The next day, the first supply wagons carrying hardtack (called “crackers” by the army) and dried beef came rolling through along the “Cracker Line.” The route stretched back for hundreds of miles. In northern Kentucky, a partially restored Ebenezer Wells led a wagon train of more than two thousand pack animals, fighting fever and exhaustion to keep the supplies moving. Robert Neve soon noticed the difference in his rations. Over the next two weeks more supplies arrived, including fresh vegetables and new uniforms. “Our rations were getting better, and we felt better as well.” His regiment was so close to the Confederate pickets that they agreed to take turns on picket duty. “We would wave each other’s caps and then exchange newspapers.” The reversal of their fortunes was complete; it was now the Confederates who were outnumbered, starving, and miserable and the Federals who were growing in confidence and strength.
General Bragg grasped the magnitude of Longstreet’s mistake in failing to prevent the Federal bridgehead into Chattanooga, but his reaction to the disaster was perverse. Instead of trying to plug the gap or reinforce his position, Bragg chose to send Longstreet away, along with twenty thousand men, on an expedition to take Knoxville, Tennessee, from General Burnside. There was some rationale to the decision: if Burnside could be forced back to central Tennessee, the Confederates would repossess the three railways that passed through Knoxville and the all-important Cumberland Gap, which would restore the quick route to Virginia. But at best the mission was a dangerous sideshow when Federal supplies and troops were pouring into Chattanooga.
Bragg relished the thought of Longstreet’s having to operate on his own, hoping that this would expose some of his rival’s weaknesses. “One of General Longstreet’s most serious faults as a military commander was shown at this time,” admitted Francis Dawson. Longstreet made few preparations for the campaign and never bothered to speak to Dawson about ordnance. “Not one word was said to me by him on the subject. I had an inkling, however, of what was going on, and obtained ample supplies. Had I not done so, we should have been in an awkward predicament by the time that we reached Knoxville. Had anything been lacking, it is certain that the blame would have been placed on me.”8 The army reached its destination with less than half the number of wagons and animals required for a campaign. But Dawson’s prescience protected him from Longstreet’s growing fury as the general watched his army wilt under the twin assaults of hunger and cold.9 The capture of a Federal wagon train on November 15 eased some of the pain.
Longstreet desperately wanted to avoid a siege, and hoped to make Burnside fight him outside the town. On November 16, he thought he had succeeded. Burnside’s army was strung across a narrow valley outside Knoxville—a “beautiful position” for taking, recalled a Confederate officer. But the situation began to go wrong almost at once. When the cannons opened fire, Dawson was horrified to discover that the ammunition he had worked so hard to acquire was defective. Instead of raining fire and shot upon the enemy, the shells exploded prematurely or not at all. Two days of fighting ended with severe losses to the Confederate corps.
Longstreet vacillated while his enemy built stronger defenses. “There was a good deal of delay, for one reason and another,” wrote Dawson, “and we were so near the town that we could hear the tunes played by the band at Fort Sanders. The favourite air then was: ‘When This Cruel War Is Over.’ ”10 Longstreet had assured Bragg that Knoxville would be captured long before Grant’s reinforcements arrived at Chattanooga. This was impossible now that Burnside occupied the town. But since he had not heard from Bragg for several days, Longstreet wrongly assumed there was no imminent danger to the besiegers.
—
Francis Lawley, Frank Vizetelly, and Fitzgerald Ross left Georgia in early November, once they knew for certain that General Longstreet would not be returning to Chattanooga. Vizetelly and Ross set off for Charleston, while Lawley, who was mystified by his friends’ enthusiasm for danger, headed for Richmond. Charleston was again being bombarded; if the Federals succeeded in taking the city, it would be one more disaster that Lawley would have to fudge for his readers. The strain of always putting the best face on Confederate fortunes was beginning to show in his most recent dispatches. When he arrived in Richmond on November 14, Lawley wrote a report for The Times that admitted far more than he perhaps realized. The enemy, he wrote, “hems in the edges of the ‘rebellion’ on every side.” The North had surrounded the South “with a cordon of vessels so numerous as for the first time in 30 months to make access to the Confederate coast really dangerous and difficult.”11
Lawley thought the city looked beautiful. A light dusting of snow covered most reminders of the war and imparted charm to even the most dilapidated buildings. President Davis had returned to Richmond a few days earlier, having toured Charleston’s defenses and delivered an encouraging speech to its embattled citizens. During his absence the Confederate cabinet had learned that the precious Lairds rams were almost certainly lost to them. The secretary of the navy, Stephen Mallory, still hoped that James Bulloch would find a way to rescue the vessels; with the exception of the Alexandra, the agent had always come through. But the rest of the cabinet thought the news vindicated its decision to expel the British consuls. They were convinced that the Royal Navy could have broken the blockade at any time during the past three years if the British had been truly in favor of Southern independence. The existence of the British blockade runners made no difference to Southern resentment toward Britain—though without them Lee’s army would be suffering even greater privations.
