The Civil War: A Narrative: Volume 1: Fort Sumter to Perryville

by Shelby Foote

  He would wait and see, improvising to meet what might arise. Meanwhile, the armies were getting into position at last for another major effort—and, incidentally, fulfilling the Tribune reporter’s prediction about “the poetry of war.” Down on the Rappahannock, for example, another of Greeley’s men overheard the following exchange between two pickets on opposite banks:

  “Hallo, Secesh!”

  “Hallo, Yank.”

  “What was the matter with your battery Tuesday night?”

  “You made it too hot. Your shots drove the cannoneers away, and they haven’t stopped running yet. We infantry men had to come out and withdraw the guns.”

  “You infantry men will run, too, one of these fine mornings.”

  The Confederate picket let this pass, as if to say it might be so, and responded instead with a question:

  “When are you coming over, bluecoat?”

  “When we get ready, butternut.”

  “What do you want?”

  “Want Fredericksburg.”

  “Don’t you wish you may get it!”

  2

  As if in accordance with the respective limitations of their available resources—which of course applied to men as well as to the food they ate, the powder they burned, and the shoes and clothes and horses they wore out—while Lincoln was getting rid of experienced commanders, Davis was making use of those he had. Yet this difference in outlook and action was not merely the result of any established ratio between profligacy and frugality, affordable on the one hand and strictly necessary on the other; it was, rather, an outgrowth of the inherent difference in their natures. Lincoln, as he said, was more in need of success than he was in need of sympathy. And while this was also true of Davis, he placed such value on the latter quality—apparently for its own sake—that its demands for reciprocal loyalty, whatever shortcomings there might be in regard to the former, were for him too strong to be denied.

  Braxton Bragg and R. E. Lee were cases in point. Ever since the western general began his retreat from Harrodsburg, Davis had been receiving complaints of dissension in the ranks of the Army of Kentucky, along with insistent demands that its commander be removed: in spite of which (if not, indeed, because of them; for such agitations often seemed to strengthen instead of weaken Davis’ will) the summons Bragg found waiting for him in Knoxville had not been sent with any notion of effecting his dismissal, but rather with the intention of giving him the chance to present in person his side of the reported controversy. When he got to Richmond, October 25, the President received him with a smile and a congratulatory handshake. On the face of it, both were certainly deserved: the first because it was not Davis’ way to dissolve a friendship or condemn any man on the basis of hearsay evidence, and the second because, of the three offensives designed to push Confederate arms beyond the acknowledged borders of secession, only Bragg’s had been even moderately successful. In fact, “moderately” was putting it all too mildly. Whatever else had been left undone, a campaign which relieved the pressure on Chattanooga and recovered for the Confederacy all of northwest Alabama, as well as eastern and south-central Tennessee, including Cumberland Gap—not to mention the fact that its two columns had inflicted just under 14,000 battle casualties while suffering just over 4000, and had returned with an enormous train of badly needed supplies and captured matériel, including more than thirty Union guns—could scarcely be called anything less than substantial in its results. What was more, Bragg had conceived and, in conjunction with Kirby Smith, executed the whole thing, not only without prodding from above, but also without the government’s advance permission or even knowledge. Initiative such as that was all too rare. Davis heard him out, and though he did not enjoy hearing his old friend and classmate Bishop Polk accused of bumbling and disloyalty, sustained him. Bragg was told to rejoin his army, which meanwhile was moving rapidly by rail, via Stevenson, Alabama, from Knoxville to Tullahoma and Murfreesboro, where it would threaten Nashville and block a Federal advance from that direction.

  Polk was summoned to the capital as soon as Bragg had left it. Invited to present his side of the controversy, the bishop came armed with documents—messages from Bragg to him, messages from him to Bragg, and affidavits provided by fellow subordinates, similarly disaffected—which he believed would protect his reputation and destroy his adversary’s, or at any rate neutralize the poison lately poured into the presidential ear. “If you choose to rip up the Kentucky campaign you can tear Bragg into tatters,” Hardee told him. However, Davis urged him to put them away, appealing to his patriotism as well as his churchman’s capacity for forgiveness, and the bishop agreed to go back and do his Christian best along those lines. By way of compensation, the President handed him his promotion to lieutenant general, a new rank lately authorized by Congress at the same time it legalized the previously informal division of the armies into “wings” and corps. That was gratifying. Equally so was the news that his friend Hardee’s name appeared immediately below his own on the seven-man list of generals so honored.

  Above them both—next to the very top, in fact—was Kirby Smith, who thus was rewarded for his independent accomplishments in Kentucky, even though he had written to the War Department soon after his return, complaining acidly of Bragg’s direction of the campaign during its later stages and requesting transfer to Mobile or elsewhere, anywhere, if staying where he was would require further coöperation with that general. Davis himself replied to this on October 29. He agreed that the campaign had been “a bitter disappointment” in some respects, but he also felt that events should not be judged by “knowledge acquired after they transpired.” Besides, having talked at length with Bragg that week, he could assure Smith that “he spoke of you in the most complimentary terms, and does not seem to imagine your dissatisfaction.” Davis admitted some other commanders might “excite more enthusiasm” than the dyspeptic North Carolinian, but he doubted that they would be “equally useful” to the country. In motion now for Middle Tennessee, Bragg would need reinforcements in order to parry the Federal counterthrust from Nashville. Where were they to be procured if not from Smith? He asked that, and then concluded: “When you wrote your wounds were fresh, your lame and exhausted troops were before you. I hope time may have mollified your pain and that future operations may restore the confidence essential to cheerfulness and security in campaign.”

