Terrible Swift Sword (55 page)

After he took Corinth, General Halleck
did exactly what beaten Beauregard hoped he would do. Instead of moving boldly on
with a force too large for his opponents to meet he divided his army into
halves, separated the two halves, and presently lost the initiative without
even knowing he had lost it.
¹

Restored
to his old command, Grant became head of an army of occupation, protecting the
ground that had been gained but unable to do more than that. His troops were
spraddled out from Memphis eastward to the Tennessee River, holding a belt of
northern Mississippi, repairing and garrisoning the railway line that went all
the way north to Columbus in Kentucky. He had plenty of men to do all of this,
but he did not believe that he had enough to do this and in addition mount a
real offensive; furthermore, what he did would be conditioned to a large extent
by the doings of the other half of the victorious army, the half commanded by
General Don Carlos Buell.

While Grant held western Tennessee,
Buell was instructed to go out and take eastern Tennessee. He would move almost
directly eastward from Corinth, crossing the Tennessee River at Decatur and
following that river and the Memphis & Charleston Railroad to Chattanooga;
the project had such high priority that when Mr. Lincoln and Secretary Stanton
called on Halleck for 25,000 men to reinforce McClellan after the Seven Days
defeat they told him to send no one at all if to do so would delay or imperil
Buell's move. Naturally enough, Halleck sent no one, but the all-important
campaign west went slowly—apparently because both generals seemed to worry more
about what Buell was moving away from than about his destination. His base of
supplies lay at Louisville, far to the north, and when he began to move he had
to repair and protect the Memphis & Charleston road so that these supplies
(coming down from Louisville most roundabout) could reach him; difficult,
because the road ran parallel to the Confederate front and could be broken
easily. At Decatur, Alabama, he reached a north-south line from Nashville,
and eighty miles farther east, at Stevenson, a second line from Nashville came
down, and these routes seemed infinitely preferable, once he got to them; but
during July, while his army inched its way toward Chattanooga, Buell learned
something about the kind of cavalrymen the Confederacy had in its service and
the lesson was so instructive that he never did get to Chattanooga.

The first teacher was
a soldier who, like the Jeb Stuart who plagued McClellan, combined jaunty
flamboyance with solid competence: a big Kentuckian named John Hunt Morgan, who
left Knoxville early in July with nine hundred troopers and rode northwest into
Kentucky. Here, for more than three weeks, he went rampaging about, destroying
Federal supply dumps, dodging or beating the Federal cavalry detachments that
came out to stop him, wrecking railroad lines, beating up the environs of
Lexington and Frankfort and raising such a disturbance that the President
notified Halleck: "They are having a stampede in Kentucky. Please look to
it." Halleck in turn told Buell to suppress Morgan even if it delayed the
advance on Chattanooga.
²
It was quite beyond Buell's power to
suppress Morgan, but the Chattanooga expedition was unquestionably delayed.

Even worse was a simultaneous raid
mounted by Nathan Bedford Forrest, the untaught soldier who made war with
driving fury, and who had just been appointed a brigadier general. Forrest
took a thousand men out of Chattanooga on July 9 and rode into middle
Tennessee, picking up reinforcements along the way, capturing a whole brigade
of Buell's troops, a live brigadier general and half a million dollars worth of
supplies at Murfreesboro. He got away clean, destroyed three important railroad
bridges near Nashville, and came so close to Nashville that the Federals there
thought he was actually going to capture the place. He no sooner went away than
Morgan came back, riding across Tennessee not far north of Nashville and making
a serious break in the Louisville & Nashville line near the town of
Gallatin; when Federal cavalry came out to fight him, Morgan beat and dispersed
it and captured the commanding general. Federal reports on all of this bristle
with complaints about disgraceful conduct on the part of Yankee cavalrymen, but
the complaints do no more than prove that Morgan and Forrest knew how to find
and hit the weak spots. They also knew how to show Buell that the north-south
railroads in Tennessee were little safer than the east-west line in northern
Alabama.
³

