by Shelby Foote
Below the boom, Porter’s anxiety was relieved as he watched the charred remnants of the rebel fleet come floating down the river. When his demand for immediate surrender of the forts was declined, he put his mortar crews back to work, firing up the remainder of their shells.
New Orleans was in a frenzy of rage and disappointment at the news from downriver. Other cities might accept defeat and endure the aftermath in sullen silence; but not this one. All afternoon and most of the night, while crowds milled in the streets, brandishing knives and pistols and howling for resistance to the end, drays rattled over the cobbles, hauling cotton from the presses for burning on the quays, where crates of rice and hogsheads of molasses were broken open and thrown into the river. This at least won the people’s approval; “The damned Yankees shall not have it!” they cried, and the night was hazed with acrid smoke that hid the stars.
They were no less violent next morning when they heard the guns of the enemy fleet make short work of the Chalmette batteries, then come slowly into view around Slaughterhouse Bend as a drizzle of rain began to fall; “silent, grim, and terrible,” one among the watchers called the warships, “black with men, heavy with deadly portent.” Their great hope had been the ironclads, built and launched in their own yards. One had already gone downriver, powerless, and been by-passed. Now here came the other, the unfinished Mississippi, drifting helpless, set afire to keep her from falling into Federal hands. The crowd howled louder than ever at the sight, shouting “Betrayed! Betrayed!” and screaming curses at the Yankee sailors who watched from the decks and yardarms. Aboard the Hartford, one old tar grinned broadly back at them as he stood beside a 9-inch Dahlgren, holding the lanyard in one hand and patting the big black bottle-shaped breech with the other. The rain came down harder.
Despite the threats and invective from the quay, Farragut’s strength was so obvious that he didn’t have to use it. Two officers went ashore and walked unescorted through the hysterical mob to City Hall, where the mayor was waiting for them. Lovell had retreated, leaving New Orleans an open city. However, if the citizens were willing to undergo naval bombardment, he offered to “return with my troops and not leave as long as one brick remained upon another.” The offer was declined: as was the navy’s demand for an immediate surrender. “This satisfaction you cannot obtain at our hands,” the mayor told the two officers. He would not resist, but neither would he yield; if they wanted the city, let them come and take it.
Farragut wanted no pointless violence; he had had enough violence the day before, when, as he told a friend, “I seemed to be breathing flame.” Saturday, while negotiations continued, he ordered his captains to assemble their crews at 11 o’clock the following morning and “return thanks to Almighty God for his great goodness and mercy for permitting us to pass through the events of the past two days with so little loss of life and blood. At that hour the Church pennant will be hoisted on every vessel of the fleet, and their crews assembled will, in humiliation and prayer, make their acknowledgments thereof to the Great Disposer of all human events.” That would be ceremony enough for him, with or without a formal surrender by the municipal authorities.
The occupation problem still remained, but not for long. Monday the garrisons of Forts Jackson and St Philip—they were “mostly foreign enlistments,” the commandant said; “A reaction set in among them,” he explained—mutinied, spiked the guns, and forced their officers to surrender. Still powerless, the Louisiana was blown up to forestall capture. Butler’s 18,000 men ascended the river unopposed and marched into the city on the last day of the month. “In family councils,” a resident wrote, “a new domestic art began to be studied—the art of hiding valuables” from looters under the general known thereafter as “Spoons” Butler. One cache he uncovered with particular satisfaction: 418 bronze plantation bells collected there in answer to Beauregard’s impassioned pleas for metal. Sent to Boston, they sold for $30,000 to mock the rebels from New England towers and steeples. Other aspects of the occupation were less pleasant for the visitors. Not only was southern hospitality lacking, the people seemed utterly unwilling to accept the consequences of defeat: particularly the women, who responded to northern overtures with downright abuse. Butler knew how to handle that, however. “I propose to make some brilliant examples,” he wrote Stanton.
