by Bruce Catton
Two things this Congress had done that would set a pattern for the struggle; things which could mean that it would be a shattering upheaval rather than just a war. It had in effect voted to put all of the resources of the North into the contest. These resources were immense, or would be when they were finally marshaled, and the Confederacy could not begin to match them; in a long war they would be decisive, provided that the will to use them continued. In addition, Congress had taken a confused but revolutionary step toward making this a war that would swallow up slavery as well as secession; it had at least hinted that when it dealt with slavery it would be guided by the harsh necessities of the case rather than by the Constitution. In the months ahead these necessities would become exceedingly demanding.
3: A Head Full of Fire
Perhaps the great comet meant something. It swung into view early in July, it was believed to be the most brilliant in half a century, and an awed observer in Connecticut said that “both head and tail were seen simultaneously.” The tail, he said, was “in the form of a bright streamer, with sides nearly straight and parallel.” The New York Herald, irreverently ready to see an omen in almost anything, wrote solemnly about the “celestial visitor that has sprung upon us with such unexampled brilliancy and magnitude,” and said the thing was a burden for the timid, “who regard it with fear, looking upon it as something terrible, bringing in its train wars and desolation.”1
This was as it might be, the time of war and desolation having arrived. To a crippled scientist who was trying just then to blow up two Yankee warships (he was a trained observer well qualified to judge such matters), the comet was at least useful. It was a bright beacon which men in rowboats, afloat on a perilous tide at midnight, could use as a guide while they tried to place infernal machines where they would do the most harm. The observer was Matthew Fontaine Maury, a commander in the Confederate States Navy, and in a way his presence on this expedition of derring-do was a portent more meaningful than Thatcher’s comet itself.
Maury was one of the few Americans of that day with a true international reputation. He perhaps had done even more than the clipper-ship designers themselves to speed the progress of wind-driven ships across the world’s oceans. A studious, thoughtful man, he had worked at his desk in Washington so effectively that every ship captain in the western world was deeply in his debt; he was, in fact, one of those quiet world-shrinkers who make the planet smaller and, simply by taking effective thought, bring the distant races and nations of man closer together. Virginia-born, he had become a midshipman in the United States Navy in 1825, had served at sea for fourteen years, and then, while on leave, had been in a stagecoach accident which left one leg permanently lame. Supposedly unfit for duty afloat, he had been appointed, in 1842, superintendent of the navy’s Depot of Charts and Instruments, with responsibility as well for direction of the Naval Observatory and Hydrographical Office, and in this post he became one of the navy’s most useful officers. He studied not only the stars but winds, ocean currents, and the logs of thousands of mariners; and presently, year after year, he was publishing wind and current charts, sailing directions, studies in oceanography, and the like, whose net effect was to show ship masters what courses would enable them to make the fastest passages. (It was said that his work knocked forty-five days from the average sailing time between New York and San Francisco.) He was honored at home and abroad, and although in the 1850s some petty rivalry among the brass-bound old salts in the Navy Department put him on the shelf, he was quickly restored to duty and promoted to commander.
When secession came, he was in his middle fifties, a staunch Southerner but no extremist; on Lincoln’s inauguration he wrote that it was each man’s duty to follow his state, if his state should go to war—“if not, he may remain to help on the work of reunion.” Virginia went to war and Maury followed Virginia, and shortly thereafter Secretary Mallory gave him a Confederate commander’s commission and put him in charge of harbor defenses. Maury began experimenting with electric mines, and early in July he set out on an attempt to put some of those mines to use. He was a pleasant-spoken man, short, stout, and ruddy, still afflicted with that game leg, going out after years at a desk to try his hand at a sea-going exploit in the John Paul Jones style.2
This happened down off Sewell’s Point, Virginia, where the James River flows out into the broad reach known as Hampton Roads. Anchored in the stream, along with other men-of-war, were the Federal warships U.S.S. Minnesota and Roanoke. Maury wanted to sink them, and he had been studying them through a spy glass. A guard boat, puffing steam, circled about them night after night, and the chances looked bad; and on a Sunday he saw the church flag floating above the national emblem, and it bothered him. His daughter, Betty, to whom he told the story a few days later, said that “when he thought that those men were worshiping God in sincerity and truth, and no doubt think their cause as righteous as we feel ours to be, his heart softened toward them for he remembered how soon he would be the means of sending many of them to eternity.” But Sunday night came, and the guard boat apparently was off duty, so Maury went out in a skiff, four other skiffs following him, an officer and four oarsmen in each boat. They had an arrangement of kegs full of powder, connected by long lines, and the idea was to get up-tide from the warships and set these powder kegs adrift; they would float down, the long lines would be caught by the warships’ anchor chains, the kegs would drift on and touch the vessels’ sides—and then, by some intricate trigger mechanism, the powder would explode and the ships would go to glory.
