This Hallowed Ground (24 page)

For Halleck clung to the thought that the war might be won without very much fighting. To him, the occupation of Rebel territory was the big thing. Here he was, sitting in an important junction town, occupying a healthy stretch of the Memphis and Charleston Railroad; as far as he could see, this was victory. He wrote to Pope that all he wanted was for Beauregard to go far enough south so that he could not menace the railroad line: “There is no object in bringing on a battle if this object can be obtained without one. I think by showing a bold front for a day or two the enemy will continue his retreat, which is all I desire.”
¹⁵

Memphis was in Union hands now, and Grant was sent over to take charge of it. This assignment marked the beginning of the upswing for Grant. He had been on the verge of quitting the army during the march down to Corinth, feeling humiliated because Halleck was giving him nothing to do, and Sherman had talked him out of it — Sherman, who had lost his command and been written off as insane early in the war, but who had come back and was now solidly established, the last of his nervous anxiety having been burned away in the fires of Shiloh. Now Grant had a job again. Before long it would grow bigger.

Bit by bit Halleck was scattering the huge army that Beauregard had not dared to fight. He had to occupy Memphis, Corinth, many miles of railroad, a network of towns behind the railroad. Also, he was sending Buell east to take Chattanooga — an eminently sound idea, one which the Confederates just then did not know how they were going to stop, except that it was all being done very slowly. Buell was a cautious, methodical man and Halleck was the last man on earth
to make him less so; Buell went inching along toward Chattanooga, rebuilding as he went the railroad line which the Rebels had been tearing up, and it was almost an open question whether he would reach Chattanooga before the war was over.
¹⁶

Meanwhile the army had lost a good man — old C. F. Smith, who had damned the volunteers and led them to victory at Fort Donelson, who had given Grant the framework for his “unconditional surrender” message, and who should have been spared for more battles; there was plenty of fighting ahead, and a man of his kind would be useful. But the old man had been ill for weeks with his infected leg, and a few weeks after the battle of Shiloh had died at Savannah, Tennessee. They would miss him.

This was the spring when they could have done it. The irresponsible overconfidence of the old “On to Richmond” days was gone forever, and there was a sullen new respect for the fighting capacity of the southern soldier, but the chance was there just the same. Now was the time to move fast and hit hard, because the other side was badly off balance. The Confederate war potential, limited in any case by comparison with that of the North, had not yet been fully developed. Final victory could be won before summer if the strong northern advantage was pressed to the limit.

Yet the great Federal offensive moved with leaden feet. In the West, Halleck was profoundly cautious, inching along with pick and shovel, leaving nothing to the chances that might go against him, blind to the chances that might work in his favor, asking only that Beauregard leave him alone. And in the East, where the Confederate capital and nerve center lay a scant hundred miles from Washington, the Federal command was demonstrating that speed was a word it did not understand.

Richmond had become very important. Not only was it the capital, the living symbol of the Confederacy’s ability to exist as an independent nation. In the largely rural South it was now the metropolis, the great industrial center, the heart and core of the war-production machine. Memphis was gone, and Nashville, and New Orleans; now Richmond was the keystone, and if it fell the Confederacy’s ability to resist would be fatally limited. To take and hold Richmond this spring was to win it all.

But there were problems. While the Westerners were moving up the Tennessee toward what would soon be the Shiloh battlefield, Confederate
Joe Johnston was stoutly entrenched around the old Bull Run battlefield, and McClellan at last moved forward to drive him out But McClellan’s army was more than twice as big as Johnston’s, and Johnston had no intention of waiting to be destroyed; he got out of there before McClellan arrived, falling back behind the Rappahannock River and leaving nothing for the Yankees except miles of trenches, a string of log huts and barracks, a number of wooden guns that had been mounted for purposes of deception, and smoldering piles of burned foodstuffs and equipment that could not be carried away. McClellan looked things over, decided that an overland pull down to Richmond would be too risky, and returned to Washington; he would put his army on boats and steam down to Old Point Comfort, where the James River came into the lower end of Chesapeake Bay. From there he would march up the long peninsula between the James and York rivers, striking Richmond from the east, trusting to Federal sea power to protect his flanks and give him his supplies.