Farragut now was free to continue his trip upriver, and in early May he did so. Baton Rouge fell as easily as New Orleans, once the guns of the fleet were trained on its streets and houses; the state government had fled the week before to Opelousas, which was safely away from the river. Natchez was next, and it too fell without resistance. Then in mid-May came Vicksburg, whose reply to a demand for surrender was something different from the others: “Mississippians don’t know, and refuse to learn, how to surrender to an enemy. If Commodore Farragut or Brigadier General Butler can teach them, let them come and try.” The ranks were wrong; Butler was a major general, Farragut a captain; but the writer seemed to mean what he was saying. The guns frowned down from the tall bluff—“so elevated that our fire will not be felt by them,” Farragut said—and there were reports of 20,000 reinforcements on the way from Jackson. Deciding to label this first attempt a mere reconnaissance, he left garrisons at Baton Rouge and Natchez, and was back in New Orleans before the end of May. Vicksburg was a problem that could wait. In time he intended to “teach them,” but just now it needed study.
Welles was angry, hotly demanding to know why the attack against Vicksburg’s bluff had not been pressed, but the feeling in the fleet was that enough had been done in one short spring by one upriver thrust. New Orleans was now in northern hands and a second southern capital had fallen—both delivered as outright gifts to the army from the navy. Southerners agreed that it was quite enough, though some found bitter solace in protesting that the thing had been done by mechanical contrivance, with small risk and no gallantry at all. The glory was departing. “This is a most cowardly struggle,” a Louisiana woman told her diary. “These people can do nothing without gunboats.… These passive instruments do their fighting for them. It is at best a dastardly way to fight.” Then she added, rather wistfully: “We should have had gunboats if the Government had been efficient, wise or earnest.”
4
The North had found a new set of western heroes—Farragut, Curtis, Canby, Pope, Ben Butler: all their stars were in ascendance—but some of the former heroes now had tarnished reputations: Grant, for instance. If the news from Donelson had sent him soaring like a rocket in the public’s estimation, the news from Shiloh dropped him sparkless like the stick. Cashiered officers, such as the Ohio colonel who cried “Retreat! Save yourselves!” at first sight of the rebels, were spreading tales back home at his expense. He was incompetent; he was lazy; he was a drunk. Correspondents, who had come up late and gathered their information in the rear—“not the best place from which to judge correctly what is going on in front,” Grant remarked—were soon in print with stories which not only seemed to verify the rumors of “complete surprise,” but also included the casualty lists. Shocking as these were to the whole country, they struck hardest in the Northwest, where most of the dead boys were being mourned.
Hardest hit of all was Ohio, which not only had furnished a large proportion of the corpses, but also was smarting under the charge that several Buckeye regiments had scattered for the rear before firing a shot. Governor David Tod was quick to announce that these men were not cowards; they had been caught off guard as a result of the “criminal negligence” of the high command. By way of securing proof he sent the lieutenant governor down to talk with the soldiers in their camps. They agreed with the governor’s view, and the envoy returned to publish in mid-April a blast against “the blundering stupidity and negligence of the general in command.” He found, he said, “a general feeling among the most intelligent men that Grant and Prentiss ought to be court-martialed or shot.” Grant himself was an Ohioan, but they disclaimed him; he had moved to Illinois.
Nor was Ohio
alone in her resentment. Harlan of Iowa rose in Congress to announce that he discerned a pattern of behavior: Grant had blundered at Belmont until he was rescued by Foote’s navy, had lost at Donelson until C. F. Smith redeemed him, and had been surprised at Shiloh and saved by Buell. “With such a record,” Harlan declared, “those who continue General Grant in active command will in my opinion carry on their skirts the blood of thousands of their slaughtered countrymen.”
Eventually the problem landed where the big ones always did: on the shoulders of Abraham Lincoln. Late one night at the White House a Pennsylvania spokesman made a summary of the charges. Grant had been surprised because of his invariable lack of vigilance and because he disregarded Halleck’s order to intrench. In addition, he was reported drunk: which might or might not have been true, but in any case he had lost the public’s confidence to such an extent that any future blood on his hands would be charged against the officials who sustained him. He had better be dismissed. Lincoln sat there thinking it over, profoundly alone with himself, then said earnestly: “I can’t spare this man. He fights.”
