The blockade also posed the danger that an aggressive Union captain would fire on a foreign ship or board a neutral vessel. At all costs, Lincoln needed to keep Britain and France out of the conflict. In May, Britain announced strict neutrality, allowing for the Confederates to fight for their independence, but also acknowledging the legality of the Union blockade. Thus the British could simultaneously recognize the Confederate and Union war aims as legitimate. Reality dictated that John Bull might, therefore, fall on the Union side, since British ships would not cross the blockade line. In November 1861, however, when Jefferson Davis dispatched John Slidell and James Mason as permanent envoys to Britain and France aboard a British ship, the Trent, U.S. Navy Captain Charles Wilkes, aboard the USS San Jacinto, stopped the Trent by firing shots across her bow. Boarding the vessel, Union sailors removed Mason and Slidell and transported them to New York City, from where they were declared prisoners of war and remanded to Fort Warren in Boston. British outrage not only produced a stern letter from the foreign minister, but was also followed by deployment of 11,000 redcoats to Canada and vessels to the western Atlantic. Wilkes’s unauthorized (and unwise) act threatened to do what the Rebels themselves had been unable to accomplish, namely, to bring in Britain as a Confederate ally. Seward, perhaps, relished the developments, having failed to provoke his multinational war of unification, but Lincoln was not amused. Scarcely a month after they were abducted, the two diplomats were released on Christmas Day, 1861. Britain considered this an acceptable apology, and the matter ended.64
All that remained of the naval war was a last-gasp Confederate attempt to leapfrog the North with technology. Had the roles been reversed, the North, with its industrial and technical superiority under pressure, might have successfully found a solution to a blockade. But for the already deficient Confederacy (despite its superlative naval secretary, Stephen R. Mallory), the gap between the two combatants became obvious when the Rebels launched their “blockade breaker,” the CSS Virginia. Better known as the Merrimac, the vessel was the Union steam frigate the Confederacy had confiscated when it took the Norfolk navy yard. Outfitted with four inches of iron siding, the ship was impressive compared to wooden vessels, yet hardly a technological marvel. (Britain had launched an ironclad—Warrior—in 1859.) The Virginia’s ten guns fired from holes cut in the iron siding, which could be closed off by hand. A single gun covered the bow and stern. Most of the superstructure was above water, including the smokestack, lifeboat, and the entire gun deck. In March 1862, the Virginia sortied out under the command of Captain Franklin Buchanan to engage Union blockading vessels at Hampton Roads. The astonished Yankee sailors watched as their cannonballs bounced harmlessly off the sides of the monster, which quickly sank the Cumberland and then the Congress, two of the navy’s best frigates. The Union itself had already had contracts for several variants of its own ironclads, known by the name of the lead vessel, the Monitor, whose design was the brainchild of a brilliant Swedish designer, John Ericsson. It surpassed the Virginia in almost every category. At 172 feet long, its hull barely sat above the waterline, leading to its description as “a crackerbox on a raft.” It boasted a revolving turret capable of withstanding ten-inch shot at close range and brandished its own two eleven-inch Dahlgren smoothbore cannons; it also had some fifty of Ericsson’s inventions aboard, including the first flushing toilets on a naval vessel. Upon the Monitor’s arrival at Hampton Roads, it was charged with protecting the larger Minnesota. On March 9, 1862, the Virginia sallied forth, and “Ericsson’s pigmy” engaged it.65 Blasting away at each other for hours, neither could gain an advantage, but the Monitor could position herself where the Virginia could not bring a single gun to bear. Still, neither could seriously damage the other, and the two ships withdrew, each for a different reason (the Monitor’s captain had been blinded by a shell, and the Virginia’s second in command, having replaced the wounded Buchanan, realized he could not outmaneuver or outshoot the Monitor with his current vessel). The Virginia’s draft was so deep that it continually ran aground, and efforts to lighten the ship so that it could better maneuver only exposed its hull. Subsequently, the Virginia was run ashore and burned when its commander feared that other ships like the Monitor were about to capture her. Later, in December 1862, the USS Monitor sank in a gale off Cape Hatteras, but many of her sisters joined the federal navy in inland waterways and along the coasts.
