THE WAR: MERELY a day after his inauguration Lincoln had received word from Major Robert Anderson at Fort Sumter that he desperately needed supplies. What to do? Evacuate Sumter? That would confer a kind of legitimacy on the Confederacy, which Lincoln would not permit. Force South Carolina’s hand by reinforcing Sumter and inevitably trigger a hostile confrontation? That might provoke states of the upper South, such as Virginia, to secede. Opposing the conciliation urged by General Winfield Scott and Secretary Seward, Postmaster General Montgomery Blair was adamant about not surrendering Sumter to the Confederacy, and Lincoln carefully listened to the advice of his Treasury secretary, Salmon Chase, who argued that if the troops, stationed in a federal fort, needed sustenance of any sort, then the administration must provide for them, even if the consequence of so doing was military resistance.
By that time, Fort Sumter was a name familiar to newspaper readers—or to the spectators at Barnum’s Museum, who could see, for twenty-five cents, a dramatic performance of “Union Drama, Anderson and Patriots at Sumter in ’61.” Yet it seemed that few in the North expected a confrontation: Sumter would be evacuated, and Lincoln would cave in to the Confederacy, which had unfurled its new flag in Charleston Harbor.
Still, that Confederate flag was a symbol, one that must be considered treasonous—and so too was Sumter a symbol, though in this case a symbol of the federal government and its strength. Lincoln therefore decided to provision the fort. He would send only food, not soldiers or guns.
He notified Governor Francis Pickens of South Carolina of his plan to ship supplies to Sumter, and though he said the mission would be peaceful, Jefferson Davis didn’t believe it. Lincoln was baiting the Confederacy into firing first—and firing on a couple of tugboats, no less, dispatched simply to feed a garrison of very hungry men. “They mean to compel us into a political servitude we disown and spurn,” Davis cried.
José Gonzales, the Cuban émigré who had briefly stood behind Narciso Lopéz, joined his old friend the dashing Creole general Pierre Gustave Toutant Beauregard in Charleston. Delivering an ultimatum to Major Anderson, Beauregard had been ordered to fire on Sumter if Major Anderson did not surrender it. Anderson said that unless he received supplies or instructions, he’d evacuate the fort, but since the Confederates knew that provisions were on their way, at three thirty in the morning Beauregard had to notify Anderson that should he not surrender, then he, General Beauregard, would open fire, which he did, exactly an hour later, at four thirty on April 12.
Fort Sumter surrendered on April 14. Lincoln pressed 75,000 state militia into service for three months. At hastily called town meetings, selectmen were authorized to borrow thousands of dollars for uniforms or to care for the families of needy volunteers; on college campuses in the North, Southern students packed their bags and once back home enlisted in the Confederate army; North and South, women began to sew and collect supplies for the soldiers. “I shall have no winter this year—on account of the soldiers—,” Emily Dickinson slyly wrote. “Since I cannot weave Blankets, or Boots—I thought it best to omit the season.” Young boys drilled on town squares. Whitman noted, “Squads gather everywhere by common consent, and arm / the new recruits, even boys—the old men show them how to wear their accoutrements—they buckle the straps carefully; / Outdoors arming—indoors arming—.” Patriotic flags decorated the roofs of homes and offices in every town and hamlet in the North. The firing on Fort Sumter had infuriated the North and united it as nothing else had. Meantime, five ex-presidents—James Buchanan, Franklin Pierce, Millard Fillmore, John Tyler, and Martin Van Buren—met in Philadelphia to try to settle hostilities. As the New York Herald caustically noted, from that “fossil court of arbitration, we need hardly say, nothing is to be expected.”
The next month, Lincoln called for 42,000 three-year volunteers and 18,000 sailors, and Congress, which approved the actions Lincoln had already taken, called for a million three-year volunteers. Though Delaware, Kentucky, Maryland, and Missouri had not joined the Confederacy (much to Lincoln’s relief), right after Sumter, Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Arkansas did. The issues were clear: honor, independence, and the refusal of what was called “subjugation.” “Our cause is just and holy,” Jefferson Davis declared to his Congress. “We protest solemnly in the face of mankind that we desire peace at any sacrifice save that of honor and independence; we seek no conquest, no aggrandizement, no concession of any kind from the States with which we were lately confederated; all we ask is to be let alone; that those who never held power over us shall not now attempt subjugation by arms.”
