Terrible Swift Sword (69 page)
Cox and the others quickly told him that
people who talked that way to him were his worst enemies, and said that not a
corporal's guard would follow him if he actually tried to take the reins into
his own hands. McClellan (according to Cox) agreed heartily, and the talk then
turned to the question of issuing an order to the Army reminding everybody that
their rights as citizens were bound closely to their duties as soldiers.
Possibly as a result of this chat, McClellan on October 7 issued General Orders
No. 163, drawing attention to the Emancipation Proclamation, remarking that it
was the civil authority's responsibility to make policy and the Army's duty to
enforce the policy thus made, and suggesting that "the remedy for
political errors, if any are committed, is to be found only in the action of
the people at the polls." It was altogether a sober, unexceptionable
paper, notable only for the fact that it seemed advisable to issue it at all.
13
Too much loose talk was going around
army headquarters, and some of it was heard in the White House. On September
26, Mr. Lincoln sent a stiff note to Major John J. Key, an officer on
McClellan's staff, bluntly asking whether Major Key, when a brother officer
inquired why Lee's army had not been captured at Sharpsburg, had replied: "That
is not the game; the object is that neither army shall get much advantage of
the other; that both shall be kept in the field till they are exhausted, when
we will make a compromise and save slavery." The President would be happy
to have Major Key appear before him at once and- demonstrate that he had not
used such words.
Major Key came to the White House, along
with a Major Levi Turner, to whom the offending words had been spoken. Mr.
Lincoln listened to both men, found that Major Key had been correctly quoted,
and promptly issued an order dismissing Major Key from the Army; remarking
afterward that he did it because "I thought his silly, treasonable
expressions were 'staff talk' and I wished to make an example."
14
The example may have been needed, may
not have been needed. Certainly the atmosphere at headquarters had been odd.
Too many officers were showing too much contempt for the President and the
Secretary of War, and there was altogether too much talk about the need for
"a march on Washington." McClellan himself had listened to such
talk; he had even suggested such a step, in a letter to his wife, and Major Key
had said no more than McClellan had said when he remarked that his defeat in
the Seven Days had probably been for the best. There is not much reason to draw
a sharp distinction between the attitude of the commanding general and the
attitude of his military household. David Strother thought that McClellan had a
poor crowd around him. He felt that Fitz John Porter, "with his elegant
address and insinuating plausibility . . . and total want of judgment,"
was the evil genius, and he had bitter words for McClellan's staff: "The
people around McClellan . . . were the most ungallant, good-for-nothing set of
martinets that I have yet met with. I do not mean that they were inefficient in
their special duties, but not a man among them was worth a damn as a military
advisor, or had any show of fire or boldness."
15
The
commanding general wanted some resolution of the wearing conflict between
desire and duty; wanted, at the least, a clear understanding of what his duty
might actually be; and the martinets wanted something which they could not
have, so that it was necessary to silence them by cashiering Major Key. And
underneath everything, accounting for the loose talk and the desperate groping
for advice, was the undeniable fact that a great change had taken place. It
was going to be a different sort of war hereafter, and the serviceable Barnett
sent Barlow a warning: "Furl your sails." The proclamation, said
Barnett, in effect gave the Confederacy one hundred days of grace in which to
give up all thought of secession and come back to the Union. Nobody supposed
the Confederacy would do anything of the kind, but "from the expiration of
the days of grace the character of the war will be changed. It will be one of
subjugation determination, if the North can be coerced and coaxed into it. The
South is to be destroyed & replaced by new proprietors and ideas." The
gist of this, said Barnett, he had from Mr. Lincoln himself.
16
He
may have been tolerably accurate; the qualifying factor being that the
President had committed himself to an idea rather than to a specific program.
The war would be a revolution from now on, and if revolutionary means were
needed to win it they would be used. This, to be sure, had been inherent in the
situation from the beginning. The overshadowing fact now was that when he
issued his proclamation Mr. Lincoln did in his field exactly what General Lee
did in his when he struck the Army of the Potomac at Mechanicsville: he took
the initiative, and he would never give it up. All of the Americans who
followed this hard road of war would sooner or later have to keep step with
him: both those who went with him and those who went against him.