Confederate navy secretary Mallory, meanwhile, had funded other ironclads, and thirty-seven had been completed or were under construction by the war’s end. He also approved an experiment using a mine ram in an underwater vessel called the CSS Hunley, an unfortunate vessel that suffered several fatalities during its sea trials. Although not the world’s first submarine, the hand-cranked boat was the first to actually sink an enemy ship, the Housatonic—and itself—in February 1864. Yet these efforts smacked of desperation. The Confederacy had neither the resources nor a sufficient critical mass of scientific and technical brainpower or institutions to attempt to leapfrog the North in technology.
War in the West
While coastal combat determined the future of the blockade and control of the eastern port cities, and while the ground campaign in Virginia dragged on through a combination of McClellan’s obsessive caution and Confederate defensive strategy, action shifted to the Mississippi River region. Offensives in the West, where Confederates controlled Forts Donelson and Henry on the Tennessee and Cumberland rivers, held the key to securing avenues into Tennessee and northern Alabama. Implementing the Anaconda Plan down the Mississippi, then, depended on wresting those important outposts from the rebels.
General Ulysses Simpson Grant, an engineer from West Point who had fought in the Mexican War, emerged as the central figure in the West. This was surprising, given that only a year earlier he had failed in a series of professions, struggled with alcohol, and wallowed in debt. Grant took his Mexican War experience, where he compiled a solid understanding of logistics as well as strategy, and applied his moral outrage over slavery to it. His father-in-law owned slaves, and James Longstreet (Lee’s second in command at Gettysburg) was his wife’s cousin and an army buddy. But Grant’s own father had abolitionist tendencies, and he himself soon came to view slavery as a clear evil. When the Civil War came, Grant saw it not only as an opportunity for personal resurrection, but also as the chastisement he thought the slave South had earned. He was commissioned a colonel in the Illinois volunteers, and worked his way up to brigadier general in short order.
Grant did not take long to make his mark on the Confederates. Swinging down from Cairo, Illinois, in a great semicircle, he captured Paducah, Kentucky; then, supported by a river flotilla of gunboats, he moved on the two Confederate river-mouth forts that guarded the entrance to the western part of the Confederacy. On February 6, 1862, Grant’s joint land-and-river force took Fort Henry on the Tennessee River, and Fort Donelson, the guardian of the Cumberland River, fell a few days later. When the fort’s commander asked for terms, Grant responded grimly, “Unconditional and immediate surrender.”66 Given the army’s penchant for nicknames, it was perhaps unavoidable that he soon became known as Unconditional Surrender Grant. Donelson’s capitulation genuinely reflected Grant’s approach to war. “Find out where your enemy is,” he said, then “get at him as soon as you can, and strike him as hard as you can, and keep moving on.”67 Grant’s success laid open both Nashville and Memphis.
Northern journalists, inordinately demoralized by Bull Run, swung unrealistically in the opposite direction after Grant’s successes. The Chicago Tribune declared, “Chicago reeled mad with joy,” and the New York Times predicted that “the monster is already clutched and in his death struggle.”68 Little did they know that the South was about to launch a major counterattack at a small church named Shiloh near Pittsburg Landing on the Tennessee River. Confederate General Albert Sidney Johnston knew by then (if he had not beforehand) the difficulty of the task confronting him. He clung to a perimeter line almost three hu
ndred miles long, largely bordered by rivers, fighting an opponent who commanded the waterways, while he lacked sufficient railroads to counter the rapid concentration of forces by the Union at vulnerable points along the rivers. Now the South’s reliance on river transportation, as opposed to railways, had come back to haunt the war effort.