  That was enough for Smith, whose admiration for Davis was such that, if the President requested it, he would not only coöperate with Bragg, he would even serve under him if it was absolutely necessary. Grateful, Davis sent for him to come to Richmond in early November. Smith went and, like Polk, gave the President his personal assurance that his rancor had been laid by—as indeed it had. A week later he sent Bragg his strongest division, Stevenson’s, and neither Smith nor any member of his staff permitted himself a public word of criticism of the leader of the Kentucky campaign for the balance of the war. Returning to Knoxville by way of Lynchburg (where he had convalesced from his Manassas wound and married the young lady who had nursed him) he had an unexpected encounter during a change of trains. “I saw Gen. Bragg,” he wrote his wife; “everyone prognosticated a stormy meeting. I told him what I had written to Mr. Davis, but he spoke kindly to me & in the highest terms of praise and admiration of ‘my personal character and soldierly qualities.’ I was astonished but believe he is honest & means well.”

  Breckinridge was already with Bragg: in fact, had preceded the army to its present location. Following the repulse at Baton Rouge, after wiring Hardee to “reserve the division for me,” he had reached Knoxville in early October with about 2500 men. Reinforced by an equal number of exchanged prisoners, he had been about to start northward in order to share in the “liberation” of his native Bluegrass, when he received word that Bragg was on the way back and wanted him to proceed instead to Murfreesboro, where he was to dispose his troops “for the defense of Middle Tennessee or an attack on Nashville.” He got there October 28, joining Forrest, who
had been deviling the Federals by way of breaking in his newly recruited “critter companies.” Bragg’s 30,000 veterans arrived under Polk and Hardee ten days later, and when Stevenson’s 9000-man division marched in from Knoxville shortly afterward, the army totaled 44,000 infantry and artillery effectives, plus about 4000 organic cavalry under Wheeler. This was by no means as large a force as Rosecrans was assembling within the Nashville intrenchments, but Bragg did not despair of whipping him when he emerged. Returning from Richmond with assurances of the President’s confidence, he set about the familiar task of drilling his troops and stiffening the discipline which Buell had admired. Meanwhile, he turned Forrest and Morgan loose on Rosecrans, front and rear. “Harass him in every conceivable way in your power,” he told them. And they did, thus fulfilling the anticipation announced in general orders, November 20: “Much is expected by the army and its commander from the operations of these active and ever-successful leaders.”

  Nor were the infantry neglected in their commander’s announcement of his hopes. Having posted Stevenson’s division in front of Manchester, Hardee’s corps at Shelbyville, and Polk’s at Murfreesboro—the latter now including Breckinridge, so that Polk had three and Hardee two divisions—Bragg announced in the same general order that the army had a new name: “The foregoing dispositions are in anticipation of the great struggle which must soon settle the question of supremacy in Middle Tennessee. The enemy in heavy force is before us, with a determination, no doubt, to redeem the fruitful country we have wrested from him. With the remembrance of Richmond, Munfordville, and Perryville so fresh in our minds, let us make a name for the now Army of Tennessee as enviable as those enjoyed by the armies of Kentucky and the Mississippi.”

  Presumably this was the best that could be done in that direction: Davis had sustained the army commander and persuaded his irate subordinates to lay aside their personal and official differences in order to concentrate on the defense of the vital center in Tennessee. South and west of there, however, the problem was not one of persuading delicate gears to mesh, but rather one of filling the near vacuum created by the bloody repulse Van Dorn and Price had suffered in front of Corinth. Vicksburg was obviously about to become the target for a renewed endeavor by Federal combinations. What these would be, Davis did not know, but whatever they were, they posed a problem that would have to be met before they got there. He met it obliquely, so to speak, by turning initially to a second problem, seven hundred miles away, whose solution automatically provided him with a solution to the first.

  This was the problem of Charleston, where the trouble was also an outgrowth of dissension. John Pemberton, in command there, had been a classmate of Bragg’s and had several of that general’s less fortunate characteristics, including an abruptness of manner which, taken in conjunction with his northern birth, had earned him a personal unpopularity rivaling the North Carolinian’s. Indeed, not being restricted to the army, it surpassed it. He was “wanting in polish,” according to one Confederate observer, “and was too positive and domineering … to suit the sensitive and polite people among whom he had been thrown.” As a result, he had not been long in incurring the displeasure of Governor Pickens and the enmity of the Rhetts, along with that of other Charlestonians of influence, who by now were clamoring for his removal. They wanted their first hero back: meaning Beauregard. It was a more or less familiar cry to Davis, for others were also calling for the Creole, still restoring his “shattered health” at Bladon Springs. In mid-September two Louisiana congressmen brought to the President’s office a petition signed by themselves and fifty-seven fellow members, requesting the general’s return to command of the army that had been taken from him. Davis read the document aloud, including the signatures, then sent for the official correspondence relating to Beauregard’s removal for being absent without leave. This too he read aloud, as proof of justice in his action on the case, and closed the interview by saying: “If the whole world were to ask me to restore General Beauregard to the command which I have already given to General Bragg, I would refuse it.”

