Lee was eager to capitalize on his latest success by carrying the war into the North. Since early spring he had asked for permission to invade, but a great strategic debate snared his request. With the Yankees pressing hard on all fronts, which front was most vital for Confederate survival? The investment of Vicksburg, where Grant was closing in on John Pemberton’s garrison, caused special concern. Some men suggested that Lee send reinforcements to Bragg, so that the Army of Tennessee could defeat Rosecrans, threaten Kentucky and Ohio, and save Vicksburg. Lee opposed any scheme for western reinforcement, however, because he could not reduce his army without sacrificing Virginia. Southern railroads were so dilapidated that the North could shift troops more rapidly than the Confederacy; Confederate reinforcements would always arrive too late. Lee also argued that since northerners could not survive a deep south summer, Grant would soon retreat anyway. The solution to Confederate difficulties was an invasion of Pennsylvania, which would dislocate Federal plans, force Grant and Rosecrans to send reinforcements eastward, save Virginia, and allow Confederates to obtain supplies from northern farms and storehouses. Victories on northern soil might gain foreign recognition and foster Copperhead sentiment. Lee’s arguments convinced Davis that southerners should again wade the Potomac.
On June 9, as Lee shifted his 75,000 troops toward the Shenandoah, Union cavalry surprised Stuart at Brandy Station, resulting in the war’s largest cavalry action. Although Confederate troopers forced the bluecoats to retreat, the victory margin was thin. Eager to refurbish his reputation, Stuart suggested a raid into Hooker’s rear, and Lee consented. Departing on June 25, Stuart promised to rejoin the army in a few days, but unexpected difficulties delayed the cavalry’s return a week and Lee advanced blindly. With his men at York, Carlisle, and Chambersburg in Pennsylvania, Lee still believed Hooker was in Virginia. The Federal army was actually at Frederick, and Fighting Joe no longer commanded it. Hooker’s unwillingness to tangle with Lee as the gray column marched from the Rappahannock to Pennsylvania dismayed Lincoln, and on June 27 the president replaced him with George G. Meade. The new commander believed he could stand on the tactical defensive, since Lee would not retreat into Virginia without fighting. Meanwhile, learning that the Federals were dangerously close, on June 28 Lee ordered his forces to concentrate at Cashtown. Three days later men from James J. Pettigrew’s brigade went to seize a supply of shoes in Gettysburg. They bumped into a Yankee advance unit, John Buford’s cavalry division, which held off the graycoats until infantry support arrived. Although nobody planned to fight at Gettysburg, once the shooting began both armies converged there.
Fighting on the first day was chaotic and fierce, as the Union I and XI Corps tried to hold ground west and north of Gettysburg, but the Confederates drove them through the town and onto Cemetery Hill and Culp’s Hill. As more Federals arrived, the line extended southward along Cemetery Ridge to Little Round Top and Round Top. The position resembled a four-mile-long inverted fishhook running from the barb at Culp’s Hill, along the shank of Cemetery Hill and Cemetery Ridge, to the eye at the Round Tops. The Confederate line ran roughly parallel from east of Gettysburg, through the town, then south along Seminary Ridge. Not only were the Federals dug in on high ground, but in terms of maneuver and communications they held interior lines. Reaching the battlefield at midnight, Meade saw enough by moonlight to know his 88,000-man army held formidable terrain. If only Lee would attack!
Longstreet opposed fighting at Gettysburg. The army, he told Lee, should slide around the Federal left flank, get between Meade and Washington, find good defensive terrain, and force the Army of the Potomac to attack. Rejecting the advice, Lee issued attack orders for Longstreet to deliver the primary blow against Meade’s southern flank and Ewell to launch a secondary assault against Culp’s Hill and Cemetery Hill. Longstreet hammered but did not break the main Union line, and Ewell made only slight headway, securing a lodgment on the lower slope of Culp’s Hill. That evening Meade met with his subordinates to decide whether the army should retreat, attack, or hold its ground. Almost all agreed that the Federals should maintain their defensive posture. Where was Lee most likely to hit? Meade reasoned that the enemy, having tested the flanks, would attack the center. He was correct. Lee planned an assault, preceded by a massive barrage, aimed at the middle of the fishhook. The striking force would consist of approximately 13,500 men stretching across a mile-long front. Lee again entrusted the attack to Longstreet, who again protested his superior’s plan. But the southern commander waved off his subordinate. “The enemy is there, General Longstreet,” said Lee, indicating Cemetery Ridge, “and I am going to strike him.”