Rather than dig in, Johnston (typically) attacked. Grant’s troops were spread out while the general was planning the next part of his offensive. He had no defensive works, nor did he have any real lines of communication or supply. His headquarters was nine miles away, on the other side of the Tennessee River. Although the troops at Shiloh and Pittsburg Landing were the most raw of recruits, they had the good fortune of being commanded by the able William Tecumseh Sherman. Early on the morning of April 6, 1862, Confederate forces quietly marched through the fog, nearly into the Yankee camp until warnings sounded and musket fire erupted. For the next six hours, the armies slammed into each other at hurricane force, with shocking casualties. In the Peach Orchard, both sides were blinded by a blossom snowstorm created by the din of rifle and cannon shot. By all accounts, the midday hours at Shiloh were the bloodiest of the war, with more Union and Rebel bodies falling per minute than in any other clash. Albert Sidney Johnston himself became a casualty, hit below and behind the knee by a musket ball. Aides could not locate the wound, which was hidden by his high riding boots, and the unconscious Johnston died in their arms. Fighting at Shiloh ended on the first day with a Confederate advantage, but not a decisive victory. The Yanks found themselves literally backed up to the banks of the Tennessee River. General Lew Wallace, later famous for writing Ben-Hur, finally arrived after confusing orders that had him futilely marching across the Tennessee countryside; General Don Carlos Buell arrived after steaming up the Tennessee River with 25,000 men. Grant himself had come up from the rear ranks, and on the second day, with the reinforcements in place, the counterattack drove the Rebels from the field and forced Johnston’s successor, P.G.T. Beauregard, to withdraw south to Corinth, Mississippi. It was a joyless victory, given the carnage. Grant recalled that he could “walk across the clearing in any direction stepping on dead bodies without a foot touching the ground.”69
Tennessee was opened in 1862. Meanhile, Beauregard could not hope to hold Corinth against the combined forces of Pope, Grant, and Buell and therefore conducted a secret withdrawal that opened up northern Mississippi. Just two months earlier, in April 1862, Commander David Farragut captured New Orleans, and Memphis, too, had fallen. Now only Vicksburg stood between the Union and complete control of the Mississippi. Vicksburg not only dominated the river, but it also linked the South to the western Confederacy by rail. There, the blockade had been more porous, allowing food and horses to resupply Rebel armies in the East.
The story in the West seemed grimly monotonous: the Confederates would mount an offensive (despite their supposedly defensive strategy), suffer proportionately greater losses, retreat, then escape as the Union commander dawdled. Union general William Rosecrans attacked Mufreesboro, Tennessee, in December 1862. Again the Confederates had to leave the field despite achieving a draw. Slowly but surely, the Confederates, who took one step forward and two back, yielded ground. They were about to give up the plum of the West: Vicksburg.
From May to June, in 1862, the Union failed to capture Vicksburg, which sat on a high bluff commanding a hairpin curve in the Mississippi River. Vicksburg’s geography held the key to the city’s nearly invulnerable position. The Mississippi River flowed to the city at a 45-degree downward-sloping angle before abruptly turning due north, then sharply angled due south again. Vicksburg sat on the eastern (Mississippi) side of the hairpin, while directly north of the hairpin lay the Chickasaw Bayou, wedged between the Mississippi River and the Yazoo River. This swamp was all but impenetrable for an army, as Sherman found out, calling the approach “hopeless.”70 A main road and rail line connected Vicksburg with Jackson, Mississippi.
Throughout the remainder of 1862, Grant’s army tried a number of novel approaches to defeat this geography, including diverting the river itself by constructing a canal and breaking a levee to create a channel from the Yazoo. Nothing worked. Using Memphis as a base, however, Grant now decided to take Vicksburg by preventing the two Rebel armies facing him (one under Joe Johnston, and one in Vicksburg under John Pemberton) from uniting.
Grant discarded traditional tactics and trudged southward along the Louisiana side of the river, through difficult bayous and lakes, to a point well below Vicksburg where he could recross into Mississippi. To do so, he needed the Union Navy, under Admiral David Porter, to make a critical run from above Vicksburg, past the powerful guns in the city, to the junction below, from where it could ferry Grant’s forces across. Porter sent dozens of supply boats past the city on the night of April 22, 1863. The Confederates had poured turpentine over bales of hay and set them afire to illuminate the river in order to bombard the passing vessels. Although most federal ships sustained damage, all but one survived the run. Grant’s army now crossed into Mississippi from below Vicksburg, inserting itself between Pemberton and Johnston. After he captured and torched Jackson, Mississippi, and blocked the railroad line, Vicksburg was totally isolated.
