Battle Cry of Freedom

by James M. McPherson

  To cover his fears, McClellan tried to shift the blame to others. "I am here in a terrible place," he had written in August. "The enemy have from 3 to 4 times my force [in fact, McClellan then had twice the enemy's force]—the Presdt. is an idiot, the old General is in his dotage—they cannot or will not see the true state of affairs." In November, when McClellan had nearly three times the number of men and more than three times the weight of artillery as the Confederates in his front, he complained: "I cannot move without more means. . . . I have left nothing undone to make this army what it ought to be. . . . I am thwarted and deceived by these incapables at every turn. . . . It now begins to look as if we are condemned to a winter of inactivity. If it is so the fault will not be mine; there will be that consolation for my conscience, even if the world at large never knows it."47

  V

  Jefferson Davis was also having problems with the amour propre of his generals. On August 31 the Confederate president named five men to the rank of full general.48 Joseph E. Johnston and Pierre G. T. Beau-regard were fourth and fifth on the list, below Adjutant General Samuel

  46. Dennett, Lincoln/Hay, 34–35; Foote, The Civil War, I, 143.

  47. McClellan to Ellen Marcy McClellan, Aug. 16, Nov. 2, 1861, McClellan Papers.

  48. No Union officer at this time held a higher rank than major general, two grades below full general.

  Cooper, Albert Sidney Johnston, and Robert E. Lee. When Joseph Johnston learned of this, he erupted in outrage. Not only was this ranking illegal, he informed Davis in a hotly worded letter, it was also an insult to his honor. He had outranked all of these men in the United States army, and by the terms of the law creating the Confederate grade of full general he still outranked them. Moreover, Cooper was a desk general (and a Yankee to boot, having been born and raised in New Jersey); A. S. Johnston had just arrived in the Confederacy after a slow trip from California and had not yet heard a shot fired in anger; Lee had won no battles and was even then floundering in West Virginia; while he, Joe Johnston, had won the battle of Manassas. Davis had committed a "violation of my rights as an officer," Johnston told the president, "tarnished my fair fame as a soldier and a man," and "degraded one who has served laboriously from the commencement of the war . . . and borne a prominent part in the one great event of the war, for the benefit of persons [none] of whom has yet struck a blow for the Confederacy."49

  Insulted by the tone of Johnston's letter, Davis sent an icy reply: "Sir, I have just received and read your letter of the 12th instant. Its language is, as you say, unusual; its arguments and statements utterly one sided, and its insinuations as unfounded as they are unbecoming."50 Not until later did Davis explain that he had ranked Johnston below Lee and A. S. Johnston because the latter two had held higher line commissions in the U. S. army than Joseph Johnston, whose rank as general had been a staff commission—a dubious rationale, which in any case did not apply to Cooper, who had also held a staff appointment in the old army.

  The main effect of this graceless dispute was to plant a seed of hostility between Davis and Johnston that was to bear bitter fruit for the Confederacy. It also demonstrated an important difference between Davis and Lincoln as war leaders. A proud man sensitive of his honor, Davis could never forget a slight or forgive the man who committed it. Not for him was Lincoln's willingness to hold the horse of a haughty general if he would only win victories.

  Davis also quarreled with Beauregard. The jaunty Louisianian's report on the battle of Manassas became public in October. It implied that Davis had delayed Johnston's reinforcement of Beauregard almost

  49. Johnston to Davis, Sept. 12, 1861, O.R., Ser. IV, Vol. 1, pp. 605–8.

  50. Davis to Johnston, Sept. 14, 1861, ibid., 611.

  to the point of disaster. It noted Davis's rejection of Beauregard's grandiose plan for an offensive before the battle in a manner that caused the press to confuse this issue with the then-raging controversy over responsibility for failing to follow up the victory by capturing Washington. Throughout the report Beauregard's flamboyant prose tended to magnify his own role. Miffed, Davis reprimanded the general for writing an account that "seemed to be an attempt to exalt yourself at my expense."51 One way to deal with Beauregard, who had grown restless in his role as second in command to Johnston in Virginia, was to send him as far away from Richmond as possible. In January 1862, Davis transferred Beauregard to the Tennessee-Kentucky theater, where he could try to help the other Johnston—Albert Sidney—cope with the buildup of Union forces in Kentucky.

