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

by Allen C. Guelzo

  Halleck immediately detached Buell’s troops to try to head off Bragg. But Buell was no faster a mover in the summer of 1862 than he had been the previous winter, and instead of pursuing Bragg pell-mell, Buell proceeded to retrace his original path through Tennessee, rebuilding the Nashville & Chattanooga Railroad as he went. That was slow enough work on its own terms, but it was made slower by the activities of two of the Confederacy’s most successful raiders, John Hunt Morgan and Nathan Bedford Forrest. Bragg had given both Morgan and Forrest cavalry brigades and orders to create as much havoc as possible between himself and Buell. This Forrest and Morgan did effortlessly. Forrest, a former millionaire slave trader, was a natural military genius who possessed the killer instinct in spades, and in the middle of July Forrest’s raiders struck at Buell’s patiently rebuilt railroad line at Murfreesboro, Tennessee, and put it out of commission for two weeks. Meanwhile, Morgan swept up through Nashville in August, destroying rail lines and a railroad tunnel and further delaying Buell. Bragg, meanwhile, rolled into Kentucky and occupied Glasgow, Kentucky, on September 14. He then began recruiting volunteers for the Confederate army and commenced a leisurely move on Frankfort, the capital of Kentucky, where he scattered the Unionist legislature and inaugurated a Confederate governor on October 4, 1862.

  By that time, Buell had finally managed to catch up with Bragg, and on October 8 the two armies collided near Perryville, Kentucky. The battle that resulted was a happenstance affair, like Shiloh, with neither Bragg nor Buell fully in control of the day’s events. After a day of pitiless slugging, the battle of Perryville ended with Buell in command of the field, while Bragg withdrew into Tennessee. Buell had saved the Ohio River for the Union, but he received small thanks for it. Like McClellan, he failed to pursue the fleeing Confederates. Even more like McClellan, Buell unwisely announced that he “would not lend his hand to such an act as the emancipation of the slave,” and on October 24, 1862, he was relieved of his command.38

  If the distraction afforded by Bragg’s abortive offensive into Kentucky was one reason why the Federal offensive in the west came to halt, then the other reason was Halleck himself. Once Halleck occupied Corinth, he was determined not to risk the troops under his command on further offensive moves, and began parceling up his forces into small garrisons to keep the likes of Forrest and Morgan away from his supply lines. Although Halleck retained Grant as his deputy, Grant fumed and sputtered in frustration, his mind burdened with the tide of press criticism still flowing in his direction over Shiloh. One of Halleck’s subordinates complained that, after Corinth, “this great army… could have marched anywhere through the South without effective opposition… yet in less than two months,” Halleck had dissipated its strength in penny-ante garrison duties “to such an extent that the war was half over before it was again reunited.” In June, feeling that “I am in the way here” and “can endure it no longer,” Grant would have resigned his commission had not Sherman talked him out of it. Then, in July, Halleck was called to Washington to assume the post of general in chief of the Federal armies, the job Lincoln had taken away from McClellan in March. Halleck reconfigured the departmental boundaries and in October designated Grant as commander of the Department of the Tennessee (effectively this meant that Grant was responsible for policing all the newly occupied Confederate territory between the Tennessee and Mississippi Rivers).39

  By that time Grant was ready to approach Halleck with a proposal for a new campaign. During the spring campaign up the Tennessee, the upper stretches of the Mississippi River had fallen into Union hands simply because the Confederates could no longer hold them once they had lost the Tennessee River. What was worse for the Confederates was that they had also lost New Orleans. The Federal navy had been planning its own operation against New Orleans as early as November 1861, and in February 1862 command of an assault flotilla was given to a hard-eyed and aggressive fleet captain named David Glasgow Farragut. With four steam-powered sloops—the Hartford, Brooklyn, Richmond, and Pensacola—and a collection of small gunboats and mortar schooners, Farragut began the ascent of the Mississippi on April 16, stopping below New Orleans on the eighteenth for six days so that his mortar schooners could pound the two forts that guarded the river.