Lee had not fought a battle since Gettysburg and yearned to launch an attack against General Meade and the Army of the Potomac. It went against the grain with him to remain on the defensive, but, as he had explained to his wife in late October, “thousands were barefooted, thousands with fragments of shoes, and all without overcoats, blankets or warm clothing. I could not bear to expose them to certain suffering on an uncertain issue.”12
—
General Meade was troubled by many worries, but the condition of his army was not among them. At the beginning of October, a scandal had threatened to tarnish the reputation of the cavalry corps, but it was quickly hushed up by the War Department. All the cavalrymen knew about it was that Sir Percy Wyndham had been escorted to Washington under armed guard. It was not clear why he had been removed. The War Department refused to say anything other than that he had been relieved “for the time being.” Sixteen years later, in 1879, the Decatur Daily News of Illinois ran an article that claimed to clear “an old mystery.” Apparently, two unnamed informants had accused Wyndham of plotting to surrender his regiment to the Confederates for $300,000. “Mr. Stanton could not, getting his information as he did, place Col. Wyndham under arrest … so the only road open was to remove him from command.”13 The informants had first brought the accusation to Secretary Chase, who took the matter to Stanton. They claimed to have a letter from the Confederate secretary of state, Judah P. Benjamin, that laid out a strategy to entice Wyndham into surrendering his cavalry.14 The War Department does not seem to have investigated whether Wyndham actually considered the bribe, nor was he interrogated about the letter.
Speculation about Wyndham’s removal from active duty was rife: Lord Lyons received protests from the public after stories appeared in the New York press that accused him of being the instigator. “I have to say that there is no foundation whatever for the assertion made respecting me,” Lord Lyons wrote to a Mr. John Livingston in New York. He had not, as Livingston claimed, solicited or made “representations of a disparaging character against that brave officer.”15 On November 5, The New York Times intervened unexpectedly—probably at Seward’s behest—with an article on the controversy that explicitly denied Lord Lyons’s involvement and repeated the War Department’s stance that Wyndham was on temporary relief from duties. It would turn out to be a very long relief.
The Union cavalry wondered about the unexplained removal of its most colorful brigade leader; Wyndham’
s habit of twiddling his mustache whenever he became angry was remembered with humor rather than the fear it once provoked. The corps would have been happy to have him back, especially after it suffered a humiliating defeat by Jeb Stuart’s troopers at Buckland Mills on October 19, which was dubbed “Buckland Races” by the Confederates after the Federals were chased upcountry for several miles. Meade was summoned by Lincoln for an interview in Washington and given to understand that he was expected to destroy Lee, not play cat-and-mouse with him. The result of the meeting was a small engagement near Fredericksburg on November 7, which netted Meade more than 1,600 prisoners, eight battle flags, and four artillery guns.
The secretary of war, Edwin Stanton, remained unimpressed and wanted Meade to push harder. Nothing about the situation in Virginia pleased him. But on November 14, Stanton received one piece of news that did give him satisfaction: the combined land and sea force sent to capture John Yates Beall had at last succeeded in cornering its prey. Bored with lying low in Richmond, Beall had resumed his raids on November 10. He managed to seize just one vessel before his whereabouts were exposed and the full might of the North pounced on the little band. Bennet G. Burley was one of only two who managed to escape. Beall and his crew were taken to Fort McHenry in Baltimore, where they were kept in manacles for six weeks until the Confederate secretary of the navy, Stephen Mallory, ordered eighteen Federal prisoners of war—picked at random—to be similarly shackled in retribution, which led to a relaxation of their treatment.26.1
“I have seen your dispatches,” Lincoln telegraphed Meade after the fight at Fredericksburg, “and I wish to say, ‘Well done!’ ” He then wrote to Burnside at Knoxville, giving him the news about Meade’s success and asking pointedly, “Let me hear from you.”16 Lincoln was also waiting anxiously for news from General Grant: the “Cracker Line” had saved the Army of the Cumberland from starvation, but far more was at stake than a battle over logistics. “If we can hold Chattanooga and eastern Tennessee,” Lincoln had written to Rosecrans before the general’s removal, “I think the rebellion must dwindle and die.”17
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On November 19 the president was going to Gettysburg—whose 23,000 Union casualties in July remained the highest of any battle of the war—to speak at the dedication of the town’s new war cemetery. The solemn and painful task was made worse by the uncertainty in the west; Lincoln would have to address the mourners with Rosecrans’s disaster at Chickamauga still fresh in their minds. However, Lincoln did not wish to dwell on the dangers facing the country, or why duty had to be its own reward at such a time. He already had a theme for the speech, one advocated three months earlier by Seward’s financial emissary to London, John Murray Forbes, whose perspective on the meaning of the war had sharpened during his travels abroad. “John Bright and his glorious band of English republicans can see that we are fighting for democracy,” Forbes had written to Lincoln on September 8. “After we get military successes, the mass of the Southern people must be made to see this truth, and then reconstruction becomes easy and permanent.”18