War had come.
Davis moved the capital of the Confederacy to Richmond, which was closer to Washington than Montgomery. Richmond was a manufacturing center, and its Tredegar Iron Works produced locomotives, projectiles, and cannon. And Thomas Jefferson had designed the lovely and luminously white state capitol.
“On to Washington,” cried the Richmond Examiner in April. “On to Richmond,” answered the masthead of the New-York Tribune in June.
ON JULY 20, 1861, readers of Northern newspapers believed the North had just won a grand battle fought at Bull Run, near Manassas Junction, twenty-six miles southwest of Washington. “Great Battle: Brilliant Union Victory,” blared the New York Herald—until, that is, journalists on the field during the next few days recounted for readers the ignominious and headlong rout: Federal troops stampeding along roads clogged with abandoned wagons, riderless horses galloping past wounded men, wounded men begging for help and ignored, mostly, by panic-stricken soldiers running for their lives. Soldiers tossed away their picks and shovels, knapsacks, blankets, cooking tins, bayonets, muskets, even belts, all to lighten their load as they ran as fast as they could. “The regular cavalry, I record it to their shame,” wrote one correspondent, “joined in the mêlée, adding to its terrors, for they rode down footmen without mercy.”
Four days earlier the Federal army had marched toward the Confederates, entrenched beyond the town of Centreville, just past Bull Run Creek. Fighting them at Blackburn’s Ford, the Confederates had initially repulsed the attack. By Sunday the twenty-first, the tide had turned. The Federals (as the Union forces were also called) were driving back Confederate forces. They were going to win, no doubt about it. So what had happened? Confederate reinforcements arrived, and their counterattack not only broke up the Federal defense but also turned its retreat into a stampede. Pausing near a stream, one reporter watched in disbelief as soldiers scurried past him. “Ayer’s battery dashed down the turnpike,” he wrote. “A baggage wagon was hurled into the ditch in a twinkling. A hack from Washington, which had brought out a party of congressmen, was splintered to kindling. Drivers cut their horses loose and fled in precipitate haste. Instinct is quick to act.” The intrepid Ben Wade, a senator from Ohio, tried halting the retreat by blocking the road with his carriage and waving his rifle at the fleeing men.
A rout, pure and simple, had taken place, the morale of the army shattered, the ranks broken, “the dust, the grime and smoke, in layers, sweated in, follow’d by other layers again sweated in,” recounted Walt Whitman, “absorb’d by those excited souls—their clothes all saturated with the clay-powder filling the air—stirr’d up everywhere on the dry roads and trodden fields by the regiments, swarming wagons, artillery, &c.—all the men with this coating of murk and sweat and rain, now recoiling back, pouring over the Long Bridge—a horrible march of twenty miles, returning to Washington baffled, humiliated, panic-struck.”
The many eyewitness reports together told a story of shocked disbelief. Twenty-seven-year-old Edmund Clarence Stedman had caught the attention of fellow Northerners when he celebrated John Brown as brave and godly, if a bit crazy, in a poem that “rang like a reveille,” or so said Lincoln’s secretary John Hay. Later known as a lyricist of little power—and a successful financier—Stedman was also a critic whose anthologies of poetry, published at the turn of the century, virtually created the (much-derided) category of Victorian
poetry. Born in Hartford, Connecticut, he entered Yale at sixteen; though he was expelled for dissipation two years later, Yale recanted, awarding Stedman, late in his life, an honorary degree.
Back in 1861, the long-faced, large-eyed Stedman was easily recognized by his mutton-chop beard. As a field journalist on the staff of the New York World, on the morning of July 21 Stedman was on the Bull Run battlefield, waving the standard of the 5th Massachusetts Infantry and begging its men to rally round him. He too pleaded to little avail, and in his newspaper dispatch, he pulled no punches: “a grand army, retreating before superior numbers, was never more disgracefully or needlessly disrupted, and blotted, as it were, out of existence in a single day,” he wrote. “This is the truth, and why should it not be recorded?” As soldiers fled the field, one thousand wounded men were left behind. The long-limbed, lean, Bavarian-born Henry Villard, on assignment for the New York Herald, fell out of a tree he had climbed a that morning to try to get a better look at the battlefield. Villard, who years later would purchase The Nation magazine, landed with a thump near Stedman and the illustrator whom Harper’s magazine had sent to sketch the battle. But as Villard said, “the scenes on the battlefield beggar description. . . . Here lay one man with his leg shot off, there another with a wound in the head, a third with an arm shot off, and hundreds of wounded in nearly all the various portions of the body.”
