The Civil War: A Narrative: Volume 2: Fredericksburg to Meridian

by Shelby Foote

  Telegrams were also sent—in fact had been sent beforehand, so confident was the Secretary that the council would approve his plan—to officials of three of the several railroads involved, requesting them to “come to Washington as quickly as you can.” By noon of the 24th they were in Stanton’s office, poring over maps and working out the logistical details required for transporting four divisions, together with their guns and wagons, from the eastern to the western theater, 1200 circuitous miles across the intervening Alleghenies. Four changes of cars were necessary, two at unbridged crossings of the Ohio, near Wheeling and Louisville, and two more at Washington and Indianapolis, where there were no connecting tracks between the roads that must be used. Hooker was authorized to commandeer all the cars, locomotives, plants, and equipment that he deemed necessary, but no such action had to be taken, so complete was the co-operation of all the lines. Before sundown of the following day, just forty-four hours after Dana’s warning reached the War Department, the first trainload of soldiers pulled into Washington from Culpeper, the point of origin down in Virginia. By the morning of the 27th, two days later, 12,600 men, together with 33 cars of field artillery and 21 of baggage, had passed through the capital, and at 10 o’clock that evening Stanton wired former Assistant Secretary Thomas A. Scott, who had returned to his prewar duties with the Pennsylvania Railroad and was posted at Louisville to regulate the operation west of the mountains: “The whole force, except 3300 of the XII Corps, is now moving.” Within another two days Scott reported trains pulling regularly out of Louisville, and at 10.30 the following night—September 30—the first eastern troops reached Bridgeport, precisely on the schedule announced at the outset, six days back. By October 2, nearly 20,000 men, 10 six-gun batteries with their horses and ammunition, and 100 carloads of baggage had arrived at the Tennessee railhead. “Your work is most brilliant,” Stanton wired Scott. “A thousand thanks. It is a great achievement.”

  It was indeed a great achievement, this swiftest of all the mass movements of troops in history, and most of the credit belonged to the Secretary of War, who had worked feverishly and efficiently to accomplish what many, including the Commander in Chief, had said could not be done. Under his direction, the North had given its answer to the South’s strategic advantage of occupying the interior lines; for though the Confederates had stolen a march and thereby managed, in Forrest’s phrase, to “get there first with the most men,” the Federals had promptly upped the ante by moving farther and faster with still more. In the final stages of the operation, Wheeler’s raiders delayed some of the supply trains by tearing up sections of track, but all got through safely in the end. “You may justly claim the merit of having saved Chattanooga,” Hooker wired Stanton on October 11, after posting his four divisions to prevent a rebel crossing below the town and a descent on the hungry garrison’s rear. The Secretary was pleased to hear so, just as he had been pleased the week before at the evidence that he had been right in rejecting doleful objections that Lee would attack if Meade’s army was weakened by any substantial detachment of troops to Rosecrans. “ ‘All quiet on the Potomac,’ ” he had informed the Chattanooga quartermaster on October 4. “Nothing to disturb autumnal slumbers.… All public interest is now concentrated on the Tennessee.”

  Bragg’s complaint that the Federals had “more than double our numbers” was untrue in regard to the time he made it his excuse for not rapidly following up the advantage gained at Chickamauga. In fact, when McLaws arrived—with two of his own and one of Hood’s brigades, plus the First Corps artillery, which soon was posted atop Lookout Mountain—the Confederates became numerically superior. But now that Hooker had crossed the Alleghenies with nearly 20,000 reinforcements, the situation was reversed. It was the besiegers who were outnumbered. This novel condition, rarely paralleled in military annals, was about to become more novel still; Sherman was on the way from Vicksburg, via Memphis, with another five divisions. Even when he reached Chattanooga, the Army of the Cumberland would not have “more than double” the number of troops in the Army of Tennessee, but it already had a considerable preponderance without him. Although there was still the menace of starvation—an Illinois private was complaining, tall-tale style, that since Chickamauga he and his comrades had eaten “but two meals a day, and one cracker for each meal”—Rosecrans at least could relax his fears that Bragg was going to drive him into the river with a sudden, downhill infantry assault. The rebels lacked the strength, and no one knew this better than their chief. A graver danger, so far as the northern commander was personally concerned, lurked at the far end of the telegraph wires linking his headquarters to those of his superiors in Washington. This applied in particular to the headquarters of the Secretary of War, whose original mistrust of his fellow Ohioan was being confirmed almost daily in the confidential reports he received from Dana, his special emissary on the scene.

