Terrible Swift Sword (46 page)

This report was
greatly exaggerated. Beauregard had executed a most orderly withdrawal, he had
lost little property, and few prisoners had been taken. (To do Pope justice, he
never said he had taken many prisoners; he had simply estimated that 10,000
stragglers were trailing Beauregard's army and had predicted, erroneously, that
most of them would soon surrender. The exaggeration was largely Halleck's own,
although the blame went to Pope and Halleck did nothing to set the record
straight.)
⁷
But one sentence in Halleck's report was entirely
correct. The result of this methodical, glacial campaign was indeed all that
Halleck could desire, even though the opposing army had got away unharmed.

For Halleck was no more pugnacious than
McClellan. He was campaigning by the map and by the textbooks. He had set out
to take a strategic point and he had taken it, and, as long as Beauregard
remained in Tupelo, Halleck had no intention of following him. He had Corinth,
and Corinth was the most he had wanted to get. As a chess player, he now had a
definite positional advantage; a winning advantage, if properly exploited.

With a compact,
well-equipped army of 100,000 men, Halleck held a key railroad center and
could move in any direction he chose, and there was little the Confederates
could do to stop him. They had Beauregard and his 50,000 at Tupelo, scattered
details along the Mississippi from Fort Pillow to Vicksburg, 12,000 at
Knoxville under Major General Edmund Kirby Smith, 2000 at Chattanooga,
detachments in Louisiana watching Ben Butler at New Orleans—and nothing much
else. The Federals could open the Mississippi all the way to the mouth if they
chose; they could march straight south and take Mobile; they could swing east,
take Chattanooga, and possess all of eastern Tennessee—something Mr. Lincoln
wanted just about as much as he wanted the capture of Richmond itself. All they
had to do was get at it.

Certain fruits fell into their hands at once.
With a Federal Army in Corinth both Fort Pillow and Memphis were doomed.
Beauregard ordered the former place evacuated at once, and its garrison moved
down to Grenada, Mississippi; and on June 6 Federal rams and gunboats under
Flag Officer Davis came downstream to Memphis, destroyed a Confederate fleet
there in a brisk battle watched by most of the townspeople, who lined the
bluffs to see the spectacle, and forced the defenseless city to surrender. The
Mississippi was open now all the way down to Vicksburg; and as a matter of fact
it was open from the south all the way
up
to
Vicksburg as well, Farragut having sent seven of his ocean-going cruisers
upstream in May to tap the defenses and see if the Navy could crack them
without help. The Vicksburg fortifications at this time were not nearly as
strong as they became a bit later, but they were more than the Navy could
manage; still, there were Federal gunboats above the city, the salt-water ships
were just below it, Farragut himself was coming up in
Hartford,
followed
by Porter and the mortars, and if 20,000 men from Halleck's army could be sent
there in June or July the place would unquestionably be taken and the river
would be open from Minnesota to the Gulf.

All of the possibilities were visible to
everyone, and no one was more impressed by the extent of them than Jefferson
Davis.

Mr. Davis was coldly furious over the fact
that Halleck had been permitted to take Corinth without a battle, and he
promptly sent a military aide to Tupelo with a set of icy questions to which
Beauregard was ordered to reply in writing. Why had the army retreated from
Corinth? What plans were there for recovering the lost territory? Why had the
camp at Corinth been so sickly, why was not a stronger defensive line chosen,
could not Halleck's communications have been cut, what if anything had been
done to hold the Mississippi and Memphis—and, in general, how about the whole
sorry business anyway?

Beauregard replied in writing, answering
the questions with dignified formality, pointing out that the retreat had been
approved by all of his chief subordinates. As to future plans, they would
depend largely on what the enemy did. If Halleck divided his forces, Beauregard
would move against one of the separated contingents; if Halleck tried to keep
his army together, every effort would be made—by demonstrations along his
flanks, and by the spreading of false reports in the newspapers—to induce him
to split it up. Also (Beauregard told the aide) if the President thought the
retreat a mistake Beauregard would ask for a court of inquiry; he himself
considered the movement the equivalent of a brilliant victory.
⁸

Whatever his army did next, Beauregard would
not be directing its movements. His health had been bad all spring, and once
his troops were established at Tupelo—the camp site was much better than the
one at Corinth, the water was good, and the list of invalids immediately grew
shorter—he took sick leave, on advice of his doctors, going to the noted
watering place of Bladon Springs, Alabama, to recover his health. Mr. Davis
considered that the general had deserted his post without getting War
Department permission and he at once removed Beauregard from command, putting
Braxton Bragg in his place. From Bladon Springs, Beauregard wrote to his
trusted aide, Brigadier General Thomas Jordan, expressing himself about Mr.
Davis in terms which sounded much like McClellan's more impassioned remarks
about the Federal administration. "If the country be satisfied,"
wrote General Beauregard, "to have me laid on the shelf by a man who is
either demented or a traitor to his high trust—well, let it be so. I require
rest & will endeavor meanwhile by study and reflection to fit myself better
for the dark hours of our trial, which, I foresee, are yet to come. As to my
reputation, if it can suffer by anything that living specimen of gall &
hatred can do—why it is not then worth preserving
...
My consolation is, that the difference between 'that
Individual' and myself is—that if he were to die today, the whole country
would rejoice at it—whereas, I believe, if the same thing were to happen to me,
they would regret it."
⁹

The situation in
Mississippi was oddly like that in Virginia. Two Federal armies had made slow,
methodical, and apparently irresistible advances, and each had reached a
position from which a decisive victory might be won. Halleck had his army well
in hand and was meditating an advance on Chattanooga; McClellan's army was
more extended, the unpredictable Chickahominy flowing between its separated
wings, the weaker wing lying nearer the enemy; but the river was being bridged,
he had disposed of the threat to his right flank and rear, he would soon be
able to wheel up his heavy guns, and he was preparing for what he himself had
spoken of as "the last struggle."