  Despite quarrels with his generals, Davis faced the New Year with more confidence than Lincoln. Since mid-July the Confederacy had won most of the important land battles in the war: Manassas, Wilson's Creek, Lexington (Mo.), Ball's Bluff. Although the Union navy had achieved some significant victories, these had not yet led anywhere. One of the apparent naval triumphs—the capture of southern commissioners James Mason and John Slidell from the British ship Trent—had even produced a Yankee backdown in the face of British threats. Northern banks had suspended specie payments and the government faced a financial crisis.52 Northern morale was at its lowest ebb since the days after Bull Run. The London Times correspondent in Washington reported that every foreign diplomat but one agreed that "the Union is broken for ever, and the independence of the South virtually established."53 The Army of the Potomac went into winter quarters having done nothing to dislodge enemy outposts within sight of that river; worse still, McClellan fell ill with typhoid fever in mid-December, leaving the army without a functioning commander for nearly a month. Lincoln had assigned two promising generals, Henry W. Halleck and Don Carlos Buell, to command of the Missouri and Kentucky theaters, but in January both reported an early advance impossible. "It is exceedingly discouraging," wrote Lincoln on a copy of Halleck's letter to him. "As

  51. Ibid., Ser. I, Vol. 2, pp. 484–504; Davis to Beauregard, Oct. 30, 1861, in Rowland, Davis, V, 156–57.

  52. Naval affairs, the Trent crisis, and financial developments will be discussed in subsequent chapters.

  53. Russell, My Diary North and South, 259.

  everywhere else, nothing can be done." On the day he wrote these words, January 10, 1862, the president dropped into Quartermaster General Meigs's office. "General, what shall I do?" he asked despondently. "The people are impatient; Chase has no money; . . . the General of the Army has typhoid fever. The bottom is out of the tub. What shall I do?"54

  But January 1862 proved to be the darkness before dawn for the Union cause. Although other dark nights would follow, the four months after January turned out to be one of the brightest periods of the war for the North.

  54. CWL, V, 95; "General M. C. Meigs on the Conduct of the Civil War," AHR, 26 (1921), 292.

  12

  Blockade and Beachhead: The Salt-Water War, 1861–1862

  I

  The navy achieved some of the Union's most important military successes in 1861. The primary naval task was the blockade. It was no easy task. The Confederacy's 3,500 miles of coastline included ten major ports and another 180 inlets, bays, and river mouths navigable by smaller vessels. By June 1861 three dozen blockade ships were patrolling this coastline. Additional blockaders were commissioned or chartered every week—some of them old sailing brigs, others converted sidewheeler ferryboats—which joined the modern steam frigates and sloops of war in the ceaseless, tedious cruising off southern ports.1

  At first these ships were too few to apprehend more than one out of every dozen merchant vessels running the blockade. Even as the blockaders gained in numbers and effectiveness, another difficulty became obvious. The navy had only two bases in the South: Hampton Roads at the mouth of the James River opposite Confederate-held Norfolk; and Key West, Florida. Some ships spent nearly as much time going to and from these bases for supplies and repairs as they did on blockade duty. To remedy the problem, the navy decided to seize additional southern

  1. A frigate was a three-masted warship mounting thirty to fifty guns; a sloop,
also generally three-masted, carried ten to twenty-four guns. Using its steam-powered screw propeller for maneuvering and fighting, a steam warship could switch to sails for long-distance cruising.

  harbors to serve as bases. While plans for the first such operation went forward, the navy scored its initial victory of the war at Hatteras Inlet in North Carolina.

  For 200 miles along the North Carolina coast runs a series of barrier islands penetrated by a half-dozen inlets, of which Hatteras Inlet was the only one navigable by large ships. Behind this barrier lay the Albe-marle and Pamlico sounds, inland seas with rail and canal connections to the interior. This transport network served as Richmond's back door to the Atlantic, the front door being closed by Union control of Hampton Roads. Numerous blockade runners passed through Hatteras Inlet during the war's early months. The North Carolina sounds also served as a haven for privateers that dashed through the inlets to capture unwary merchant vessels. What the privateers failed to snatch, the frequent storms off Cape Hatteras sometimes wrecked, for the rebels had dismantled the lighthouse and removed all navigation buoys from this treacherous coast.