  Immediately after the battle, the former Brook Farmer had been glad to “testify to the conspicuous and steady gallantry of Rosecrans on the field”; he put the blame for the defeat on “that dangerous blunderhead McCook” and on Crittenden, whom he considered derelict and incompetent. Before the month was out, however, he had begun to sour on Old Rosy. “He abounds in friendliness and approbativeness.” Dana wired on the 27th, “[but] is greatly lacking in firmness and steadiness of will. He is a temporizing man.… If it be decided to change the chief commander”—there had been no intimation that such a thing was being considered; Dana brought it up of his own accord—“I would take the liberty of suggesting that some Western general of high rank and great prestige, like Grant, for instance, would be preferable as his successor.” Three days later he favored Thomas for the post, saying: “Should there be a change in the chief command, there is no other man whose appointment would be so welcome to this army.” As for the present leader, Dana informed Stanton “that the soldiers have lost their attachment for [him] since he failed them in the battle, and that they do not now cheer him until they are ordered to do so.” In the course of the next two weeks, the first two in October, the Assistant Secretary’s conviction became even more pronounced in this regard. “I have never seen a public man possessing talent with less administrative power, less clearness and steadiness in difficulty, and greater practical incapacity than General Rosecrans. He has inventive fertility and knowledge, but he has no strength of will and no concentration of purpose. His mind scatters; there is no system in the use of his busy days and restless nights.… Under the present circumstances I consider this army to be very unsafe in his hands.” Thus Dana, on the 12th. Six days later, after passing along a report that the soldiers were shouting “Crackers!” at staff officers who moved along them to inspect the fortifications, he added the finishing touches to his word portrait of a man in control of nothing, least of all himself: “Amid all this, the practical incapacity of the general commanding is astonishing, and it often seems difficult to believe him of sound mind. His imbecility appears to be contagious.… If the army is finally obliged to retreat, the probability is that it will fall back like a rabble, leaving its artillery, and protected only by the river behind it.”

  He might have spared himself and the telegrapher the labor of composing and transmitting this last in his series of depositions as to the general’s unfitness for command; for by now, although he would not find it out until the following day, the purpose he intended had been achieved. Stanton had been passing his dispatches along to the Commander in Chief, who had found in them a ready confirmation of his own worst suspicions. Despite this, and because he had not yet decided on a replacement, Lincoln had continued his efforts to stiffen Old Rosy’s resolution. On October 12, for instance, while Dana was observing the “scattered” condition of the Ohioan’s mind, Lincoln wired: “You and Burnside now have [the enemy] by the throat, and he must break your hold or perish.” Rosecrans replied that afternoon, complaining that the corn was ripe on the rebel side of the Tennessee, while “our side is barren.” Nevertheless, and in spite of t
his evidence of divine displeasure, he closed by remarking, much as before, that “we must put our trust in God, who never fails those who truly trust.” Commendable though such faith was, particularly after all the Job-like strain that had been placed on it of late, the President would have preferred to see it balanced by a measure of self-reliance. And not only did this quality appear to be totally lacking in the commander of the army now holed up in Chattanooga, but it had begun to seem to Lincoln that ever since Chickamauga, as he told his secretary, Rosecrans had been acting “confused and stunned, like a duck hit on the head.”