Lee’s plan was almost Burnside-like in its simplicity, and it produced a Fredericksburg with the roles reversed. The artillery barrage shattered the sultry stillness at one o’clock and continued for almost two hours before the Confederates emerged from the woods on Seminary Ridge and advanced as if on a parade ground. Pickett’s Charge, named after George Pickett, who commanded the largest of the three attacking divisions, pitted gallantry against firepower. Forty minutes decided the issue. Yankee batteries rained grapeshot and canister on the exposed ranks. Federal infantry unloosed volley after volley, while punishing fire from the flanks engulfed the column. The storm of hot metal shredded the attacking column, which suffered 50 percent casualties.
“It is all my fault,” Lee told the survivors, urging them to rally in case Meade counterattacked. Within a few hours the Army of Northern Virginia had regrouped, but Meade did not leave his lines. As after Antietam, Lee held his ground for a day before retreating. Battle casualties amounted to one-third of his army, and thousands of men straggled during the withdrawal. Meade did not pursue vigorously. With his army having suffered 23,000 casualties, he seemed content to escort the invaders off northern soil. By late July both armies were again on the Rappahannock, and a long stalemate ensued in the eastern theater. Lincoln was disconsolate when he learned that Lee’s army had reached Virginia soil, and he penned a harsh letter to Meade, which he never actually sent. “I do not believe you appreciate the magnitude of the misfortune involved in Lee’s escape,” the president wrote. “He was within your easy grasp, and to have closed upon him would, in connection with our other late successes, have ended the war.” The “other late successes” occurred in the western theater, where Vicksburg and Port Hudson surrendered and Bragg was in retreat.
A muddled command system exacerbated normal Confederate problems in the west: Too many places to defend, too few troops, and too little logistical support. In November 1862 Davis appointed Joseph E. Johnston, recovered from his wound at Fair Oaks, to command a newly formed Department of the West that included the armies of Bragg in Tennessee and Pemberton in Mississippi. The command difficulties were threefold. First, the extent of Johnston’s authority was unclear. Retaining the right to correspond directly with Richmond, Bragg and Pemberton could circumvent him. Second, Johnston could not effectively coordinate the two armies due to the distance between them, the South’s primitive transportation system, and Federal control of the Tennessee River. Third, Johnston and Davis disagreed on a fundamental issue. The department commander believed middle and east Tennessee were more important than the Mississippi, but Davis stressed holding the river.
Following his unsuccessful overland campaign toward Vicksburg, Grant went to Young’s Point to oversee the river campaign. Both geography and man had made Vicksburg difficult to attack. Only the high ground south and east of the city offered suitable terrain for military operations. Grant’s problem was to get there. The bayou country fanning northward from Vicksburg was impenetrable, as Grant learned after months of searching for a feasible route. Powerful batteries lining the river presented a barrier seemingly as impassable as the bayous. Grant admitted that the “strategical way according to the rule” would be to return to Memphis and try the overland route again. But in the Union’s grim springtime mood people would have interpreted the move as another defeat, so Grant deter
mined upon a plan as daring as any that Lee devised. His army would slog down the Mississippi’s west side and cross below the city. David D. Porter, commanding the river flotilla, would simply have to run the gauntlet with gunboats and transports. Grant knew he might have a difficult logistical problem once he left his supply base north of Vicksburg. For supplies he would depend in part on a wagon road coming down the river’s west bank and on the Navy’s ability to run additional transports past the Confederate batteries. But the road was tenuous and the Navy’s task risky, and Grant would have to live primarily off the country until he got back to the Mississippi above Vicksburg—if he could.