The night after the proclamation was
published a crowd came to the White House to serenade the President and to
demand a speech. Never one to say anything of importance on an impromptu basis,
Mr. Lincoln did not try to tell them much, and what they heard was no more than
a somber warning:
"What I did, I did after a very
full deliberation, and under a very heavy and solemn sense of responsibility. I
can only trust in God I have made no mistake. I shall make no attempt on this
occasion to sustain what I have done or said by any comment. It is now for the
country and the world to pass judgment, and, may be, take action upon it."
17
6.
Nobly Save or Meanly Lose
Far underneath the
war there lay a fear, and the proclamation compelled men to look at it; the
fear that the peculiar institution was so dangerous and so unstable that it
would explode if it were touched. The declaration that the Federal government
would make war to free the slave, and would even turn the freed slave into a
soldier to help carry on the fight, seemed to be a threat to take the lid off
of the bottomless pit—as if freedom could not be given to millions of bondsmen
without bringing terror and the realization of the ultimate peril.
In the days that followed the issuance
of the proclamation both houses of the Confederate Congress gave way to bitter
oratory as the anger born of this fear found expression. Resolutions to
enslave all captured Negro soldiers and to execute their white officers were
considered, and discarded. William L. Yancey had urged earlier that Congress
resolve that Washington now was making war on the Southern people as well as
upon their government, and that individual citizens would
thus be justified in shooting Yankee
soldiers who tampered with their property. J. B. Jones, the Rebel war clerk who
kept such a useful diary, noted at the end of September that "some of the
gravest of our Senators favor the raising of the
black
flag,
asking and giving no quarter
thereafter," and from as sober a soldier as General Beauregard came the
same demand.
"Has the bill
for execution of abolition prisoners after 1st of January next passed?" he
asked, in a letter to Porcher Miles. "Do it, and England will be stirred
into action. It is high time to proclaim the black flag for that period. Let
the execution be with the garrote."
1
How England would have responded to a
wholesale strangling of prisoners of war was never put to the test. The frothy
talk of alarmed super-patriots meant in the end no more than the frothy talk of
the martinets at McClellan's headquarters. Yet there were responsible
Englishmen who shuddered at the notion that the United States government would
fight to end slavery. On October 7 the London
Times
spoke as if the unhappy slave were a
subhuman monster who could be liberated only at the price of unspeakable
outrages:
"Mr. Lincoln will, on the 1st of
next January, do his best to excite a servile war in the states which he cannot
occupy with his armies. . . . He will appeal to the black blood of the
Africans. He will whisper of the pleasures of spoil and of the gratification of
yet fiercer instincts; and when blood begins to flow and when shrieks come
piercing through the darkness, Mr. Lincoln will wait amid the rising flames,
till all is consummated, and then he will rub his hands and think that revenge
is sweet. . . . Sudden and forcible emancipation resulting from the 'efforts
the Negroes may make for their actual freedom' can only be effected by massacre
and utter destruction."
2
In 1862 a man did not have to be wholly
unhinged to suppose that massacre and utter destruction would accompany
emancipation. The most dreadful thing about slavery was the fact that it
prepared neither the owners nor the owned for the slightest change in their
relationship. It provoked fear on one side, and it was logical to imagine that
it provoked desperate hatred on the other; it lived by the invocation of unlimited
force, and no one could be blamed for thinking that it would die in the same
way. The man who wrote the screed for the London
Times
was doing no more than put quivering,
orgiastic prose around a thought that tormented many lesser mortals, in America
and in England as well.
Yet the
Times
spoke for nothing but that tortured, dying
thought. The Emancipation Proclamation might flutter the pulses of upper-class
Britons who did not in any case expect anything good to come out of America,
but once the news of it crossed the Atlantic it began to exert a powerful
effect on the attitude of the British government. Mr. Lincoln's opponents found
themselves on the defensive: a man who sided with the Confederacy now must at
least appear to be siding with slavery. The textile workers of Lancashire who
were suffering because the United States fleet kept cotton from the mills would
not now demand that their government sweep away that fleet and let the cotton
in; the blockade that was ruining the cotton trade was also destroying human
servitude, and this meant something even to men thrown on the parish: perhaps
especially
to them. When the war was no more than a
bloody struggle between factions there might well be intervention for the sake
of the payrolls in the Midlands. Now it was different. If the American Union
lived slavery would die, and if it died slavery would live, and although to say
this involved a staggering oversimplification the basic issue was clear. Only a
ruthless and determined British government could move in now to help the
Southern Confederacy.