  Ridicule by the President was often the prelude to a general’s dismissal, and this was no exception; Rosecrans was about to go, as Buell and McClellan had gone before him. But there was still the question of a successor to be settled before he went. Dana’s recommendation of Thomas appealed to Lincoln, who had said of the Virginian shortly after the battle that earned him the sobriquet, “The Rock of Chickamauga”: “It is doubtful whether his heroism and skill, exhibited last Sunday afternoon, has ever been surpassed in the world.” Stanton felt much the same way about him. “It is not my fault that he was not in chief command months ago,” he replied to Dana’s observation that there was “no other man whose appointment would be so welcome to this army.” However, there was also Grant, who had been comparatively idle since the fall of Vicksburg, fifteen weeks ago. This was plainly a waste the nation could ill afford. What was most desirable was some arrangement that would employ the full abilities of both, and it took Lincoln until mid-October to arrive at a solution that did just that.

  The Center Gives

  FOR GRANT, THE THREE-MONTH PERIOD THAT followed the fall of Vicksburg—more specifically, the ninety days that elapsed between Sherman’s recapture of Jackson in mid-July and Lincoln’s mid-October solution to the western command problem—had been a time of strain not unlike the one that followed Shiloh and the occupation of Corinth the year before, in which his counsel was rejected and he felt himself to be more or less a supernumerary in the conduct of the war. Now as then, he saw his army dismembered and dispersed, its various segments dispatched to critical theaters, while he himself was confined with the mere remnant to the quiet backwater which he had created along his particular stretch of the Mississippi. He did not consider submitting his resignation, as he had done before, but he suffered, as the result of a horseback accident midway of this season of frustration, an injury which for a term seemed likely to produce the same effect by removing him entirely from the scene, flat on his back on a stretcher. It was indeed a period of tension, of strain of the kind he had always borne least well, and it was attended, as all such times had been for him, by rumors of his drinking, which was said to be his only relief from the boredom that invariably descended when there was no fighting to be done and his wife was not around.

  Not, of course, that he and the troops who remained with him had been completely idle all this time. While Herron was conducting his foray up the Yazoo, which had cost Porter the De Kalb, and Sherman was closing in on Jackson, the price of which was to run him just over 1100 casualties, Grant sent one of McPherson’s brigades down to Natchez to look into a report that there was heavy rebel traffic there in goods moving to and from the otherwise cut-off Transmississippi. Brigadier General T. E. G. Ransom, who commanded the expedition, found the report to be altogether true. Moreover, by sending mounted pursuers east and west he made the simultaneous capture of a wagon train bound for Alexandria with half a million rounds of rifle and artillery ammunition and a drove of 5000 Texas cattle bound for Alabama, both of which had crossed the river the day before, headed in opposite directions. This was a sizable haul, achieved without the loss of a man, and one month later, at nearly as cheap a price, Grant made a considerably larger one at Grenada, the railroad junction south of the Yalobusha where the Confederates had collected most of the rolling stock of the Mississippi Central, trapped there since May by Johnson’s precipitate burning of the bridge across the Pearl when he evacuated Jackson. The raid was two-pronged, one cavalry column sent south from Memphis by Hurlbut while another was sent north by Sherman. On August 17 they converged upon the junction, which so far had resisted all efforts to take it—including Grant’s, back in December—and after a brief skirmish with the outnumbered garrison, which fled to avoid capture, went to work on the huge conglomeration of engines and cars “so closely packed as to make a small town of themselves.” An elated trooper described them so, and afterwards the official tally listed no fewer than 57 locomotives and more than 400 freight and passenger cars wrecked and burned, together with depot buildings and machine shops containing a wealth of commissary and ordnance supplies. The total bill of destruction was set at $4,000,000, which made the raid one of the most profitable of the war. Presently, however, this figure had to be scaled down a bit. Learning that the Confederates had returned to Grenada in the wake of the departed bluecoats and were frugally carting away the precious locomotive driving wheels, removed from the rubble and ashes, Hurlbut advised in his report that, next time they went out on such a venture, the raiders use sledges to crack off the flanges of the wheels and thus render them unsalvageable.