  Impatient with the results of the bombardment, at two in the morning of the twenty-fourth Farragut arranged his ships in two columns and swept up the river past the fire of the forts. Farragut anchored for the day just above the forts, and the next morning he ran his ships past the last small Confederate batteries below New Orleans. At noon on April 25, Farragut dropped anchor in the river by the city and sent ashore an officer to raise the United States flag over the New Orleans mint. The downriver forts, abandoned by most of their disheartened garrisons, surrendered on April 28.40

  The fall of New Orleans was probably the severest single blow the Confederacy sustained in the war. New Orleans was the Confederacy’s great port, its doorway to the rest of the world, and its commercial and financial equivalent of New York City. In addition to losing the city itself, 15,000 bales of cotton (worth over $1.5 million) were burned by the retreating Confederates, along with more than a dozen river steamboats, a half-completed ironclad gunboat, and the entire city dock area. “The extent of the disaster is not to be disguised,” wrote Edward Pollard of the Richmond Examiner. “It annihilated us in Louisiana… led by plain and irresistible conclusion to our virtual abandonment of the great and fruitful Valley of the Mississippi,” and cost the Confederacy “a city which was the commercial capital of the South, which contained a population of one hundred and seventy thousand souls, and which was the largest exporting city in the world.”41

  Serious though the loss of Tennessee was that spring, the Confederacy could have survived it so long as it held New Orleans and the lifeline New Orleans offered to the outside world. However, Albert Sidney Johnston had convinced Jefferson Davis that the real threat to New Orleans was from the Yankees on the Tennessee River and the upper Mississippi, and Johnston’s determination to throw Grant and Halleck out of Tennessee had led him to clear out all the Gulf coast garrisons, including New Orleans, of men and equipment, including a squadron of river gunboats that might have made a significant difference in Farragut’s ability to maneuver upriver. When the Federal navy burst through the back door into New Orleans only two weeks after Shiloh, New Orleans was simply too weak to defend itself.

  With the Union suddenly holding both the upper and lower ends of the river, it seemed to Ulysses Simpson Grant a worthwhile effort to move over and seize the remaining parts in the middle, around the fortified town of Vicksburg. Grant could not have known it, but at that very moment Halleck was already under pressure from Lincoln to make precisely that kind of move. The November midterm congressional elections would soon be upon Lincoln, and the farmers of the Union West were restless at the prospect of a longer and longer war that kept the Mississippi shipping network closed to them. John A. McClernand, a powerful Illinois Democrat and now a major general of volunteers in Grant’s district, had gone off on his own to Washington demanding that Lincoln let him recruit his own army to take down the Mississippi and blow open the Vicksburg bottleneck; to placate the Northern Democrats, Lincoln had given him a curiously worded authorization in October to raise a force of volunteers. Halleck looked upon McClernand as a nuisance, and rather than take the risk that Lincoln would actually allow an inexperienced politician to take a Federal army on a joyride down the Mississippi, Halleck sanctioned Grant’s plan to move on Vicksburg, with McClernand parked safely under Grant’s command.

  This time almost nothing went right for Grant. At first he hoped simply to march overland from Corinth with a force of 72,000 men and quickly seize Vicksburg and its garrison, but once under way in November, Grant changed his mind and detached Sherman and 32,000 men to advance down the Mississippi in another combined army-navy operation. He might have saved himself the trouble: Confederate raiders under Earl Van Dorn struck at Grant’s supply base at Holly Springs, Mi
ssissippi, on December 20, destroying the bulk of Grant’s supplies and stopping his overland march in its tracks. Meanwhile, Sherman’s men arrived before Chickasaw Bayou, northeast of Vicksburg, on December 26 to find that the Confederate troops from Vicksburg had dug themselves in along the hills on the other side of the bayou. After a series of futile attacks, Sherman withdrew and the whole endeavor went up in smoke.42

