Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction

by Allen C. Guelzo

  Taken together the entire Mississippi River system pulled into itself the commerce of 1.25 million square miles in a gigantic net that stretched to include Pittsburgh in the east and St. Louis in the west. The Mississippi was the commercial highway of the old Northwest and the new cotton lands of the Mississippi Delta, and it tied westerners and southerners into closer economic units than westerners enjoyed with the old East Coast. Pittsburgh, Wheeling, St. Louis, Louisville, Memphis, Natchez, and Cincinnati all grew rich on their trade southward on the river system. It was the river, too, that helped to throw Southerners into the lap of the Democratic Party in the 1830s and 1840s, since they had no wish to help the Whigs build canals and highways in the North when the river brought the nation’s commerce their way simply by force of nature. The South had in the Mississippi River system all the cheap water transportation it needed without the taxation necessary for funding “internal improvements,” and Southerners had no wish to see their western trading partners lured back toward the East by artificial networks of canals or turnpikes.

  The river, however, was only a river until Americans actually learned how to use it, and the key to opening up the potential of the Mississippi River system was the steamboat. In 1811, the first steam-powered vessel on the Mississippi River system was built at Pittsburgh and sent down the Ohio to the Mississippi. It easily beat out the travel time needed by flatboats to work down the rivers, and within a decade newer and faster steamboats cut the travel time from the Gulf to Louisville to under a week. By 1820, there were 89 steamboats operating on the Ohio and Mississippi; by 1840, there were 536. They could penetrate even the smaller rivers in the Mississippi system and cut the costs of shipping every kind of marketable good. In particular, the steamboats were a godsend to cotton agriculture. Baled cotton was bulky and expensive to ship to markets, and before the steamboats, shipping costs cut severely into its profitability. Prior to the 1820s, it cost as much as $5 to move 100 pounds of cotton downriver from Louisville. With the coming of the steamboats, the freight rates fell in 1830 to only $2 per 100 pounds, and in 1840 to only 25¢. Steam made cotton worth transporting to market, and cotton profits, in turn, underwrote the growth of steam navigation on the western rivers. Even the peculiar design of the riverboats was dictated largely by the need to build large, flat-bottomed river craft that could accommodate the space needed for shipping cotton.2

  If the steamboat provided the means for getting the agricultural produce of the west to market, it was the port of New Orleans that provided the greatest marketplace—provided, in fact, one of the great international entrepôts of the world. Down the long river network to New Orleans went most of the grain, hogs, cattle, cotton, and other goods of Ohio, Minnesota, Illinois, and Louisiana; then, in the 1850s, as Tennessee and the border states developed new iron and textile industries, the South’s infant industrial potential poured out onto the rivers and down to New Orleans as well. Up the river from New Orleans, beating against the sluggish brown current of the Mississippi, came the imported goods and manufactures that Southern and western agriculture depended on.

  By the outbreak of the Civil War, New Orleans was the sixth-largest city in the United States and the third-largest importer of goods, and it had to accommodate more than 3,500 steamboat arrivals during the year, with more than 2 million tons of freight that earned more than $185 million. It was from New Orleans that William Howard Russell could see “a grand slave confederacy enclosing the Gulf in its arms, and swelling to the shores of the Potomac and Chesapeake, with the entire control of the Mississippi and a monopoly of the great staples on which so much of the manufacture and commerce of England and France depend.”3

  It was scarcely noticed that by 1860 some of the Mississippi River system’s grand predominance over the West was already beginning to slip away. Southerners in Congress could block the massive appropriations needed for building the rival systems of national roads and canals that would divert western trade back toward eastern markets, but they could not prevent state legislatures in the North from building canals of their own, such as New York’s Erie Canal, which linked the entire Great Lakes water system with the Hudson River and New York City. Nor could they prevent private railroads—the steam-powered mate of the riverboat—from extending their fingers over the Alleghenies into Ohio and Illinois and across the Mississippi into Missouri. The first commercial rail line began construction on July 4, 1828, with the laying of what would become the 73-mile track of the Baltimore & Ohio rail line; two years later, with the rail line complete, a former brewer and brickmaker named Peter Cooper put his own locomotive, Tom Thumb, on the B&O line and hauled the first load of thirty passengers around Baltimore. Within ten years, there was more railroad mileage in the United States than canal mileage, and over the next twenty years the railroads grew to the length of 30,626 miles of track.4