In early April Grant started his men marching south, and on the night of April 16–17 a dozen of Porter’s ships slipped downriver. Confederate gunners hit all twelve ships, but only one sank, and on April 30 the army crossed at Bruinsburg. The next day Grant brushed aside rebels at Port Gibson and then paused for more than a week to stockpile supplies and organize a wagon train before resuming his advance. His first task was to keep Pemberton and Johnston, who had patched together a force near Jackson, from uniting. Grant headed for Jackson, winning another minor battle at Raymond and forcing Johnston to retreat. Then Grant turned toward Vicksburg, defeating Pemberton’s main force at Champion Hill and his rear guard at the Big Black River. The Confederate commander retreated into Vicksburg’s earthworks. Reluctant to undertake a siege during the summer months, Grant twice stormed the fortress, but the Confederates bloodily repulsed the assaults. The only way to take the city was by siege.
Throughout the campaign Johnston and Pemberton never agreed on a common strategy. Johnston had urged Pemberton to abandon Vicksburg and join him for a joint attack on Grant, but Pemberton refused, since he believed Vicksburg was a “vital point, indispensable to be held.” Thus Grant was successful even though Confederates in the vicinity outnumbered him until mid-June. By then, however, he had 71,000 troops closing in on Vicksburg. Shelling went on night and day as the inhabitants huddled in basements or caves, subsisting on mule meat and rats, and on July 4 Pemberton surrendered. Four days later Port Hudson capitulated to Banks, who had besieged it since mid-May. “The Father of Waters,” Lincoln happily wrote, “again goes unvexed to the sea.”
As the Vicksburg siege entered its final stage, Rosecrans launched an offensive with his 60,000-man army. Moving with speed and skill, he maneuvered Bragg out of middle Tennessee. Bragg took refuge in Chattanooga, and Rosecrans paused to regroup. When he resumed his advance in mid-August, Burnside’s Army of the Ohio marched simultaneously from Kentucky toward Knoxville. Burnside forced Simon B. Buckner’s Knoxville defenders to withdraw and entered the city on September 3. Six days later Rosecrans took Chattanooga after clever maneuvering again forced Bragg to retreat. Rosecrans plunged southward in pursuit, each of his three corps pouring through mountain gaps twenty miles apart. Bragg prepared to pounce as the South effected another far-flung strategic concentration similar to the one preceding Shiloh. He received reinforcements from Buckner and Johnston, and he anxiously awaited two divisions under Longstreet coming from Lee’s army. But the Union occupation of Knoxville severed the direct rail link between Virginia and Bragg, compelling Longstreet to take a roundabout route. Before he arrived, Bragg tried three times to strike Rosecrans’s dispersed forces. The attempts miscarried but alerted Rosecrans, who hastily concentrated his army along Chickamauga Creek. At the ensuing Battle of Chickamauga, the Confederates had a numerical advantage of about 10,000 men. On September 18, as Longstreet’s first troops detrained, the Confederates fought their way across the creek. The next day Bragg delivered an all-out attack but made little progress. He renewed the attack the next morning and rolled up the Union right flank. One-third of the army, including Rosecrans, fled to Chattanooga, and it appeared Bragg might annihilate the remaining two-thirds. But George H. Thomas rallied the Federals and repulsed attacks until dark, earning the sobriquet “the Rock of Chickamauga.” That night Thomas retreated to Chattanooga.
Chickamauga was another dearly bought Confederate victory devoid of strategic consequences. The rebels suffered 18,400 casualties, the Yankees 16,100. Furthermore, the Union army retained Chattanooga even though Bragg besieged it. Since the only supply route Rosecrans utilized was circuitous and subjected to rebel cavalry raids, by mid-October his army was starving. With Rosecrans acting, in Lincoln’s memorable phrase, “confused and stunned like a duck hit upon the head,” the administration responded decisively by sending reinforcements and changing the command structure. Stanton ordered two corps from the Army of the Potomac under Hooker to Chattanooga. In the war’s greatest railroad operation, 23,000 men covered 1,200 miles in twelve days. The War Department also ordered four divisions under Sherman to the beleaguered city. On October 17 Lincoln appointed Grant as commander of all forces (except Banks’s army) between the Appalachians and the Mississippi and directed him to assume personal control at Chattanooga. He replaced Rosecrans with Thomas, opened up a direct supply route, and developed plans to break the siege. Meanwhile, Bragg committed a blunder. At Davis’s behest he sent Longstreet to recapture Knoxville just as the Union army was seizing the initiative under Grant’s energetic generalship. On November 24–25 Union attacks drove the Confederates from their siege positions, forcing the Confederates to retreat to Dalton. Shortly thereafter Longstreet retreated from Knoxville, although he remained in a position to menace east Tennessee. Bragg admitted that Davis had erred in keeping him in command, since, as both men knew, he had lost the confidence of his generals. In October Davis had visited Bragg’s headquarters and in the commander’s presence asked each subordinate whether the army needed a new leader. All said yes, yet Davis retained Bragg! Now, after one failure too many, Davis replaced Bragg with Johnston.