  Both Natchez and Grenada were satisfactory accomplishments, so far as they went, but after all they were only raids. Grant wanted something more: something comparable, in its influence on the outcome of the war, to the recent reduction of Vicksburg and the attendant opening of the Mississippi: something, in short, that would knock the flanges off the whole Confederate machine. Banks had suggested, soon after the fall of Port Hudson, an operation against Mobile, and so had Sherman, who proposed that the coastal city be taken as prelude to an advance up the Alabama River to Selma and beyond, threatening Bragg’s rear while Rosecrans, who had maneuvered his adversary back across the Tennessee, brought pressure against his front. Grant approved and passed the word to Halleck. “It seems to me now that Mobile should be captured,” he wired on July 18, “the expedition starting from some point on Lake Pontchartrain.” Halleck replied that the plan had merit, but added characteristically that it would not do to hurry. “I think it will be best to clean up a little,” he advised. “Johnston should be disposed of; also Price, Marmaduke, &c., so as to hold the line of the Arkansas River … [and] assist General Banks in cleaning out Western Louisiana. When these things are accomplished there will be a large available force to operate either on Mobile or Texas.” Just when this would be he did not say. Banks meanwhile had continued to recommend the same objective, though with no better success, and on the last day of the month he left New Orleans aboard a fast packet to confer with Grant at Vicksburg, which he reached the following morning. After putting their heads together both generals continued to urge Halleck to order the reduction of the Confederacy’s only remaining Gulf port east of the Mississippi. “I can send the necessary force,” Grant offered. Whereupon the general-in-chief suddenly cut the ground from under their feet by flatly rejecting the Mobile proposal in favor of an all-out effort against coastal Texas. “There are important reasons why our flag should be restored to some part of Texas with the least possible delay,” he wired on August 6. He did not say what those reasons were, but three days later Lincoln himself got in touch with Grant on the matter. “I see by a dispatch of yours that you incline strongly toward an expedition against Mobile,” he wrote. “This would appear tempting to me also, were it not that, in view of recent events in Mexico, I am greatly impressed with the importance of re-establishing the national authority in Western Texas as soon as possible.”

  Personally considerate though this was, it was not very enlightening; nor was Halleck’s explanation, which he made in a covering letter to Banks, that the decision in favor of a Lone Star expedition had been “of a diplomatic rather than of a military character, and resulted from some European complications, or, more properly speaking, was intended to prevent such complications.” In point of fact, the matter was more complex than anyone outside the State Department knew, including Old B
rains himself, who was a student of international affairs. Benito Juárez, elected head of the Mexican government in the spring of 1861, coincident with the crisis over Sumter, had announced at the time of First Bull Run a two-year suspension of payments to foreign creditors for debts contracted by his predecessor; in response to which Spain, France, and England concluded a convention looking toward a forcible joint collection of their claims and sent some 10,000 troops to Mexico by way of proof that they meant business. By May of the following year, in the period between Shiloh and the Seven Days, while Stonewall Jackson was on the rampage in the Shenandoah Valley, England and Spain had obtained satisfaction from Juárez on the debt, and they withdrew their soldiers. France did not; Napoleon III, attracted by Mexico’s wealth and weakness, had plans designed to rival in the New World those of his illustrious uncle in the Old. He stepped up his demands, including insistence on indemnity and payment of certain shady claims advanced by Swiss-French bankers, rapidly increased his occupation force to 35,000 men, and began a march inland from Vera Cruz and Tampico, which was resisted fitfully and ineffectually by guerillas operating much as they had done against Cortez and Winfield Scott, over the same route of conquest. In June of 1863, with Lee on the march for Pennsylvania and Vicksburg under siege, Mexico City fell to the invaders and a pro-French government was set up.