  No self-respecting navy could tolerate this "nest of pirates." Commodore Silas Stringham of the Atlantic blockading squadron put together a flotilla of seven ships carrying 141 guns to wipe it out. Two transports carrying 900 soldiers and marines under Benjamin Butler's command accompanied the task force. The soldiers' job was to assault the rear of the two forts guarding Hatteras Inlet after the ships had shelled them from the sea. Naval doctrine held that ships alone could not destroy well-armed forts. Perhaps this would have proved true if the half-finished forts had been well armed. As it turned out, however, the flotilla's rifled cannon battered them into submission on August 28–29 while cruising just out of range of their nineteen smoothbore guns. On August 29 the 670 men in the forts surrendered without Butler's troops having fired a shot. When news of this victory reached the North it took some of the sting out of Bull Run and Wilson's Creek. In North Carolina panic reigned along the tidewater as Tarheels expected Yankee hordes to descend on all their coastal towns. But the bluejackets were not ready to follow up their victory—yet.

  The next naval success required scarcely any effort at all. Off the coast of Mississippi halfway between New Orleans and Mobile lies Ship Island. In September 1861 the Confederates obligingly abandoned its half-completed fortifications after a token shelling by the U. S. S. Massachusetts. The Federals occupied the island and built up a base for the Gulf blockade squadron and for a campaign to capture New Orleans.

  Meanwhile a formidable fleet was heading down the Atlantic coast toward Port Royal, South Carolina. This task force consisted of seventeen warships, twenty-five colliers, and thirty-three transports carrying 12,000 infantry, 600 marines, and their supplies. A gale off Cape Hat-teras on November 1 scattered the fleet and foundered several transports carrying much of the army's ammunition and most of its landing boats. This mishap canceled the original plan for troops to land and assault the two forts guarding the entrance to Port Royal Bay. Once again the navy would have to do the job alone.

  This was not a pleasant prospect for Flag Officer Samuel du Pont, nephew of the founder of the du Pont gunpowder company and a veteran of forty-six years in the navy. The traditional belief that one gun on shore was equal to four on shipboard seemed to give the forty-three guns in the forts a better than even chance against 157 in the fleet. But du Pont was about to overturn the tradition. Using tactics made possible by steam power, he ordered his ships to steam back and forth past the forts in an oval pattern, pounding them with heavy broadsides while presenting moving targets in return. On November 7 the Union fleet carried out this plan with deadly precision, knocking out both forts after only four hours of firing. The Confederate defenders and white civilians fled the coastal sea islands connected by waterways radiating out from Port Royal Bay. Union forces occupied this region of rich long-staple cotton plantations. Left behind by their owners were some ten thousand contrabands who soon became part of an abolitionist experiment in freedmen's education and cotton planting with free labor.

  At the cost of thirty-one casualties, the Union navy secured the finest natural harbor on the south Atlantic coast. More than that, the navy acquired a reputation of invincibility that depressed morale along the South's salt-water perimeter. The day after the capture of Port Royal, Robert E. Lee arrived in Savannah as the newly appointed commander of the south Atlantic coastal defenses. He regarded this assignment as "another forlorn hope expedition—worse than West Virginia." Lee recognized that sea power gave Yankees the option of striking when and where they pleased. "There are so many points to attack, and so little means to meet them on water," he sighed, "that there is but little rest."2 Lee had little choice but to concentrate Confederate defenses at strategic points, yielding most of the coastline to the enemy. During the next

  2. Lee to Mildred Lee (his daughter), Nov. 15, 1861, in Robert E. Lee, Jr., Recollections and Letters of Robert E. Lee (New York, 1904), 55; James M. Merrill, The Rebel Shore: The Story of Union Sea Power in the Civil War (Boston, 1957), 44.

  few months, bluejackets seized several other harbors and ports as far south as St. Augustine, Florida. In April 1862, siege guns planted on an island at the mouth of the Savannah River battered down Fort Pulaski, giving the Federals control of the entrance to Savannah.