It wasn’t only the frightened soldiers who had run. After the battle began, around six in the morning, the sound of guns could be heard in Washington, where members of Congress and their families had filled their picnic baskets and piled them into carriages and hacks and ridden out to nearby fields to watch through opera glasses what was sure to be a victory. It was a sunny day, and the broad Potomac was curled like a silver ribbon, noted the celebrated William Howard Russell, a middle-aged British journalist for the London Times who had covered the Crimean War. Soon he heard shots and then a low dark boom from the cannon, and on his way to Centreville, where the picnickers had opened their baskets, he could see wagons, which he supposed were returning for more supplies. The crowd grew larger, and one man began to yell, “Turn back! Turn back! We are whipped.” Russell almost laughed but was overcome by the vague sense that “something extraordinary [was] taking place which is experienced when a man sees a number of people acting as if driven by some unknown terror.” He acidly noted that though Washingtonians had gathered “in the hope of seeing the Lord deliver the Philistines into his hands,” what they actually saw was mayhem. Most of the spectators scurried back to Washington in confusion.
“Their hearts were all willing to witness the killing,” a Boston versifier mocked them:
When the jolly civilians had chosen their ground;
They drank and they nibbled—reporters they scribbled,
While shot from the cannon were flying around.
But nearer the rattle and storm of the battle
Approached the civilians who came to a show,
The terrible thunder filled them with wonder
And trembling, and quaking with fear of the foe.
The hell’s egg-shells flying, the groans of the dying,
Soon banished their pleasure and ruined their fun;
There was terrible slaughter—blood ran like water,
When civilians were picnicking down at Bull Run.
The rout wasn’t just a consequence of flying missiles, blue smoke, and crackling gunfire. It was one of arrogance.
The battle plan had been that of the forty-two-year-old General Irvin McDowell, a West Pointer who had never before led men in the field. He had aimed to attack the Confederate lines with three advancing columns of about 35,000 men each and then confront Brigadier General P. G. T. Beauregard’s forces at Manassas Junction. Afterward, he intended to move south and seize the Confederate capital at Richmond. It was a bold and risky plan, and it was as much the result of the Tribune’s pugnacious prodding as of sound military logic. McDowell, for instance, wanted the reporters covering the battle to wear white uniforms, as if to indicate their purity of character—and as if battle would be a romantic, organized storybook affair.
But the militia was made of three-month men, green and poorly trained. Their officers were as yet unproven. And the plan didn’t take into account that Confederate reinforcements could (and did) sweep down on them, many arriving by rail. McDowell had no reserves, and Union boys, tired, hot, and frightened, went up to the Confederate lines, cowered, and then ran away.
Nor did the North count on the ferocious tenacity of the Confederate soldiers. It did not count on such leaders as the thin-lipped, unflappable Brigadier General Thomas Jackson, the Confederate who earned his “Stonewall” sobriquet here at Bull Run. Urging his men forward, Confederate Brigadier General Barnard Bee shouted, “There is Jackson with his Virginians, standing like a stone wall! Rally behind the Virginians!” Bee was killed, but Jackson made a firm stand at Bull Run; he was an unrelenting man. Often compared with Oliver Cromwell, so ferocious was his belief that the Southern cause was divinely inspired, so flamboyantly humble was he in the face of providential destruction, Jackson was bent on invading the North to wreak unrelenting destruction. “For our people,” Jackson said, the war was “a struggle for life and death.”
“THE VAUNTED UNION we thought so strong, so impregnable,” said Walt Whitman, “seems already smash’d like a china plate.” The Battle of Bull Run demolished the fantasy that the war would be bloodless or brief. But the fantasy of a short war hadn’t yet disappeared for everyone. Howell Cobb, who joined the Confederate army, wrote his wife in August that from “the tone of the Northern papers I infer that the people there are getting sick of the war and since their disastrous defeat at Manassas they begin to talk of peace.” The war wouldn’t last past the next January, everyone thought.