  In any case, he had decided by then to use him in the opposite direction: meaning Charleston. Orders had been drawn up in late August, appointing Beauregard to command the Department of South Carolina and Georgia, with headquarters in Charleston. Whether he would accept the back-area appointment, which amounted in effect to a demotion, was not known. Yet there should have been little doubt; for the choice, after all, lay between limited action and inaction. “Nil desperandum is my motto,” he had declared, chafing in idleness earlier that month, “and I feel confident that ere long the glorious sun of Southern liberty will appear more radiant than ever from the clouds which obscure its brilliant disk.” He wanted a share in scouring those clouds away. Receiving the orders in early September, he told a friend: “If the country is willing I should be put on the shelf thro’ interested motives, I will submit until our future reverses will compel the Govt to put me on duty. I scorn its motives and present action.” He wired acceptance, took the cars at Mobile on September n, and received a tumultuous welcome on the 15th when he returned to the city whose harbor had been the scene of his first glory.

  This not only freed the embittered Charlestonians of Pemberton; it also freed Pemberton for the larger duty Davis had in mind for him, along with a promotion as seventh man on the seven-man list of new lieutenant generals. Slender and sharp-faced, the forty-eight-year-old Pennsylvanian had been pro-Southern all his adult life, choosing southern cadets as his West Point friends and later marrying a girl from Old Point Comfort. He was, indeed, an out-and-out States Righter, and it was generally known in army circles that in making his choice of sides in the present conflict, despite the fact that two of his brothers had joined a Philadelphia cavalry troop, he had declined a Federal colonelcy in order to accept a commission as a Confederate lieutenant colonel and assignment to Norfolk, where he had been charged with organizing Virginia’s cavalry and artillery. Efficiency at that assignment had won him a brigadier’s stars and transfer to Charleston, where his ability as an administrator—whatever his shortcomings when it came to social converse—had won him another promotion and eventually still another, along with another transfer, in connection with the larger duty Davis had in mind. This was for Pemberton to take charge of a department created October 1, consisting of the whole state of Mississippi and that part of Louisiana east of the Mississippi River. Instructed to “consider the successful defense of those States”—one already invaded from the north, the other already invaded from the south—“as the first and chief object of your command,” he was told to proceed at once to his new post: which he did. Arriving October 14, he established department headquarters at Jackson, Mississippi.

  There were, as usual, objections. Mainly these came from men over whose heads he had been advanced in his rush up the ladder of rank, including Van Dorn and Lovell, here in his own department, as well as others back in the theater he had come from; “officers who,” as one of them protested, “had already distinguished themselves and given unquestioned evidence of capacity, efficiency, and other soldierly qualities.” By this last, the disgruntled observer meant combat—for Pemberton had seen none since the Mexican War. Also, it was felt that he lacked the flexibility of mind necessary to independent command of a region under pressure from various directions. But the fact was, Davis had already taken this into consideration. Pemberton’s main job would be to keep a bulldog grip on Vicksburg and Port Hudson, denying free use of the Mississippi to the Federals and keeping the stretch of river between those two bastions open as a Confederate supply line connecting its opposite banks. Inflexibility in the performance of such a job—even tactical and strategic near-sightedness, of which the new commander was also accused by those who had known him in the East—might turn out to be a positive virtue when he was confronted, as surely he would be, by combinations which well might cause a more “flexible” man to fly to pieces. So Davis reasoned, at any rate, when he assigned the Northerner to
defend his home state. And at least one Vicksburg editor agreed, declaring that Pemberton’s arrival at last demonstrated that the far-off Richmond government had not “failed to appreciate the vast importance of preserving this important region” and that Mississippians were no longer “to be put off and imposed upon with one-horse generals.”

  Whatever their resentment of his rapid rise, his northern birth, his lack of exposure to gunfire, and his uncongenial manner, Pemberton’s by-passed fellow officers—even Van Dorn, whose ruffled feathers Davis smoothed by explaining that the appointment had been made, not to overslough him, but to unburden him of paperwork and other back-area concerns, in order to free him for the offensive action which he so much preferred—would doubtless have been less envious if they had been able to compare the magnitude of the new commander’s “first and chief object” with the means which he had inherited for effecting it. He had fewer than 50,000 troops of all arms in his entire department: 24,000 under Van Dorn and Price—disaffected Transmississippians for the most part, anxious to get back across the river for the close-up protection of their homes—and another 24,000 mainly comprising the permanent garrisons of Vicksburg and Port Hudson. Even without knowledge of the three-pronged Federal build-up now in progress north and south of these two critical points (a combined force of more than 100,000 men, supported by the guns of two fleets) it was obvious that the difficulties of the assignment would be exceeded only by the clamor which would follow if he failed, whatever the odds.