But the real trouble was not with the
supply lines. Buell's march was leisurely from beginning to end—one officer in
Buell's army said it was "like holiday soldiering," with the average
day's march beginning at dawn and ending long before noon—and the notion that
it might be well to beat the Confederates to Chattanooga bothered hardly
anybody. Buell left Corinth on June 10, came within striking distance of
Chattanooga before July ended, and never struck; in effect his army went
aground along the Alabama-Tennessee border and remained aground until late in
August, stirring into active movement only when the Confederates at last
assumed the offensive. Buell was an extremely deliberate soldier and Halleck
could not hurry him. One of Halleck's defects was that he did not know how to
spur a subordinate on: he could only nag at him, filling the record with
warnings but never actually infusing a sense of urgency into anyone. A Lee or a
Grant in Halleck's position that summer would have had faster movement on the
Chattanooga expedition or a new commander; Halleck could only call for speed
without getting it.
⁴

So
Chattanooga, which might have been taken, was not taken. The same was true of
Vicksburg.

In the month of June 1862, Vicksburg was
just waiting for someone to come and capture it. Hasty fortifications had been
built, eighteen guns had been mounted, and 3600 infantry had been assembled,
but the great fortress that was to block the Federal advance for a year had
hardly begun to take shape. Just below the city was Admiral Farragut, with
Hartford
and ten other deep-water cruisers and
Porter's mortar flotilla; just above was Flag Officer Davis, who had four
armored river gunboats and some more mortars. With all of this naval power on
hand, two divisions from Halleck's army could have taken the place with ease;
and the three miles along the Vicksburg waterfront were at that time the only
piece of the entire Mississippi River which the Confederacy really controlled.

But Halleck was still digesting Corinth.
The Navy Department, in turn, inspired by what Farragut had done at New
Orleans, believed that the old admiral and his squadron had unlimited capabilities,
and without waiting for Halleck it told Farragut to go ahead and smash the
Vicksburg batteries the way he had smashed Forts Jackson and St. Philip. Ben
Butler had sent three thousand soldiers up the river with Farragut, under
Brigadier General Thomas Williams; once Farragut had pulverized the defenses,
these could go ashore and occupy the town just as Butler had occupied New
Orleans.

Admiral Farragut was
game but skeptical. His ships badly needed repair, it was hard to get coal, the
river was falling and deep-draft ships might run aground, his crews were
sickly, and anyway he had not actually smashed these lower-river forts; he had
pounded them and passed by, and they had surrendered because once New Orleans
was occupied they were hopelessly cut off. At Vicksburg the case was very
different, because Vicksburg could not be cut off by water. It could never just
be occupied; it would have to be fought for, and most of the fighting would
have to be done by soldiers on dry land.

Farragut tried. On June 28, after Porter's
mortars had bombarded the Confederate works without great effect, he took his
burly ships up the river. There was a spectacular two-hour running fight, in
which three of the Federal ships were turned back. The rest got through, with moderate
losses to personnel, the Confederate batteries had suffered little damage—and
Farragut, as he had anticipated, found that he had indeed got the bulk of his
fleet past Vicksburg but that nothing noteworthy had been accomplished.
Williams's brigade was altogether too weak to take Vicksburg by storm; lacking
anything better to do, it went ashore on the Louisiana side of the river and
began trying to dig a canal across the base of the long, narrow point of land
opposite Vicksburg, in the hope that the Mississippi would cut a new channel
there and leave Vicksburg high and dry. (It was a vain hope. The soldiers dug a
huge ditch but it had been planned badly and the river refused to do its part.
The scheme fascinated Federal planners for months to come, and hundreds of
thousands of man-hours of hard work were expended in the steaming heat, but it
was all a wasted effort.) Farragut's fleet above the city was no better off
than it had been below.
⁵

Meanwhile, Vicksburg ceased to be an
easy mark. Before June ended there were 10,000 Southern soldiers in the place,
with energetic Earl Van Dorn to command them, and day by day the defenses grew
stronger; and presently it was the Federals rather than the Confederates who
were in difficulty.