The
British government was neither ruthless nor determined. It was simply old,
Prime Minister and Foreign Secretary being both beyond their time.
Furthermore—and this was as weighty as the proclamation itself—Lee after all
had lost at Antietam, and the South right now did not look like a winner. As
Minister Adams had pointed out a year earlier: "Great Britain always looks
to her own interest as a paramount law of her action in foreign affairs."
8
It was not in the British interest to bail out a losing cause.
When Lee found that he could not go back across the Potomac and force his reluctant
antagonist to fight again, the moment for British intervention passed.
There
was even more to it than Antietam. The great Confederate counteroffensive had
also failed in the west.
When Don Carlos Buell took his army out
of central Tennessee and went north toward the Ohio, some sort of opportunity
had been briefly offered to Braxton Bragg and
Bragg had never quite been able to
accept it. His army was just a little too small, Kirby Smith was just a little
too far away and too independent, the dire things that would happen if he
fought and lost were just a little too easy to see—and, after all, the kind of
resolution that drives a man to risk all in order to win all is an uncommon
trait; the Confederacy had one army commander who possessed it, and perhaps one
was its share. Anyway, the opportunity faded and disappeared. Bragg maneuvered
after the time for maneuver had passed. He went to Frankfort and helped to
install a true Confederate as governor of Kentucky, and by this time it was
too late to win the battle which would have validated the installation. Buell
at last was coming to meet him, and on October 8 the two armies collided in a
savage, inconclusive engagement near the town of Perryville. More than seven
thousand men were casualties, nobody won anything of consequence—so
ill-directed was the encounter that the two armies actually fought for hardly
more than access to a supply of drinking water, Kentucky's streams being nearly
dry at the time—and after it was over Bragg took thought of the length of the
odds that were against him. His army had never quite been able to join hands
with the army of Kirby Smith, who was also reflecting on the odds; the people
of Kentucky had not risen to join him, and the hope that they would do so had
been the only thing that really justified the northward march in the first
place—and at last Bragg turned about and marched back to Tennessee, Kirby Smith
did likewise, and the western invasion came to a dismal end.
Like the eastern invasion, it had ended
in a drawn battle which was nevertheless—as a milestone, if as nothing more—
profoundly significant. The Southern tide never again rose as high as it was
when it touched Antietam and Perryville; and as it ebbed, after those battles,
there came a subtle change in Southern hopes. The Confederacy might yet win, by
a sudden dazzling stroke, by Northern ineptitude and war-weariness, or simply
by dogged refusal to admit defeat, but the old jaunty optimism was gone.
President Davis, who was as stout-hearted as any man in the South, reflected
the change in a dispatch he sent to Major General T. H. Holmes, who commanded
in the trans-Mississippi region:
"The
expectation that the Kentuckians would rise en masse with the coming of a force
which would enable them to do so, alone justified an advance into that state
while the enemy in force remained in Tennessee. That expectation has been sadly
disappointed, and the future is to be viewed in the light of our late
experiences." This light showed, among other things, that the Confederacy
could not reinforce certain vital points which badly needed to be strengthened,
and Mr. Davis explained this in a letter to Governor J. G. Shorter of Alabama,
who feared that the Federals were menacing Mobile:
"I
have felt long and deeply the hazard of its condition and an anxious desire to
secure it, but have vainly looked for an adequate force which could be spared
from other localities. The enemy greatly outnumber us and have many advantages
in moving their forces, so that we must often be compelled to hold positions
and fight battles with the chances against us. Our only alternatives are to
abandon important points or to use our limited resources as effectively as the
circumstances will permit."