  Grant would not give up on Vicksburg that easily. He would admit only that the idea of an overland march on Vicksburg from above the city was impractical, and during the winter of 1862–63 he mounted no fewer than five attempts to find a way to move his men downriver, past Vicksburg, and land them on the other side of the city, where he could cut off supplies and reinforcements to the city from points south and east. None of his ideas (which included attempts to dig canals around Vicksburg, to navigate the back bayous, and to reroute the Mississippi) worked, though, and by March 1863 he was no closer to taking Vicksburg than ever. Finally, in April, Grant decided to gamble on the riskiest of all the possible approaches to Vicksburg. He ferried his men across the Mississippi, marched them down below Vicksburg on the Louisiana side of the river, and on the moonless night of April 16–17, 1863, ran a fleet of eight navy gunboats and three transports (plus some coal barges) past the four-mile-long line of Confederate naval artillery on the Vicksburg waterfront. Every one of the gunboats was hit, but only one transport was sunk, and once below Vicksburg they provided cover for Grant to safely ferry his men back across the Mississippi, this time below Vicksburg.43 Within a month Grant had cut off all of Vicksburg’s outside communications and had bottled up Vicksburg’s 30,000 Confederate soldiers into an airtight siege. After six weeks the Confederates were reduced to near starvation, and on July 4, 1863, Vicksburg surrendered to Grant.

  With Vicksburg the Confederacy had lost a citadel, an army, and an additional measure of its self-confidence. “The surrender was the stab to the Confederacy from which it never recovered,” remembered one of Vicksburg’s citizens. “No rational chance of its triumph remained after the white flag flew on the ramparts of the terraced city.”44 With Vicksburg, Ulysses Simpson Grant had redeemed a reputation. He also set a president to wondering whether he had at last found a general who could win his war for him.

  THIS IGNORANT MAN

  At the beginning of the Civil War Abraham Lincoln was fifty-two years old, and the numerous photographs that were taken of him during his first year as president reveal a man thin and spare, but erect and powerful, with a strongly etched face and the familiar whiskers (which he had grown as a fashionable whim shortly after his election) encircling his jaw. By the end of the war, Lincoln’s face had grown aged and careworn, his cheeks sunken into ashen hollows, his coarse black hair showing tufts of white, and his beard shrunken to a pitiful tuft at the chin. As the conflict dragged on and the casualty lists began to lengthen, Lincoln descended deeper into a peculiar variety of religious mysticism in which he began to view himself as merely “a humble instrument in the hands of our Heavenly Father,” powerless to guide events on his own terms. As the off spring of parents who were hard-shell Calvinistic Baptists, Lincoln had already imbibed a brooding certainty that all human activity was predestined to some mysterious end. Now that sense of helplessness in the face of events intensified: “I have all my life been a fatalist,” Lincoln remarked to one congressman, and added, quoting Hamlet, “‘There’s a divinity that shapes our ends.’”45

  Other burdens conspired to further drain Lincoln’s energies and blacken his impenetrable moods. He received a glut of hate mail, much of it threatening him with various kinds of death, which he filed in an envelope marked “Assassination.” “Soon after I was nominated in Chicago,” Lincoln said, “I began to receive letters threatening my life. The first ones made me feel a little uncomfortable; but I came at length to look for a regular installment of this kind of correspondence in every mail.” Eventually the threats preyed so much on his mind that he began to dream of assassination and funerals in the White House, and his friend Ward Hill Lamon pestered him so badly to protect himself that Lincoln made Lamon federal marshal of the District of Columbia, and let him and Stanton provide regular guards. Lincoln himself made no attempt at protection. As he explained resignedly to Francis Carpenter, there was no security in this life from fate: “If… they wanted to get at me, no vigilance could keep them out. We are so mixed up in our affairs, that—no matter what the system established—a conspiracy to assassinate, if such there were, could easily obtain a pass to see me for any one or more of its instruments.” Besides, Lincoln added, democracy imposed a certain amount of risk on its leaders. “It would never do for a President to have guards with drawn sabres at his door, as if he fancied he were, or were trying to be, or were assuming to be, an emperor.”46