He was not fighting now, nor was he likely to be fighting any time in the near future. Halleck had seen to that by taking the field himself. As soon as he reached Pittsburg Landing, four days after the battle, he began reorganizing his forces by consolidating Grant’s Army of the Tennessee and Buell’s Army of the Ohio with Pope’s Army of the Mississippi, summoned from Island Ten. When George Thomas, now a major general as a reward for Fishing Creek, arrived with Buell’s fifth division—the other four, or parts of them, had come up in time for a share in the fighting—Halleck assigned it to Grant’s army and gave Thomas the command in place of Grant, who was appointed assistant commander of the whole, directly under Halleck. That way he could watch him, perhaps use him in an advisory capacity, and above all keep him out of contact with the troops. Having thus disposed of one wild man, he attended to another. McClernand, with his and Lew Wallace’s divisions, plus a third from Buell, was given command of the reserve. So organized, Halleck told his reshuffled generals, “we can march forward to new fields of honor and glory, till this wicked rebellion is completely crushed out and peace restored to our country.” He was confident, and with good cause. His fifteen divisions included 120,172 men and more than 200 guns.
Thomas and Pope were pleased with the arrangement; but not Buell and McClernand. Buell, whose command was thus reduced to three green divisions while his former lieutenant Thomas had five, all veteran, protested: “You must excuse me for saying that, as it seems to me, you have saved the feelings of others very much to my injury.” McClernand, too, was bitter. He saw little chance for “honor and glory,” as Halleck put it, let alone advancement, when his army—if it could be called such; actually it was a pool on which the rest would call for reinforcements—did not even have a name. But the saddest of all was Grant. He had no troops at all, or even duties, so far as he could see. When he complained about being kicked upstairs into a supernumerary position, Halleck snapped at him with charges of ingratitude: “For the past three months I have done everything in my power to ward off the attacks which were made upon you. If you believe me your friend you will not require explanations; if not, explanations on my part would be of little avail.”
C. F. Smith, who at Donelson had proved himself perhaps the hardest fighter of them all, was not included in the reshuffling because he was still confined to his sickbed in Savannah. After Shiloh, the infected shin got worse; blood poisoning set in. Or perhaps it was simply a violent reaction of the old man’s entire organism, outraged at being kept flat on his back within earshot of one of the world’s great battles. At any rate, he sickened and was dead before the month was out. Halleck ordered a salute fired for him at every post and aboard every warship in the department. The army would miss him, particularly the volunteers who had followed where he led, alternately cursed and cajoled, but always encouraged by his example. Grant would miss him most of all.
April 28, having completed the reorganization and briefed the four commanders, Halleck sent his Grand Army forward against Beauregard, who was intrenched at Corinth with a force which Halleck estimated at 70,000 men. Buell had the center, Thomas the right, and Pope the left; McClernand brought up the rear. Halleck intended to follow along, though for the present he kept his command post at Pittsburg. The great day had come, but he did not seem happy about it according to a reporter who saw him May Day: “He walks by the hour in front of his quarters, his thumbs in the armpits of his vest, casting quick looks, now to the right, now to the left, evidently not for the purpose of seeing anything or anybody, but staring into vacancy the while.” Part of what was fretting him was the thing that had fretted Grant the year before, when he marched for the first time against the enemy and felt his heart “getting higher and higher” until it seemed to be in his throat. What Halleck felt was the presence of the enemy. “The evidences are that Beauregard will fight at Corinth,” he wired Washington this same day.
Certain comparisons were unavoidable for a man accustomed to weighing all the odds. In the fight to come it would be Beauregard, who had co-directed the two great battles of the war, versus Halleck, the former lieutenant of engineers, who had never been in combat. True, he had written or translated learned works on tactics; but so had Hardee, waiting for him now beyond the woods. Bragg was there, grim-faced and wrathful, alongside Polk, the transfer from the Army of the Lord, and Breckinridge, an amateur and therefore unpredictable. So was Van Dorn, who had crossed the Mississippi with 17,000 veterans of Pea Ridge, where the diminutive commander had thrown them at Curtis in a savage double envelopment. It had failed because Curtis had kept his head while the guns were roaring. Could Halleck keep his? He wondered. Besides, Van Dorn might have learned enough from that experience to make certain it did not fail a second time.… For Halleck, the woods were filled with more than shadows.