The plan was good enough, and the army sailed with high confidence. By the first week in April thousands of troops were going ashore near Fortress Monroe; like their general, the men assumed that they would be in Richmond in a few weeks, and the mere sight of the great fleet of transports and warships, the waving flags and the visible display of northern power, convinced them that they were irresistible. Richmond was perhaps fifty miles away, and in the state of Virginia there were at least twice as many Union soldiers as Confederates. A quick march up the peninsula, one big battle at the gates of Richmond, and that would be that.

Yet the march was not quick. McClellan got his army to the peninsula before Johnston did, and for a few crucial days there was nothing much there to stop him. Yorktown was fortified, and a sketchy line of works ran across the peninsula from York River to the James, but there were no more than fifteen thousand armed Confederates present. McClellan had fifty-three thousand men with him, more were coming down on every boat, and one hard smash would probably have settled things. But McClellan was an engineer and he wanted to study the situation with an engineer’s careful eye, and while he was at his studies the local Confederate commander played a game on him.

This officer was General John Bankhead Magruder, an imposing-looking gentleman whose military talents were limited but who for years had been an enthusiast for amateur theatricals, and the show he put on now had a sure professional touch that completely baffled McClellan. Magruder marched his skimpy forces back and forth and up and down, making a great show, behaving as if his force was unlimited, and McClellan was greatly impressed; he concluded presently
that the Confederate line was too strong to be stormed, and so he halted his army, began to wheel up a ponderous array of siege guns and heavy mortars, built works for their protection — and, in the end, lost an entire month, during which time Johnston and his army showed up and the invasion came to a stalemate.
¹

Other things went wrong, military errors being cumulative.

The Union navy ruled the waters, and it had been supposed originally that any Rebel line on the peninsula could easily be outflanked: warships could steam up either of the rivers, hammering down any fieldworks that might exist and landing troops in the Rebel rear. But just at this time the navy had utterly lost control of the waters around Hampton Roads, and the flanking device McClellan had counted on was not available. This had happened because when the Federals evacuated Norfolk navy yard in the spring of 1861 they had done an imperfect job of destruction on one warship which they had been obliged to leave behind — U.S.S.
Merrimac
, a powerful steam frigate, temporarily immobilized because of defective engines.

Merrimac
had been burned and scuttled, but when the Confederates took over the yard they raised the hulk, found it largely intact, and with vast ingenuity created a new marine monster that almost won the war for them.
Merrimac
was cut down to her berth deck and was given a slanting superstructure with twenty-four-inch oaken walls covered by four inches of iron plating, with ports for ten guns. For
Merrimac’s
bow the unorthodox naval architects devised a four-foot iron beak. The defective engines, not at all improved by having spent some weeks at the bottom of the harbor, were more or less repaired, the vessel was rechristened
Virginia
, and early in March this unique creation came steaming out into Hampton Roads to upset Yankee strategy.

She looked like nothing anybody had ever seen before. Before and abaft her superstructure, her decks were just awash, so that from a distance the craft looked like a derelict barn adrift on the tide, submerged to the eaves. She drew twenty-two feet of water, her decrepit engines wheezed and creaked and frequently broke down, she was so unhandy it could take half an hour just to turn her around — and at that moment there were not more than three warships in the navies of the world that would have been a match for her. She cruised about, sinking two wooden warships with ease and driving another ashore, and the frustrated Yankee gunners who fired whole broadsides at her at point-blank range discovered that they might as well have been throwing handfuls of pebbles: the missiles bounced high in the air when they struck, making a prodigious clanging and whanging but doing no particular harm to anyone.
²

For twenty-four hours the Federal authorities were in a state of
panic, the most panicky of the lot being that eccentric war minister, Secretary Edwin M. Stanton.
Merrimac
could destroy the whole Federal fleet, she could steam up the Potomac and destroy Washington, she could go up the coast and clean out New York Harbor, she could go down the coast and obliterate the blockading squadrons; perhaps, in this promising month of March, the whole war would be lost because of this ungainly waddling warship. (In actual fact,
Merrimac
drew too much water to ascend the Potomac and was far too unseaworthy to go out into the open ocean, but Washington did not realize this.) At the very least she could upset all plans for the lower Chesapeake Bay.