  As it turned out, it was not for Lincoln that the bell tolled. In February 1862 Lincoln’s third son, William Wallace Lincoln, died of typhoid fever in the White House, and grief over the boy’s death nearly tipped Mary Todd Lincoln over the brink into insanity. Lincoln, himself “worn out with grief and watching,” could explain the death only as yet another visitation of the inscrutable power that held human destinies in a powerful and inescapable grip. “My poor boy,” Lincoln murmured, “he was too good for this earth… but then we loved him so. It is hard, hard to have him die.” After Willie Lincoln’s death, Lincoln’s own health began to suffer. Mary only made matters worse with spendthrift habits and a weakness for flattery by schemers and poltroons looking to acquire insider information about administration policies. “Many times,” recalled his old friend Orville Hickman Browning, “he used to talk to me about his domestic troubles” and “was constantly under great apprehension lest his wife should do something which would bring him into disgrace.” Unable to sleep, he paced the White House through the night, or sat up into the wee hours of the morning in the telegraph room of the War Department to receive the latest news of the war. He gradually lost weight, until his clothes seemed to hang from him, and in the fall of 1863 he contracted a mild form of smallpox. There was, he complained, a tired spot in him that no rest could ever touch.47

  Over and above all these reasons for the haggard look of Lincoln’s face was the crushing weight of having to conduct what amounted to two separate wars. In addition to the shooting war, Lincoln was also compelled to wage a political war behind the lines to keep up civilian support and morale, to enable the armies to keep on fighting, and to implement the long-term agenda of domestic policies he had inherited from Henry Clay and cherished ever since his first days as a Whig politician. The initial consensus of 1861–62 was that Lincoln was no more successful in winning the political war than he was in winning the military one. On the eve of his inauguration, one longtime Washingtonian shook his head over Lincoln: “He certainly does not seem to come much to the level of the great mission” before him “& I fear that a weak hand will command the ship.” “My opinion of Mr. Lincoln,” wrote Orestes Brownson to Charles Sumner at the end of 1862, “is that nothing can be done with him. … He is wrong-headed… the petty politician not the statesman &… ill-deserving the sobriquet of Honest.” The New York lawyer George Templeton Strong confided to his diary in 1862, “Disgust with our present government is certainly universal. Even Lincoln himself has gone down at last. Nobody believes in him any more.”48

  Of course, the benefit of hindsight suggests that Lincoln’s critics were wrong and that Lincoln eventually succeeded in rallying the political morale of the North around even the most radical of his policies, emancipation. But it is also true that Lincoln accomplished that goal only very slowly, and at the cost of terrific political turmoil. The reasons lying behind that turmoil are twofold. The first is bound up with Lincoln’s inexperience in national politics. Although Lincoln had been involved in state and local politics for almost his entire adult life, he had never actually been elected to an office of any consequence in Illinois beyond the state legislature, and his only experience on the nation
al level before 1861 consisted of his solitary and undistinguished term as a representative from Illinois’s Seventh District. Had there been such a thing as executive search firms in Lincoln’s day, none of them would have given him a second look. His work habits had been shaped by the experience of local politics and a two-man law practice, and as a result, Lincoln only grudgingly delegated even routine correspondence to his secretaries. “His methods of office working were simply those of a very busy man who worked at all hours,” Robert Todd Lincoln recalled.

  He never dictated correspondence; he sometimes wrote a document and had his draft copied by either [John] Nicholay [sic] or [John] Hay; sometimes he himself copied his corrected draft and retained the draft in his papers. … He seemed to think nothing of the labor of writing personally and was accustomed to make many scraps of notes or memoranda. In writing a careful letter, he first wrote it himself, then corrected it, and then rewrote the corrected version himself.49

  That same inexperience made many of the old Republican hands look at him askance, as a quirk in an electoral process that ought to have elected a Seward, a Chase, or a Douglas instead. Elihu Washburne, meeting Lincoln on the railroad platform when the president-elect arrived in Washington on February 23, 1861, could not help thinking that Lincoln “looked more like a well-to-do farmer from one of the back towns… than the President of the United States.” Fully as much as George McClellan, Republican senator Benjamin Wade of Ohio dismissed “Old Abe” as a “fool,” and curtly declined an invitation to a White House ball in February 1862 with the acid question, “Are the President and Mrs. Lincoln aware that there is a civil war?” Newspaper editors foamed angrily over Lincoln’s election, asking, “Who will write this ignorant man’s state papers?” The historian George Bancroft burst out, in a letter to his wife, “We suffer for want of an organizing mind at the head of the government. We have a president without brains.”50