A large retinue accompanied Lincoln to Gettysburg, including Seward, several governors and senators, and the French minister, Henri Mercier, but not Lord Lyons, who did not receive an invitation. Although the reasons for the visit were somber, the crowds greeted Lincoln with enthusiasm and lined up in large numbers to shake his hand. The principal speaker at the ceremony was not the president but the great orator Edward Everett, whose age and infirmities were sadly evident in parts of his speech. Everett spoke for more than two hours during the unusually hot afternoon, tripping up occasionally and at one point confusing Meade with Lee.19
When he was finished, the audience steeled itself for another long speech, not knowing that Lincoln had been asked by the organizers to be short and concise. The two-minute address was over so quickly that the photographer did not have time to focus his lens, and many among the fifteen thousand listeners had not yet settled down. Lincoln himself believed that his words had fallen flat. Several newspapers criticized him for failing to live up to the occasion.20 Antonio Gallenga, a temporary correspondent for The Times, thought that Lincoln’s speech had been a total failure. English readers were told that the “imposing ceremony” was “rendered ludicrous by some of the luckless sallies of that poor President Lincoln.”21 But Lincoln’s private secretary John Hay recorded in his diary that the president spoke “in a firm free way, with more grace than is his wont.”22 Edward Everett had no doubts about the momentous nature of Lincoln’s speech. He congratulated Lincoln, confessing that he wished “I came as near to the central idea of the occasion, in two hours, as you did in two minutes.”23 Everett realized that Lincoln had captured the essential nature of the war. In a mere 272 words, the president had defined the moral purpose of the country’s existence—democracy, freedom, equality—not only for the mourners at Gettysburg but for every subsequent generation of the American people. The Revolution of 1776 had brought forth:
a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.
We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field as a final resting-place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.
But, in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate—we cannot consecrate—we cannot hallow—this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us, the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion; that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain; that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom; and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.24
—
Henry Yates Thompson arrived at Bridgeport, Alabama, forty-seven miles downstream from Chattanooga, on Friday, November 20, carrying a letter of introduction from Edward Everett to Dr. John Newberry, the head of the Western Department of the Sanitary Commission. It was late, so instead of continuing his journey to the commission’s headquarters, Thompson bedded down in one of their tents at Bridgeport. “Before I went to sleep,” he wrote, “I heard a solemn thudding sound outside. I asked my companion what was it and he said: ‘Oh, the last of Sherman’s men crossing the pontoons.’ ”25
Grant had been waiting for Sherman’s troops to arrive before he made his attack against General Bragg. By November 21 he had accumulated more than sixty thousand men. Staring down at them from Lookout Mountain and Missionary Ridge was a diminishing army of 33,000 Confederates. The “Cracker Line” had answered the Federal hunger pains, but no such relief had come to Bragg’s army. “Never in all my whole life do I remember of ever experiencing so much oppression and humiliation,” wrote the Confederate private Sam Watkins. “The soldiers were starved and almost naked, and covered all over with lice and camp itch and filth and dirt. The men looked sick, hollow-eyed, and heart-broken, living principally upon parched corn, which had been picked out of the mud and dirt under the feet of officers’ horses.”26
Thompson and Dr. Newberry boarded a steamboat for the last leg of the journey. It was another two days of arduous travel before they reached Chattanooga on November 22. That day, Bragg stacked the cards against himself still higher by sending two more divisions to Knoxville. “I had a fine view of the whole Rebel position on Missionary Ridge about three miles distant across a wooded valley,” wrote Thompson on the twenty-third:
The
pickets and the skirmishers of both sides were behind their respective rifle pits in the valley below us and the Rebel pickets were plainly visible from Fort Wood, about half a mile from where I stood. All those round me were expecting immediate fighting. Soon I saw a sight I shall never forget. The whole Union army in the town—about 25,000 men under General Thomas—left their tents and huts and marched out past Fort Wood in long winding columns creeping into the valley and into line of battle round the town. From Fort Wood it all looked like a great review. But it was in deadly earnest.
Thompson was observing Grant’s test of Bragg’s resolve, to see whether the Confederate general was prepared to fight over Chattanooga or was planning to withdraw. The Union line charged toward Orchard Knob, a fortified hillock at the base of Missionary Ridge. The Confederates in the rifle pits, as mesmerized as Thompson by the bright spectacle rushing toward them, fled. Federal private Robert Neve was surprised to take the hill so easily: “We kept rushing on until we got in sight of their works, which we took with little opposition, and captured a number of prisoners. I took two myself,” he added. Thompson watched as the prisoners were brought in and noticed that they were “rough and ragged men with no vestige of a uniform.” During the night, while Neve lay shivering on the ground listening to every rustle and snap, Thompson rolled bandages for the Sisters of Mercy. He had not expected so much noise or, perhaps, so much blood. “This is war with a vengeance,” he wrote.27 The men had seemed universally brave and determined. Robert Neve could have enlightened him that nothing was ever uniform in battle: “I noticed in this fight that several officers and men got sheltered behind the trees, and kept waving their hats and cheering men up to a great degree, not even caring about firing a shot at the enemy.”28
A World on Fire: Britain's Crucial Role in the American Civil War Page 67