  The first warning bell for New Orleans’s slipping control over the commerce of the continent rang on May 5, 1856, when the 430-ton side-wheel steamboat Effie Afton rammed a newly opened railroad bridge over the Mississippi at Rock Island, Illinois. The boat burned, and the vessel’s owners—her captain, clerk, and engineer—sued the owners of the bridge—the Rock Island Bridge Company, a subsidiary of the Illinois Central Railroad—on the grounds that the bridge was a hazard to navigation. The case came to trial in federal court in Chicago in July 1857 over whether “the defendants have constructed… a permanent obstruction to commerce on the river.” The real question was whether New Orleans river traffic deserved a better right-of-way than a Yankee railroad. The jury could not come to a verdict, however, and subsequent efforts to appeal the non-verdict to the Supreme Court (in 1863) and the Illinois state courts (in 1875) failed. The steamboat (and New Orleans) had lost.5

  One of the lawyers for the Rock Island Bridge Company was Abraham Lincoln.

  WAR ON THE BORDER

  At the outbreak of the war, the importance of controlling the Mississippi River and its vast system of tributary rivers was obvious to both the Union and the Confederate governments. Indeed, the only really aggressive feature of General Winfield Scott’s Anaconda Plan had been its insistence on redeeming the Mississippi River valley for the Union. So long as the Confederacy controlled the lower Mississippi River and New Orleans, the prevailing wisdom dictated that Northern farmers everywhere west of the Appalachians would suddenly face ruin, and angered farmers were very likely to take their anger with them to the ballot box at the next congressional elections unless Lincoln and his soldiers did something about it very quickly. By the same token, Jefferson Davis realized that the Confederacy would never be secure unless it could control not just New Orleans and the lower Mississippi but also the great tributaries, the Ohio and the Missouri.

  The Ohio was, in Davis’s judgment, the natural northern boundary of the Southern Confederacy. The Ohio would offer a natural defensive moat for southern armies to resist invasion by the Federals. A Confederate presence on the south bank of the Ohio would further paralyze Northern commerce and force the Lincoln government to the negotiating table. Most important of all, the Ohio was fed, near its confluence with the Mississippi, by two vital rivers, the Tennessee and the Cumberland, which led deep into Tennessee, Mississippi, and Alabama. Unless the south bank of the Ohio was firmly in Confederate hands, Federal steam-powered transports, supply ships, and gunboats could enter the Tennessee and Cumberland Rivers without obstruction and use them as easy invasion routes into Confederate heartland.

  In order to control the Ohio, the Confederates needed to control the border states, especially Kentucky and Missouri, and that was precisely what Abraham Lincoln was determined to prevent. He still hoped, well into 1862, that Confederate control of the upper South could be disrupted by appealing to pro-Union sentiment in eastern Tennessee, western Virginia, and northern Alabama and Arkansas. None of that would be possible, however, if Kentucky and Missouri, by falling into Confederate hands, stood in the way. “To lose Kentucky is nearly the same as to lose the whole gam
e,” Lincoln wrote to Orville Browning in September 1861. “Kentucky gone, we cannot hold Missouri, nor, as I think, Maryland. These all against us, and the job on our hands is too large for us.”6

  Thus the political race to woo the border states became the first round of the Civil War in the West, and in the case of both Missouri and Kentucky, it was a round won largely by the Union. At first all the advantages in the race seemed to belong to the Confederacy. Both Missouri and Kentucky were slave states and had important social and economic ties to the South, and every natural appearance indicated that they would join the Confederacy. Yet appearances proved deceiving, and for two reasons. The first was Lincoln’s carefully cultivated assertions that he had no intention of touching slavery in the states where it was sanctioned by the Constitution. Those assurances, however much they grated on the ears of abolitionists, persuaded border state Unionists not to risk their slave property on the shaky chances of a rebellion. Second, in both states, slavery was not nearly as powerful an institution as in the Deep South, and slaveholding and strong Unionist sentiments often existed hand in hand.