  Another joint army-navy expedition—in which the army for once did most of the fighting—sealed off all harbors in North Carolina except Wilmington. This expedition launched the checkered career of Ambrose E. Burnside, a handsome, florid, personable Rhode Islander whose imposing muttonchop whiskers would contribute a new word to the language with an anagram (sideburns) of his name. After leading a brigade at Bull Run, Burnside had gone home to organize a division of soldiers accustomed to working around water and boats. They would need such skills, for their objective was to follow up the capture of Hatteras Inlet by gaining control of the North Carolina sounds. The Yankees' toughest foe in this enterprise turned out not to be the rebels, but the weather. Burnside's flotilla of makeshift gunboats, coal scows, and passenger steamboats carrying his 12,000 troops was scattered by a gale off Hatteras on January 13 that wrecked three of his vessels. Two more weeks of gale-force winds forced the expeditionary force to hunker down in misery just inside Hatteras Inlet. When the weather finally moderated, seasick soldiers welcomed the prospect of combat as a lesser evil.

  Their first target was Roanoke Island, a swampy piece of land ten miles long, two miles wide, and rich in legend—a land where the memory of Virginia Dare and the inscrutable word "Croatan" marked the mysterious fate of England's first North American colony. Controlling the passage between Pamlico Sound and Albemarle Sound, Roanoke Island was the key to Richmond's back door. Commander of the 3,000 Confederate soldiers, four batteries with thirty-two guns, and seven one-gun gunboats defending the island was Henry A. Wise, the political general transferred here from his feuds with fellow Virginian John Floyd in West Virginia. Wise had learned enough about war to recognize the inadequacy of his "mosquito-fleet" gunboats, badly sited batteries, and poorly trained, outnumbered troops. He pleaded with Richmond for more men and more guns, but Richmond seemed strangely indifferent.

  This indifference cost them dearly, for the Yankees were coming with power. On February 7–8, Burnside's sixteen gunboats mounting sixty-four guns drove off the mosquito fleet and neutralized the Confederate shore batteries while steamers towed landing boats through the surf and 7,500 soldiers waded ashore on Roanoke Island. There they plunged through "impenetrable" knee-deep swamps and smashed through rebel entrenchments, suffering only 264 casualties. For this price they captured the island's 2,675 defenders. General Wise escaped but his son, an infantry captain, was killed in the fighting. Next day Union gunboats destroyed the mosquito fleet and seized Elizabeth City on the mainland. During the next several weeks, Yankees captured all the North Carolina ports on the sounds, including New Berne and Beaufort with their rai
l connections to the interior and Beaufort's fine harbor, which became another base for the blockade fleet.

  Here was amphibious warfare with style. It won a promotion to major general for Burnside. It raised northern morale and dampened southern spirits. The Confederate Congress set up a committee to investigate the Roanoke Island disaster. The hue and cry forced Judah Benjamin to resign as secretary of war (though Davis, who liked Benjamin, promptly appointed him secretary of state). By April 1862 every Atlantic coast harbor of importance except Charleston and Wilmington (N.C.) was in Union hands or closed to blockade runners. Because of this, and because of the increasing number of Union warships, the blockade tightened considerably during the first half of 1862. Moreover, southern hopes to breach the blockade with their (not so) secret weapon—the ironclad C. S. S. Virginia—had been dashed by the U. S. S. Monitor.

  Having no traditions and few old-navy prejudices to overcome, the rebels got a head start into the new era of ironclad warships. In July 1861 they began grafting an armor-plated casemate onto the salvaged hull of the frigate Merrimack. Work began in July. The capacity of the Tredegar Iron Works was stretched to the limit to construct two layers of two-inch iron plate sufficient to protect a superstructure 178 feet long and 24 feet high above the waterline and one-inch plate covering the 264-foot hull down to three feet below the waterline. The superstructure sloped at an angle of 36° to give added protection by causing enemy shots to ricochet. The strange appearance of this craft, rechristened the Virginia, reminded observers of a barn floating with only its roof above water. The Virginia was armed with ten guns, four on each broadside plus fore and aft seven-inch pivot rifles. Attached to her prow was an iron ram to stave in the hulls of wooden warships. The principal defects of this otherwise formidable vessel were its unreliable engines and deep draft. Unable to build new engines of adequate horsepower, the rebels reconditioned the two old Merrimack engines that had been condemned by the prewar navy and slated for replacement. The weight of the Virginia's armor gave her a draft of twenty-two feet. This prevented operations in shallow water while her unseaworthiness prevented her from venturing into the open sea. The weak engines and ungainly design limited her speed to four or five knots and made her so unmaneuverable that a 180-degree turn took half an hour. Some of these problems would not become apparent until the Virginia was launched; in the meantime she inspired hope in the South and fear in the North.