everything to the man on the spot the Federals gave
Roanoke Island top-level planning and support. Back in September the War
Department had organized an oversized division with the idea that it could be
used, with gunboats and small craft, to clear the Confederates out of the
eastern shore of the Chesapeake. Then McClellan scented larger possibilities
inside Hatteras Inlet and concluded that this force could accomplish a great
deal more if it went into the Carolina sounds. President Lincoln backed the
idea, the Navy named Flag Officer L. M. Goldsborough to handle the gunboats,
and the Army's part of the program was entrusted to Brigadier General Ambrose
E. Burnside, a West Pointer who had left the Army to go into business before
the war and who had commanded Rhode Island's three-months recruits at Bull Run.

Before
the war ended the Northern people would hear a great deal of Burnside, much of
it bad, for it was his evil fate to be tested far beyond his strength, which
was moderate; but this first assignment was just his size and he did very well
with it. He was a likeable sort—big, florid, friendly, his handsome face
adorned by a beard which was elaborate even by Civil War standards—and he
always recognized his own limitations even if he was never able to surmount
them. He had 11,500 men, and in mid-January he and Goldsborough sailed from
Hampton Roads with a fleet of more than sixty vessels— shallow-draft gunboats,
transports, tugs, open barges designed for use as landing craft and a number of
ferryboats never intended for work on blue water. They ran into a southeast
storm that gave them a vicious tossing, wrecking two ships and almost bringing
the whole expedition to grief, but they reached Hatteras Inlet at last and
after waiting a week for the seas to moderate they came inside. Burnside put
about a third of his men ashore there and made ready to attack Roanoke Island,
forty-five miles to the north.

The
business was well organized. Burnside had three brigades afloat, and for each
brigade there was a steam transport towing twenty landing craft. Goldsborough
put the fighting ships up in front, and on the afternoon of February 7 the
fleet came up Pamlico Sound in a line two miles long, while a cold wind whipped
a spatter of rain out of a leaden sky and the pine trees on the low shores
looked as if they grew directly out of the water. Transports and landing craft
remained at the southern end of the island while the warships steamed up the
western side to force their way through Croatan Channel, which was narrow,
obstructed by sunken hulks and pilings, guarded by forts, batteries, and a
small Confederate fleet; a defensive layout which looked tough but which
quickly turned out to be extremely weak.
¹²

Goldsborough came in close to the shore
of the island, thus avoiding the fire of most of the batteries, which had been
built so that their guns could play on the middle of the channel and on nothing
else. His guns were much heavier than anything the Confederates had, and they
quickly overpowered the nearest defensive work, Fort Bartow, silencing its
guns and setting its barracks on fire. The Confederate fleet comprised seven
tugboats and river steamers, mounting a total of eight guns, and this
collection—a "pasteboard fleet," as one Southerner remarked
bitterly—could make no more than a token resistance. C.S.S.
Curlew
went to the bottom from a direct hit by a
100-pound shell, another vessel was disabled, the little fleet drew off,
returned for a second encounter, and then took off for the far end of
Albemarle Sound, completely out of the fight. There were other forts on the
Roanoke shore north of Fort Bartow, and these took comparatively little
damage, but as the day ended it was evident that they could be left to the
army, which would be on hand very shortly.

For while the bombardment was going on
Burnside had put his brigades ashore at the southern tip of the island, and on
the morning of February 8 the troops came up the island's one road to the main
defensive line, a redoubt mounting three inadequate fieldpieces and flanked on
each side by a quarter of a mile of entrenchments, manned by perhaps 1500 men.
If Wise had had enough men, guns, and time he might have made this place
impregnable, for the island was narrow here and the cramped approach to the
redoubt had a tangle of swamps on each side, but his line was too short and too
thin. Burnside sent flanking columns along through mud and waist-deep water,
and he had a prodigious advantage in numbers. His men stormed the place with
moderate loss, and by afternoon his column moved on up the island to take the
forts in the rear. The Confederates could do nothing but surrender; Burnside
had the island, with upwards of 2000 prisoners, thirty-two guns, 3000 stand of
small arms and stacks of supplies, and the Federals had the whole area of the
Carolina sounds at their mercy, with ample time to remove the obstructions
from Croatan Channel and plenty of soldiers and warships to mop up all of the
isolated forts on the mainland.
¹³

The unhappy General Wise, recuperating from
his illness, moved off to Currituck County, North Carolina, and wrote an
indignant letter to President Davis, declaring that the island could have been
held if a proper effort had been made and complaining bitterly: "The North
Carolina troops had not been paid, clothed or drilled, and they had no teams or
tools or materials for constructing works of defense, and they were badly
commanded and led, and, except a few companies, they did not fight." If
this was less than just to the unlucky soldiers who had been trapped on the
island, the general's feeling that he had been badly let down by the higher
authorities was understandable, and when Congress appointed an investigating
committee to hold hearings on the matter he exploded: "I intend to
'accuse' General Huger of nothing! nothing!! nothing!!! That was the disease
which brought disaster at Roanoke Island." The committee eventually
agreed with him, reporting that blame for the loss ought to be divided between
General Huger and Mr. Benjamin.
¹⁴

Wherever the blame belonged, the moral
was clear enough. Like Fort Donelson, Roanoke Island had been lost because the
Confederacy had not quite been able to make an adequate defense of a vital
strong point, and although mistakes had been made the underlying trouble was a
simple lack of resources. The Confederate domain was so big that it could not
be defended everywhere. During the next few weeks Burnside and Goldsborough
methodically overran all of North Carolina's inland seaports, from Elizabeth
City on the north to Beaufort on the south, and although they at last repeated
the Port Royal story, failing to exploit their gains aggressively, they had
sliced off one more piece of Southern territory and had clamped one more
constrictive grip on the new nation. Middle and western Tennessee were gone,
the Atlantic coastline was going fast, the trans-Mississippi was crumbling, New
Orleans was facing a dire threat; if the Federals now moved on Richmond with
all their strength, the war might be approaching its end.