At about the same time he notified harassed
Governor John Milton of Florida that even though the Yankees seemed likely to
overrun that isolated state, "we have no reinforcements that could be
spared without injustice to other sections equally important and equally
threatened."
4
Mr. Davis was being forced once more to
look at the grim reality which had been so distressingly visible in the spring—
the fact that the Confederacy could not resist all of the pressures which the
Federal government was able to apply whenever it made unrelenting use of them.
This was a reality which Mr. Lincoln had tried in vain to draw to the attention
of his generals. Resenting political interference in matters of strategy, they
had paid little notice, and as a result Lee and Bragg had carried the war
almost to the doorsteps of the North, and Southern prospects had looked much
better than they actually were. But now, after two drawn battles and one
proclamation, the reality was regaining its visibility. Mr. Davis could see it
clearly, and it was time for the Federal generals to see it too.
Among these was General Buell. Far back
in January, Mr. Lincoln had written to him, trying earnestly to make the point:
". . . we have the
greater
numbers,
and the enemy has the
greater
facility
of concentrating forces upon points of collision
...
we must fail unless we can find some way of making
our
advantage an over-match for his
...
by menao ing him with superior forces
at
different
points
at the
same
time."
5
This had done no good. The Federals had had vastly superior forces
in Tennessee all spring and summer but they had not menaced anything very much,
either singly or in combination, and at last General Bragg with a smaller army
had drawn Buell all the way to northern Kentucky, fighting there a battle in
which less than half of Buell's army got into action, and marching back to
Tennessee afterward with a wagon train full of supplies. Buell made no more
than a formal pursuit. He was glad that Bragg was leaving, but he felt that before
he could go after him he must rest, reorganize and re-equip his own army, and
repeated telegrams from Halleck could not get any speed out of him. One of
Buell's soldiers, irritated by the failure to pursue the retreating
Confederates, put into words the thought that was unquestionably bothering the
President: "The way the hed generals are a doing now I am afraid this war
will never end."
6
Presidential patience ran out at last,
and, on October 30, Buell was sent into retirement, command of his Army of the
Cumberland going to Major General William S. Rosecrans— red-faced, excitable,
"Old Rosey" to his admiring soldiers; an officer who had served with
McClellan in western Virginia early in the war and who then and later had shown
a considerable talent for two-handed fighting.
As far as Washington could see,
Rosecrans had in fact done very well. Commanding troops under Grant in northern
Mississippi, he had this fall repulsed General Price in a sharp fight at the
town of Iuka, when Price apparently meditated taking his army up to Kentucky
to help Bragg. Then Rosecrans had gone to Corinth, that undistinguished
railroad junction town which Beauregard had evacuated in Halleck's favor in the
spring, and there had fought a tremendous fight against Earl Van Dorn, a battle
involving small armies and huge casualty lists; Van Dorn attacked furiously and
was driven off in retreat, and what amounted to a third Confederate offensive,
to go with those of Lee and Bragg, had failed. If the administration wanted a
hard fighter for the Army of the Cumberland it could not help thinking about
Rosecrans. His appointment represented something of a rebuff for George Thomas,
to whom the command had been offered in September. At that time Thomas had
declined the offer, on the ground that a change just then would be fair neither
to Buell nor to him, but he had not intended to decline for keeps, and when
Rosecrans got the appointment Thomas filed a dignified protest. He withdrew it
when Halleck pointed out that Rosecrans ranked him, and if he felt any soreness
he kept it to himself, and he gave Rosecrans loyal service as
second-in-command; but the fact remained that he had been passed over.
Washington seems to have forgotten that he was the one western general who had
really wanted to carry out Mr. Lincoln's plan for an invasion of eastern
Tennessee. Finding a good fighting man, the government had failed to notice a
better one.
7
The important fact, however, was that the
government was replacing a cautious man with an aggressive one. Rosecrans was
marching back into Tennessee, and off to the southwest Grant was getting ready
to march overland to Vicksburg, and Major General John A. McClernand, the
Illinois Democrat, had confidential orders that contemplated the raising of a
new army for an amphibious drive down the Mississippi. In the west the Federal
power was about to begin tightening the screws once more. If the same thing
could be done in the east the Federal pressure might become irresistible.