Grant planned for a significant winter campaign, hoping for permission to advance from New Orleans to Mobile and then to “make a campaign into the interior of Alabama, and, possibly, Georgia.” Concern in Washington for the security of east and middle Tennessee prevented Grant from undertaking the campaign. Lincoln and Halleck wanted him to drive Longstreet completely out of east Tennessee and to push Johnston farther back into Georgia. Although unable to undertake his Mobile campaign, Grant did send Sherman from Vicksburg to Meridian, Mississippi, in what was the first example of his raiding strategy. Departing Vicksburg in early February 1864 with 25,000 men, Sherman devastated the railroads and resources of central Mississippi and then withdrew to Canton before returning to Vicksburg in early March.
The North’s achievements during the last half of 1863 gave it a firm strategic position for winning the war. Augmenting the substantial gains in the eastern and western theaters was a success along the coast. Following DuPont’s failure, Lincoln replaced him with John A. Dahlgren, who cooperated with Quincy A. Gillmore’s army forces to seal off Charleston by capturing Morris Island. Although the city remained in Confederate hands, blockade-running became doubly dangerous since ships had to escape Dahlgren’s cordon and avoid Union artillery on Morris Island. The North had tightened the blockade one more notch. Indeed, less spectacularly than the land battles but more steadily, the blockade was strangling the Confederacy.
The Civil War at Sea
The most important aspect of the sea war was the blockade, which the North tried to tighten and the South struggled to break. The blockade’s architects were Secretary of the Navy Welles and his assistant secretary, Gustavus V. Fox. They helped plan and organize the amphibious operations that captured bases in enemy territory and closed southern ports, and oversaw the Navy’s expansion to 671 ships by December 1864, including 236 steam vessels built during the war. With steam dominating the building program, in July 1862 Congress restructured the five naval bureaus into a new system of eight bureaus. The most significant change was the addition of a Bureau of Steam Engineering, headed by Benjamin F. Isherwood. Working closely with John Lenthall, chief of the Bureau of Construction and Repair, Isherwood did more than any other individual to design
the Union’s steam navy.
The steam navy’s growth created special problems. Prices for labor and materials rose during the war, and cost overruns played havoc with the Navy Department budget. As Isherwood and Lenthall supervised the construction of vessels, they often changed specifications, leading to what Fox called “those horrible bills for additions and improvements and everlasting alterations.” The biggest problem, however, was finding capable steam engineers. Although their numbers increased from 192 to 1,805, many were inexperienced. To compensate for the novices, Isherwood designed power plants for simplicity, reliability, and durability. But he achieved these admirable qualities by building machinery that was often heavy, underpowered, and inefficient, resulting in many slow, deep-draft ships with limited cruising ranges.
Whatever problems the Union Navy encountered, they were minor compared to those of the Confederate navy. Secretary of the Navy Stephen R. Mallory faced obstacles that made even a modest naval effort appear impossible. The southern population contained few sailors, and at its peak naval manpower was 25 percent below requirements. The South suffered more than the North from a shortage of engineers, and many of the skilled workers went into the army. Fuel, lubricants, iron, and other raw materials were scarce. The Confederacy initially had major naval facilities at Norfolk, Pensacola, and New Orleans, but the Union captured them in 1862, forcing the South to utilize small yards or build new ones in isolated locations beyond the reach of enemy amphibious operations. The transportation system often could not get even small quantities of materials to these far-flung facilities. Since Davis favored the army, the navy received inadequate funding. Money shortages crippled the effort to purchase foreign-built ships. Furthermore, constructing warships for a belligerent violated the neutrality laws of various European nations. The South’s achievement was remarkable, considering the difficulties, for it built or acquired at least 130 ships.
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