Then, from late May until July, the Union Army bombarded and closed the noose around the city from the east. Civilians living in Vicksburg, under constant fire, had run out of normal food. When Grant sealed off the city, the residents took to caves and bombproof shelters. They ate soup boiled from mule and horse ears and tails before finally consuming the remaining parts of the beasts. When the horses and mules were gone, they ate rats. Sickness and disease swept the inhabitants as well as the soldiers. At last, on the Fourth of July, 1863, Pemberton, unable to link up with Johnston outside the city, surrendered Vicksburg and its force of 30,000 starving soldiers, as well as 170 cannons, just one day after the crushing defeat of Lee’s army at Gettysburg. Grant said, “The fate of the Confederacy was sealed when Vicksburg fell.”71
Lincoln had, at last, found what he needed to defeat the Confederacy. With eerie prescience, Lincoln told his advisers just before news arrived from Vicksburg that if the general took the city, “Grant is my man, and I am his for the rest of the war.”72
Growing Government(s)
No accusation against Abraham Lincoln has more merit than that he presided over the most rapid expansion of federal power in American history. Most of the expansion can be justified by wartime demands, but too much was little more than political pork barreling and fulfillment of campaign promises.
Shortly after the call had gone out for troops, the government possessed no proven method of raising large sums of money quickly. Lincoln’s secretary of the treasury, Salmon P. Chase, proved to be the right man in the right office at the right time. Chase came from a New Hampshire family, where he learned politics from his state representative father. As a young man, Chase had also worked with his father at running a tavern and a glass factory, and when both failed, he was shipped off to an Ohio relative. After studying for the bar in Ohio, Chase practiced on behalf of the Cincinnati branch of the Bank of the United States, achieving some degree of financial success. Aloof, plodding, and occasionally without tact, Chase had been drawn to the antislavery cause following rioting in Cincinnati against a local abolitionist paper run by James G. Birney. Politically, Chase moved from the Whig Party to the Liberty Party, then adopted the label free Democrat.73
He had won a Senate seat as a Democrat from Ohio, but continued to push the free-soil cause before running for governor in Ohio under a fusion Republican ticket in 1855. Winning the governor’s seat, Chase and the legislature attempted to expand the state’s free banking laws, providing a harbinger of his financial expertise as treasury secretary. Like Seward, he was disappointed to lose the Republican presidential nomination in 1860, and even though he was offered another U.S. Senate seat by the Ohio legislature, he never took it. Instead, he reluctantly accepted Lincoln’s offer of the Treasury post.
Raising the necessary funds to run the war demanded that Chase not only develop systems for generating lots of revenue, but also for bringing it into the Treasury fairly quickly. At the same time, he did not want to sacrifice long-term stability for short-term gains. Copying Alexander Hamilton, Chase examined a menu of options to serve both short-and long-term needs. Taxes, for example, had to be passed by Congress, then collected, meaning that it would be 1862 or later before tax revenues provided much help to the cause. So while Chase immediately asked Congress for a new direct tax on incomes over $300, he simultaneously requested new tariffs and expanded land sales that would generate quicker revenues. Even when the taxes came in, at the end of 1863, the $2 million they produced was inadequate to the Union’s needs, which by the end of 1861 ran $2 million per day. Meanwhile, in addition to other shorter-term bond issues, Congress authorized Chase to raise $250 million through sales of twenty-year bonds paying 7 percent interest.
Banks hesitated to buy bonds if they had to pay for them in gold, and in December 1861 the Northern banks suspended specie payments on all notes. (The Confederacy’s banks had gone off the gold standard almost immediately after Fort Sumter.) Concerned that soldiers would go unpaid, Chase advanced a paper money concept to Congress that would allow the Treasury to issue $100 million in notes that would circulate as “lawful money, and a legal tender of all debts, public and private.”74 Enacted as the Legal Tender Act of February 1862, the proposal authorized the issue of more than Chase requested—$450 million of the new green-colored bills, called greenbacks.
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