  Missouri quickly became a case in point. Although Missouri had been a slave state since the days of the Missouri Compromise in 1820, slavery had actually flourished in Missouri only along a fairly narrow belt of counties stretching across the center of the state. In St. Louis, Missouri’s principal Mississippi river town, the population was increasingly taking on a free-soil flavor from immigrants from across the Mississippi River in Illinois, and from a flourishing community of German refugees and exiles who had found a home there after fleeing political oppression in Germany in the wake of the revolutions of 1848 and who had no sympathy at all with slavery. As the Deep South began to secede from the Union, the pro-slavery governor of Missouri, Claiborne F. Jackson, strong-armed a special session of the state legislature into calling a secession convention. “The destiny of the slave-holding States of this Union is one and the same,” Jackson insisted.

  .… The identity, rather than the similarity, of their domestic institutions; their political principles and party usages; their common origin, pursuits, tastes, manners, and customs; their territorial contiguity and commercial relations—all contribute to bind them together in one sisterhood. And Missouri will in my opinion best consult her own interests, and the interests of the whole country, by a timely declaration of her determination to stand by her sister slave-holding States, in whose wrongs she participates, and with whose institutions and people she sympathizes.7

  But the report of the convention backed away from secession for Missouri, and it adjourned in March 1861 leaving Missouri still in the Union. Lincoln’s call for volunteers after Sumter set off another demand for a secession convention in April, and as an extra measure to support secession, Governor Jackson called out the state militia, established a training camp near St. Louis (named Camp Jackson), and prepared to seize the Federal arsenal in St. Louis. As it turned out, Jackson had not reckoned with either the strength of the Missouri Unionists or the boldness of the arsenal’s commander, Captain Nathaniel Lyon, a onetime Democrat whom the Kansas-Nebraska bill had converted into an ice-cold opponent of slavery. On May 10, Lyon surrounded the state militia encampment with 7,000 regulars and pro-Union volunteers, capturing the entire encampment without a shot. But when Lyon attempted to parade his prisoners through the streets of St. Louis to the arsenal, he was attacked by a pro-slavery mob and his men opened fire. Twenty-eight people, including many innocent bystanders, were killed.8

  Jackson hoped that this would be understood as the signal for the state legislature at last to act and “place the State at the earliest practicable moment in a complete state of defence.” As Jackson realized, though, Lyon’s preemptive strike had also rendered the secessionist movement in Missouri militarily powerless. After a month of fruitless political jockeying between himself and Lyon, Jackson fled to southwestern Missouri with a pro-slavery remnant of the legislature, and there declared Missouri out of the Union. The rest of the legislature remained firmly pro-Union, and Jackson’s rump assembly never really amounted to more than a government in exile. A provisional Unionist governor, Hamilton Gamble, was appointed in July. Although Missouri would be repeatedly invaded by Confederate forces loyal to Jackson, and large areas of the backcountry were turned by Confederate guerillas under William Quantrill, Cole Younger, and “Bloody Bill” Anderson into no-go areas for Federal troops, they never seriously threatened the hold that Missouri Unionists retained on St. Louis and the strategic dock and riverbank areas along Missouri’s stretch of the Mississippi and its confluence with the Ohio River.

  The story in Kentucky was fundamentally the same. The governor, Beriah Magoffin, was pro-slavery and called the Kentucky legislature into special session to arrange for a state secession convention. When the legislature met on January 17, 1861, it turned down Magoffin’s request and instead chided the Southern states for reacting too hastily to Lincoln’s election. A Unionist mass rally in Louisville on April 19 warned that if Kentucky seceded, “all is lost. There will then be no breakwater, but instead, Kentucky will be the battle-ground—the scene of a conflict between brethren—such a conflict as no country has yet witnessed.” Magoffin again begged the legislature in May to call a secession convention; again the legislature refused, but it did allow Magoffin to resort to the unusual expedient of declaring Kentucky neutral on May 20: in “the deplorable war now waging between the United and Confederate States I solemnly forbid any movement upon Kentucky soil, or occupation of any post or place therein for any purpose whatever, until authorized by invitation or permission of the legislative and executive authorities.” Both Lincoln and Davis were anxious not to push the Kentuckians too hard. Davis, like Lincoln, wanted “to treat Kentucky with all possible respect,” while Lincoln promised Kentucky congressman Garrett Davis that he would send no troops into Kentucky “unless she or her people should make it necessary by a formidable resistance of the authority and laws of the United States.”9