IN JULY, AFTER the Federals’ rout from the plains of Manassas, Horace Greeley removed the “On to Richmond” command from the masthead of the Tribune, and the unhappy Lincoln, accompanied by Seward, decided to inspect the troops at Fort Corcoran. Things were a mess. The restless Colonel William Tecumseh Sherman was now barking that he’d shoot anyone who disobeyed his orders on the spot, for, according to him, the scared and hence unreliable privates—boys, really—had caused the rout. But the Battle of Bull Run was also, as Sherman would recall, “the best lesson a vain & conceited crowd ever got. Up to that time no one seemed to measure the danger, the necessity of prolonged preparation and infinite outlay of money.”
“Youth must its ignorant impulse lend—,” Melville wrote. “Age finds place in the rear. / All wars are boyish, and are fought by boys.”
Lincoln dismissed the defeated McDowell and placed Major General George Brinton McClellan in charge of the Army of the Potomac. It seemed a good move. A West Point graduate and classmate of General Beauregard, McClellan had served in the Mexican War, where he was brevetted first lieutenant and captain. Afterward, he had superintended the Illinois Central Railroad and the Ohio & Mississippi before returning to the military. Handsome, his shock of reddish hair cut short, and with a thick, well-groomed mustache that bristled with charm, McClellan was a compact, broad-chested man never at a loss for words about his infallibility. He said he had led the Union to important (he called them brilliant) victories in western Virginia earlier that spring when he had guarded the strategically significant Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, which linked Washington to the Midwest. Though not on the battlefield himself, he had directed his troops to win skirmishes at Philippi, Rich Mountain, and Corrick’s Ford—successes, he said, that had helped that area become a new state, West Virginia, the following year.
When he first arrived in Washington, the man already known as the Young Napoleon seemed fresh from the battlefield, eager for a fight, optimistic despite what he found: “no preparations whatever for defense, not even to the extent of putting the troops in military position,” he said. “Not a regiment was properly encamped, not a single avenue of approach guarded. All was chaos, and
the streets, hotels, and bar-rooms were filled with drunken officers and men, absent from their regiments without leave, a perfect pandemonium. Many had even gone to their homes, their flight from Bull Run terminating in New York, or even in New Hampshire and Maine.” The thousands of thirty-day soldiers who had been coming to Washington since April had quickly learned that nothing much awaited them: there were scant food and water, few uniforms, makeshift quarters. Disorganization, then, could be seen not just in the poorly drilled soldier but on the faces of the befuddled, hungry men who stood around in blazing heat or driving rain, wandering the streets or dispatched to camps where rations were measly, blankets thin, and ill-fitting shoes falling apart.
Brimming with the sanguine confidence of the egoist, McClellan set about organizing the army, enlarging its staff, and overseeing the details of regimental life, everything from the stocking of the commissary to the counting of horses, harnesses, and wagons. His assessment of the army’s unpreparedness was not wrong. Reporting to the newly formed Sanitary Commission, a private organization established to create field hospitals, to bring medical supplies, surgeons, and nurses to the army, and to coordinate casualty lists, the architect Frederick Law Olmsted wrote a blistering account of the army in his “Report on the Demoralization of the Volunteers,” in which he accused the government of sending starving, thirsty, tired boys into battle without much of a plan, much organization, much discipline, or any awareness that this was not a temporary emergency but a long, hard war.
And according to William Henry Hurlbert, the Charleston-born Douglas Democrat now editing the New York World, the defeat at Bull Run had also been caused by “professional rivalry, jealousy, envy; the desire of promotion and of conspicuous command; in some cases a mere craving for the popularity to be so easily won by falling in with the public clamor of the hour.” One of the volunteer officers testified that “the officers themselves did not know what to do; they were themselves raw and green. Every man went in to do his duty, and knew nothing about anybody else.” George Templeton Strong, who visited Washington shortly after the Battle of Bull Run, noted, “The men have lost faith in their officers, and no wonder, when so many officers set the example of running away. Of the first three hundred fugitives that crossed the Long Bridge, two hundred had commissions. Two colonels were seen fleeing on the same horse.” In addition, about a third of the country’s officers had left the Union for the Confederacy.
Ecstatic Nation Page 22