Then, just when all seemed lost, another wholly fantastic warship came into the lower bay to restore the balance.

This was U.S.S.
Monitor
, which had been designed, built, and commissioned in the very nick of time. In all the story of Civil War coincidences, none is more remarkable than the one that brought these two ships into Hampton Roads within twenty-four hours of each other.

Monitor
was a flat raft, pointed at the ends, her deck hardly more than a foot above water. Near the bow there was a little wart of a pilothouse, near the stern a smokestack; between them there was a ponderous revolving turret containing two eleven-inch guns. She had no masts, she was heavily plated with iron, and she was as complete a departure as
Merrimac
herself from all conventional standards of what a vessel had a right to look like. Orthodox naval men had shaken their heads dolefully when Swedish designer John Ericsson presented the plans for her; the decision to build her seems to have been made largely by Abraham Lincoln himself, who possessed less than his normal allotment of orthodoxy. She was not much more seaworthy than
Merrimac
, had almost foundered steaming down from New York in a storm; and now, the morning after
Merrimac’s
spectacular debut, she came chuffing in through the Virginia capes, ready for battle.

The day was March 9, memorable for the most momentous drawn battle in history — a battle that nobody won but that made the navies of the world obsolete.
Merrimac
and
Monitor
circled one another, got in close, and then fired away furiously, but neither seemed able to do the other very much harm.
Merrimac
tried to ram once, but the blow was ineffective — her iron beak had been twisted off the day before in the process of sinking a Federal frigate — and at day’s end each warship hauled off, battered and dented but fully operational.
³

Washington was jubilant:
Merrimac
had met her match. But so, for that matter, had
Monitor —
which meant trouble for McClellan. The navy people were too well aware that until more ironclads were built the one they had must be preserved at all costs, and so
Monitor
was kept strictly on the defensive; if she went out and provoked a finish
fight she might conceivably get sunk — a disaster too horrible to think about. So for two months the rival ironclads glowered at one another from opposite sides of Hampton Roads … and when McClellan asked the navy to go up the James and outflank Joe Johnston’s defensive line on the peninsula the navy could not do it. Just by staying afloat
Merrimac
was paralyzing Union activity on the James River.

So McClellan spent all of April preparing to attack the Confederate defenses. He finally got all of his heavy guns into position, ready for a scientific bombardment that would flatten the opposing works, and on May 4 — just as he was about to touch it off — he found that the works were empty. Johnston, outnumbered two to one and greatly mistrusting the strength of his fortifications, had waited until the last moment and then ordered a retreat.

That was the end of
Merrimac
. When Johnston retreated the Confederates had to evacuate Norfolk, which the Federals immediately occupied, and
Merrimac
no longer had a home. Her deep draught kept her from escaping up the James, and at last, on May 10, she was abandoned and blown up. She had had just over two months under the Confederate flag, and she had accomplished a good deal more than she usually gets credit for. She was, in fact, one of the reasons why the North did not capture Richmond in the spring of 1862.
⁴

When Johnston retreated McClellan followed. His advance ran into Johnston’s rear guard in a chain of fieldworks near old Williamsburg and fought a hard, wearing battle that did nothing but produce twenty-two hundred Union casualties and prove that both armies had long since got past the clumsy amateurish stage of the Bull Run era. Johnston kept on retreating until he had backed all the way into the suburbs of Richmond, and McClellan followed at a pace not much faster than the one Halleck had been displaying in Mississippi. May was nearly over by the time the Army of the Potomac was in line near the Confederate capital — badly behind the “three or four weeks” schedule McClellan had so optimistically laid down on February 20.