It might be the last struggle in sober truth.
At the end of May 1862, it was still possible (and for the last time) to believe
that the war might be won, might be lost, might at least be
ended,
before it became all-consuming. Senator
Sumner, in Washington, was musing darkly that "except at New Orleans the
real strength of the Rebellion has not been touched,"
¹⁰
but
now the Federal government had two immense armies placed where they could touch
it directly and with decisive effect. Everything depended on what those armies
did. They could end everything in a matter of weeks; could end it (and this
would not be true much longer) while it was still possible to imagine the men
of the contending sections making a peace that would contain saving compromises
and evasions— a peace which could relieve the nation from the necessity of
redefining its own meaning in the terrible heat of war. It might yet be that
this war was an incident rather than an absolute.

What these great armies would do
depended on many things: on the men at arms who composed them, on the limited
mortals who commanded them, on the armies that stood against them, and their
men at arms and commanders, on the accidents of wind and weather . . . and, it
may be, on the wheeling stars in their courses, and on forces no man will ever
understand. . . .

On the night of May
30 a violent rainstorm swept down the valley of the Chickahominy. An
impressionable Northern newspaper correspondent wrote that "nature's
artillery rolled and clashed magnificently, as if in stately mockery of the
puny efforts of martial men," and spoke of the "tropical grandeur and
sublimity" of the scene. A more matter-of-fact courier on General
Johnston's staff called it simply "the worst night I ever saw." A
Massachusetts officer remarked that the storm caused a flood in "the
treacherous Chickahominy, of which it was hard to say at the best of times
where its banks were, and of which no man could say today where its banks would
be tomorrow." General Johnston concluded that this storm put McClellan at
a grave disadvantage—with the banks flooded, the Army of the Potomac might be
unable to use its bridges —and he ordered an attack.
¹¹

McClellan's position was awkward. He had
two-fifths of his army, the corps of Keyes and Heintzelman, south of the river.
Keyes held a mile-wide front from the station of Fair Oaks, oh the Richmond
& York River Railroad, to the crossroads of Seven Pines, southeast of Fair
Oaks; Heintzelman had his two divisions several miles to the rear, guarding the
flank at White Oak Swamp and the bridge by which the main road from
Williamsburg crossed the Chickahominy. All the rest of the army—McClellan
himself, and the corps of Porter, Frankin, and Sumner—was north of the river,
the whole position was fifteen miles from flank to flank, and on the wet
morning of May 31 it was quite likely that some or even all of the bridges
would soon be out of service. Keyes and Heintzelman were temporarily isolated,
and Johnston could hit them with vastly superior numbers.

The original plan had
been to attack north of the river. President Davis, who was most impatient to
have the Yankee Army beaten before it could impose siege warfare on Richmond's
defenders, had urged this several days earlier and Lee had agreed with him; and
so, for that matter, had Johnston, feeling that it was important to defeat that
part of the Federal Army with which McDowell, whose advance was anticipated,
would make contact. Then came the news that McDowell was marching to the
Shenandoah Valley and not toward Richmond. Johnston quickly revised his plans.
He would attack the soft spot, south of the river, and he would do it while
the river was still rising. On the morning of May 31 he put his army in motion.

Johnston's battle plan was excellent, but its
execution was sadly bungled. Orders were misunderstood, James Longstreet got
his division on a road someone else was supposed to use, Huger's division ran
into this roadblock and was crowded completely out of action, a number of
Longstreet's brigades were unable to reach the firing line, and the pulverizing
attack which was to have been delivered by overwhelming numbers turned into a
straight slugging match in which much of the Confederate advantage was unused.
McClellan ordered Sumner to take his corps across the river and get into the
fight, and Sumner—a tough, literal-minded old-timer, who had been an Army
officer before McClellan was born and who joined a complete lack of imagination
to an unshakable belief in the overriding importance of obeying orders—got his
men across on a bridge that was beginning to float away, and gave the shaken
Federal lines the stiffening they had to have. Much of the fighting took place
in a wooded swamp, where fighting men stood in water to their knees, and where
details went along the firing lines to prop wounded men against trees or stumps
to keep them from drowning. The Confederates gained a good deal of ground on
May 31, lost most of it the next morning, and finally accepted a drawn battle
which left things just about as they had been before the fighting started.
¹²
If things had gone well, they might have destroyed a large part of McClellan's
army. Nothing went well. Seven Pines, or Fair Oaks—the battle went by both
names—was a victory for no one.

But it had certain effects. Its casualty
list was grimly instructive. Union losses ran to slightly more than 5000 and
Confederate losses were about 6000—higher totals, for each side, than had been
run up at Bull Run and Williamsburg put together. The war was getting tougher,
and the hard fighting qualities of Northern and Southern soldiers had been tragically
emphasized. Leadership had been defective—neither commander had really put his
hand on the battle to exert firm control—but the men in the ranks had met the
test magnificently. There had been little of the runaway panic that had marked
Bull Run. For the two armies together, the "captured or missing"
total, always high when shaky troops are in action, came to hardly more than
1000.
¹³

In addition, this drawn battle served as
a definite check on McClellan. He had apparently been nearly ready to begin his
final offensive when this battle took place; more than three weeks passed,
after it, before he considered himself ready to resume the advance. He did, to
be sure, bring Franklin and Sumner south of the river, leaving only Porter's
corps to guard his flank and his supply line, but the whole attitude of his
army was defensive. There was no more talk about "closing in on the enemy
preparatory to the last struggle." The battle was a stalemate and it was
followed by a more extended stalemate.