4.
Time for Compulsion

The weather in Richmond was as bad as
the news from the fighting fronts. There was a cold, relentless rain which
turned unpaved streets to mud, and February 22, which was to witness the
inauguration of Jefferson Davis for his six-year term as President of the
permanent Confederate government, struck Attorney General Bragg as "one of
the worst days I ever saw." The bad weather and bad news had turned the
attorney general into a pessimist. He wondered if the Confederacy would live
to inaugurate another president, and in his diary he recorded a skeptical
verdict: "Time alone can answer—but I fear not." A furloughed soldier
in town to see the sights wrote that he fortified himself by buying an umbrella
but that most of his comrades bought whiskey, and Capital Square, where the
inaugural address would be delivered from a canopied wooden platform, was all
bobbing with umbrellas as the crowd assembled.
¹

In the Confederate White House, Mr. Davis
retired to his room to kneel in long prayer "for the divine support I need
so sorely," and at noon he went to the Capitol, to greet the new Congress
in the Hall of Delegates and to sit by while Vice-President Stephens took the
oath of office. Mr. Davis was gaunt and pale, for his health had not been good
of late, and the committee on arrangements suggested that it might be better if
the ceremonies were held indoors, but he insisted on going through with the
program as originally planned; there was a high symbolism to this affair,
marking the transition from the provisional government to one which was to last
forever, and none of the formalities would be slighted. The procession formed
and moved out into the rain, and when Mr. Davis mounted the platform he seemed
to Mrs. Davis "a willing victim going to his funeral pyre." He was sworn
in, bending to kiss a Bible which a Nashville publisher had proudly presented
as the first Bible to be printed in the Confederacy; then, bareheaded, with
rain coming down on the expectant crowd, he began his address.
²

The Southern people had floated to war on
oratory, but the war had changed and the only eloquence that mattered now was
the terrible eloquence of the thing done, and most of the things done lately
had been done by Yankees. More than any of those who listened to him, Jefferson
Davis was aware that this nation which was now proclaiming its permanence might
die before summer unless battles were won, and the means by which battles could
be won were not immediately visible. Joe Johnston, immobilized at Centreville
by rains which turned the Virginia roads into impassable troughs of wet clay,
had fewer men in camp now than he had had two months ago, and the Federals in
his front outnumbered him by three to one. Sooner or later they would
advance—this very day, as a matter of fact, was the one specified in Mr.
Lincoln's order as the date for a great forward movement everywhere. Burnside
could move up to Norfolk almost any time he chose, and the great Federal fleet
could strike anywhere; and the Yankee armies that were starting up the Tennessee
and down the Mississippi could be stopped by nothing much short of a military
miracle. None of this could be said in public. Mr. Davis could do little but
recite inspiring generalities.

Within limits, he was frank enough. He
pointed out that the last hopes for reunion and a solution of sectional
differences "have been dispelled by the malignity and barbarity of the
Northern states in the prosecution of the existing war." Civil liberties in
the North had vanished, the jails were full of men arrested without due
process, for opinion's sake, and the men who reigned in Washington,
"feeling power and forgetting right, were determined to respect no law
but then-own will." The South had won victories and it had suffered
defeats—"the tide for the moment is against us"—but no patriot could
doubt that the final outcome would be victory. It had to be victory, because
"nothing could be so bad as failure, and any sacrifice would be cheap as
the price of success in such a contest." Perhaps Providence meant that
the Southern people must learn the real value of liberty by paying a high price
for it; they were contending, after all, against "the tyranny of an
unbridled majority, the most odious and least responsible form of
despotism." Men must deserve the aid of a higher power; "With humble
gratitude and adoration, acknowledging the Providence which has so visibly protected
the Confederacy during its brief but eventful career, to Thee, 0 God, I
trustingly commit myself, and prayerfully invoke Thy blessing on my country and
its cause."
³

The message seemed to be well received.
The furloughed soldier who had bought the umbrella wrote that people listened
as attentively "as if it had been beautiful spring weather," and a
War Department clerk believed that the candid comment on recent defeats
bespoke a more effective policy for the future and said stoutly: "We must
all stand up for our country." Wispy Alec Stephens commented that
"the country must work out its own deliverance," adding: "Our
new government is now in its crisis: if it can stand and will stand the blow
that will be dealt in the next eighty or ninety days, it may ride the storm in
safety."
⁴

The cabinet had gone
over the speech with care, in the two or three days preceding the inauguration,
striking out words and putting words in until Mr. Bragg concluded that this
must be "the best seasoned document surely that ever was issued"; but
although he had made certain contributions of his own Mr. Bragg confessed that
the whole business had seemed like a waste of time—"I was thinking of how
we were to escape the storm which threatened to overwhelm both Gov't and
people." The Confederacy, he believed, needed good luck, good management,
and a great deal of energy, and he concluded: "Too much has been left to
our generals." This remark was one the Republican radicals in Washington
would gladly have taken for their own. (For a good footnote, add Halleck's
complaint to McClellan that too many decisions were being made by politicians.)
In any case, while the speech was in preparation Mr. Davis told the cabinet
that the Confederacy must shorten its lines. Specifically, Joe Johnston would
have to leave northern Virginia and get closer to Richmond, which would be in
grave danger of capture as soon as spring came.
⁵