Nevertheless, he put on a brave face when he wired Washington two days later: “I leave here tomorrow morning, and our army will be before Corinth tomorrow night.”
Pope was off and running, in accordance with the reputation earned at New Madrid. Advancing seven miles from Hamburg on the 4th, he did not stop until he reached a stream appropriately called Seven Mile Creek, and from there he leapfrogged forward again to another creekline within two miles of Farmington, which in turn was only four miles from Corinth. He reported his position a good one, protected by the stream in front and a bog on his left, but he was worried about his other flank; “I hope Buell’s forces will keep pace on our right,” he told headquarters. It turned out he was right to worry. Buell was not there. Lagging back, he was warning Halleck: “We have now reached that proximity to the enemy that our movements should be conducted with the greatest caution and combined methods.” The last phrase meant siege tactics, and the army commander took his cue from that. “Don’t advance your main body at present,” he told Pope. “We must wait till Buell gets up.”
Buell was back near Monterey, with Thomas conforming on his right. Presently Pope was back there, too: Beauregard made a stab at his front, and he had to withdraw to avoid an attempt to envelop the flank protected by the bog. In fact the whole countryside was fast becoming boggy. Assistant Secretary Thomas Scott, an observer down from the War Department, wired Stanton: “Heavy rains for the past twenty hours. Roads bad. Movement progressing slowly.” Gloomily Halleck confirmed the report: “This country is almost a wilderness and very difficult to operate in.” Scott attended a high-level conference and passed the word along: Halleck would continue the advance, and “in a few days invest Corinth, then be governed by circumstances.” He made no conjecture as to what those circumstances might be, but Stanton could see one thing clearly. Last week’s “tomorrow” had stretched to “a few days.”
It was more than a few. Every evening the troops dug in: four hours’ digging, six hours’ sleep, then up at dawn to repel attack. The attack didn’t come, not in force at least, but Halleck had every reason to expe
ct one. Rebel deserters were coming in with eye-witness accounts of the arrival of reinforcements for the 70,000 already behind the formidable intrenchments. He took thought of the host available to Beauregard by rail from Fort Pillow, Memphis, Mobile, and intermediary points. No less than 60,000 could be sped there practically overnight, he computed, which would give the defenders a larger army than his own. Taking thought, he grew cautious; he grew apprehensive. “Don’t let Pope get too far ahead,” he warned, acutely aware by now that he had another wild man on his hands. “It is dangerous and effects no good.”
He had cause for caution, especially since the accounts of deserters were confirmed by observers of his own. In mid-May the officer in charge of pickets reported that he had heard trains pulling into Corinth during the night. “Such trains were greeted with immense cheering on arrival,” he declared. “The enemy are concentrating a powerful army.” Next night it was repeated. A scouting party, working near town, heard more trains arriving “and, after they stopped, marching music from the depot in the direction of the front lines.” Intelligence could hardly be more definite, and Halleck found his apprehension shared. Indiana’s Governor O. P. Morton, down to see how well his Hoosiers had recovered from the bloody shock of Shiloh, wired Stanton on May 22: “The enemy are in great force at Corinth, and have recently received reinforcements. They evidently intend to make a desperate struggle at that point, and from all I can learn their leaders have utmost confidence in the result.… It is fearful to contemplate the consequences of a defeat at Corinth.” Halleck thought it fearful, too: the more so after McClernand capped the climax with a report he had from a doctor friend, captured at Belmont and recently exchanged. The Illinois general, fretting in his back-seat position, was finding “the amount of duty … very great, indeed exhausting, if not oppressive.” Now he crowded into the frame of the big picture by passing along what he heard from the doctor, who had left Memphis on May 15. While there, he had spoken with some former classmates now in the rebel army, who “informed him that on that date the enemy’s force at Corinth numbered 146,000.” Other details were given, the doctor said, “prospectively increasing their number to 200,000.” To palliate the shock of this, he added that “a considerable portion of the force … consists of new levies, being in large part boys and old men.”