Visible sign of this change was a
remarkable exploit by a remarkable warship, C.S.S.
Arkansas,
which came out on July 15 to the intense
embarrassment of the United States Navy, and which eventually gave Admiral
Farragut an excuse to go all the way back to salt water.

Like
all of Secretary Mallory's ironclads,
Arkansas
faintly
resembled
Merrimack-Virginia.
Her
180-foot hull was low in the water, with a central citadel for guns and
machinery protected by an armor belt three inches thick, ingeniously but
precariously made out of railroad rails bolted to stout wooden bulwarks. She
had an iron beak for ramming, ten powerful guns, twin screws, and rickety
machinery that was quite likely to break down just when a breakdown would be
most damaging; with all her defects she was a most formidable antagonist, and
that she existed at all was largely due to her commanding officer, Lieutenant
Isaac N. Brown, who would have been an asset to anybody's navy.

During the winter and spring
Arkansas
had been under construction at Memphis, and
after the fall of Island Number Ten, the unfinished craft was towed down the
Mississippi and up the Yazoo, which enters the big river just above Vicksburg,
and moored at the town of Greenwood, two hundred miles upstream. On May 28,
Lieutenant Brown was ordered to go to Greenwood, finish the warship, arm and
man her, and then take her out and fight the Yankees. He found that he had an
empty hull, with disassembled machinery, no carriages for the guns, and most of
the railroad iron lying at the bottom of the river in a sunken scow. Since the
Yazoo was in a state of flood, the place where the
Arkansas
was moored was four miles from dry land, and
Greenwood lacked machine shops and other manufacturing facilities. Somehow he
got the hulk towed 150 miles downstream to Yazoo City, where there was high
ground. He fished up the sunken railroad iron, got a detail of two hundred
soldiers to toil as ships' carpenters, sent armed men around the neighboring
plantations to seize fourteen forges and attendant blacksmiths, hired men to
fell trees, cut green timber and make gun carriages (which had never before
been made in the state of Mississippi), somehow kept the job going on a
twenty-four-hour basis—and, in a little more than five weeks, got the thing
done.
Arkansas
was
given a crew—sailors from the river fleet that had been lost at Memphis, plus
a number of volunteers from Jeff Thompson's Missouri command—and Lieutenant
Brown was instructed to report to General Van Dorn for orders.

Brown wanted to stay
in the Yazoo and hold that river for the Confederacy: an idea that made sense,
for the Yazoo came down from some of the richest farming country in North
America, and it would be well to keep out Yankee marauders. Van Dorn wanted him
at Vicksburg, however, so Brown headed downstream—stopping for a day, en route,
to make repairs and dry out damp powder, his wheezy engines having leaked steam
into one of his magazines. On July 15,
Arkansas
came
down to the mouth of the Yazoo looking for a fight.

The Federals had heard rumors about her, and
this day they sent three warships up the Yazoo to investigate—two wooden craft
and the armored gunboat
Carondelet,
which
had run the batteries at Island Number Ten, and whose commanding officer,
Henry Walke, had been a messmate and friend of Isaac Brown on a round-the-world
cruise in the prewar Navy.
Arkansas
met
the trio a few miles from the Mississippi and immediately opened fire;
Carondelet
was disabled and driven into shallow water,
the unarmored gunboats fled at top speed, and
Arkansas
came out into the big river to find the
entire Federal fleet, Farragut's and Davis's ships together, anchored in two
long lines on opposite sides of the river. This probably would have been the
end of it, except that the Federals were caught napping, with no steam up.
Brown cruised past the combined fleets, firing as he went, taking a hammering
but reaching the Vicksburg waterfront triumphantly and making fast to a wharf
under the protection of Confederate batteries. Brown had been wounded twice,
the armor on
Arkansas's
port
side was almost ready to fall off, and the ship had a staggering casualty list,
but she had unquestionably wiped the eye of the United States Navy.
⁶