  So for several months both the Union forces on the other side of the Ohio and Confederate forces below the Kentucky border fumed and waited. A convention of border state representatives met in Frankfort, Kentucky, on May 27, chaired by the venerable compromiser John J. Crittenden. The convention pledged that Kentucky and Missouri would “purpose to take no part in this war… our sense of honor and of duty requires that we should not allow ourselves to be drawn or driven into a war in which other States, without consulting us, have deliberately chosen to involve themselves.” On August 5, however, the Kentucky legislative elections gave a resounding majority to pro-Union delegates.10

  Reading what he presumed was Union-slanted handwriting on the wall, the Confederate commander in western Tennessee, Major General Leonidas Polk, decided that the Confederacy could wait no longer to secure the Ohio River line, and on September 3, 1861, Polk’s troops moved into Kentucky and occupied Columbus. At first the Confederate government was tempted to repudiate Polk’s violation of Kentucky’s neutrality. But Jefferson Davis supported Polk’s action, and Confederate troops moved over into Kentucky to occupy Bowling Green. The Kentucky legislature angrily voted to end state neutrality and reconfirm its allegiance to the Union. An unhappy Governor Magoffin resigned his office in August 1862 and retreated into private law practice.11

  Keeping Kentucky and Missouri in the Union saved the Ohio River line for the North by the end of 1861. The question then was what the federal government proposed to do next about it, and on that score both President Lincoln and his new general in chief, George B. McClellan, had very clear ideas. Lincoln wanted Kentucky occupied at once and cleared of Confederates, followed by a thrust into eastern Tennessee to rally Tennessee Unionists to the Federal armies. McClellan also advocated a movement into Kentucky and eastern Tennessee as part of the three-way pincer movement in the spring of 1862 from Virginia and the Carolina coast, which he hoped would bite off the upper third of the Confederacy at one stroke. Unfortunately, the Federal forces
along the Ohio River line were badly organized and equipped; what was more, the length of the Ohio River was divided between two military departments whose commanders were either unwilling or unable to cooperate.

  The first of these departments, the Department of the Ohio, running from western Virginia to the mouth of the Cumberland River, consisted of about 45,000 men commanded by Brigadier General Don Carlos Buell. It was to Buell that McClellan looked to spearhead the drive into eastern Tennessee. In January 1862 he wrote anxiously to Buell that “my own advance cannot, according to my present views, be made until your troops are soundly established in the eastern portion of Tennessee.” But Buell was hampered by his men’s rawness, a lack of experienced officers, and the difficulties of the terrain that lay before him. Although he defeated a small Confederate force at Logan’s Crossroads, in southern Kentucky, on January 19, 1862, Buell’s men had neither roads nor railroads to operate upon, and they proceeded to bog themselves down in the impenetrable wild mountains north of Knoxville.12

  This provided an unlooked-for opportunity to Buell’s neighbor, Major General Henry Wager Halleck, the commanding general of the Department of Missouri, whose military jurisdiction stretched from the Cumberland River into Missouri itself. Halleck was “a black-browed saturnine man, heavy of figure and of feature; suspicious of everybody and incapable of friendship.” An 1839 graduate of West Point and one of the prizes of the Corps of Engineers, Halleck was nevertheless a capable administrator, “a man of great capacity, or large acquirements, and at the time possessed the confidence of the country, and of most of the army.” After leaving the army as a captain in 1854, he had served as secretary of state for California, practiced law in San Francisco, and wrote several outstanding textbooks on legal and military affairs. The outbreak of the war brought him back to the army as a major general, and on November 9, 1861, he inherited the troubled Department of Missouri. His appointment as the department head was largely prompted by Halleck’s considerable legal and administrative skills, since Missouri in 1862 was still a large political black hole, and no one expected much from him in the way of fighting.13