When he got back, Maury told his daughter about it and she put his words down in her diary: “The night was still, clear, calm and lovely. Thatcher’s comet was flaming in the sky. We steered by it, pulling along in the plane of its splendid train. All the noise and turmoil of the enemy’s camp and fleet were hushed. They had no guard boats of any sort out, and as with muffled oars we began to near them we heard seven bells strike.” Then came anti-climax. The mines were set adrift, the anchor chains caught the lines on schedule, the powder kegs went in against the black wooden hulls—and the triggers failed to work. Maury and his men rowed away and waited for an explosion that never came, and Betty Maury wrote: “Thank God, for if it had Pa would have been hung before now. At the first explosion the calcium light at Fortress Monroe would have been lit, and the little steamer—whose steam was up, they could hear her—would have caught them in a few minutes.”
Nothing happened. Maury escaped, as did U.S.S. Minnesota and Roanoke, and apparently the United States Navy never knew what it had missed. Maury believed that on a second try he could make the mines work, but there was no second try. The Confederate government had a genius on its hands and did not quite know what to do with him, and Betty Maury considered it an outrage “that they allowed so celebrated, valuable and clever a man as my father to risk his life in such an expedition.” She noted, also, that “Papa looks preoccupied and low-spirited. Says it is more and more palpable that the men at the head of this Government are not the men for the times.”3
The men at the head of the government were doing their best, under extreme difficulties, but the mere fact that they had a man like Maury in their service meant something. They had other men, too, who had broken off promising careers to stake all they had on the success of the new nation. Among them was a handsome six-footer named Albert Sidney Johnston, Kentucky-born, a graduate of West Point, veteran of the Mexican War, former colonel of the 2nd U. S. Cavalry, a man esteemed so highly in Washington that when Lee decided he could not take the job of second-in-command to Winfield Scott, the place was offered to Johnston. Johnston, by now commanding the Department of the Pacific with headquarters at San Francisco, an old soldier getting on for sixty, turned the offer down and resigned his commission. He stayed on for two weeks, so that his successor could take his place, and he was horrified to learn that the War Department (remembering what Twiggs had done in Texas) suspected that he would turn California over to the Rebels unless he was c
losely watched; and now he was coming east to Richmond, cross-country, hoping that Jefferson Davis somehow would be able to make use of him in the Confederate army. Nothing had been promised to him; just thought he could be of some service.
There was another Johnston—Joseph Eggleston Johnston, a sprightly and courtly little Virginian in his fifties who, when war came, was quartermaster-general of the United States Army, with the rank of brigadier. He had a trim gray goatee, a knack for winning the adoration of men who worked for him, and an indefinable quality that led soldiers to refer to him as “the gamecock”; he was both kindly and touchy, and although his superiors sometimes found him hard to get along with, his inferiors never did. He would pace his office in the War Department, thinking hard, and when an aide came in to remind him of some unfinished business, he would bite the aide’s head off—and then, before the man had left the room, would apologize so pleasantly that the aide would feel no hurt. One morning, a few days after Fort Sumter, he went in to see Secretary Cameron; came out a bit later, head bowed, tears in his eyes, to collect his belongings and go away. Cameron recalled that Johnston had told him he must resign and go south; he owed everything to the United States government, it had educated him and honored him, but he must go with his state. “It was ruin, in every sense of the word,” said Cameron, remembering what the gamecock had told him, “but he must go.” Johnston went—to Richmond, where Mr. Davis made him a Confederate brigadier and sent him off to command troops in the Shenandoah. An admiring soldier, looking on when Johnston took command, considered him both an intellectual and a fine horseman, and wrote: “He sat his steed like a part of the animal, and there was that about him which impressed us all with the idea that he was at home in the management of an army as well as of a horse.”4
… The historian Francis Parkman, considering the state of the war two years later, marveled that an adversary “with means scarcely the tithe of ours” could not only hold the Northern invader at bay but could twice show the ability to take the war into the Northland itself. The reason, he believed, was that the Confederacy—“illjointed, starved, attenuated”—had, nevertheless, “a head full of fire.” It had claimed the allegiance of some great men, men who had much to lose and much to offer, and the fight between Confederacy and Union came down to “strong head and weak body against strong body and weak head.”5 Parkman named no names, and he did not need to. The Confederacy had Lee, and the Johnstons, and Maury, and others like them, and they had not turned their lives upside-down lightly: they would stick to the finish, they would carry lesser men with them, and a new nation whose cause these men had chosen had some important assets.…
And this was the counter-weight which the South was putting into the scales against the massive force which the Northern President and Congress were evoking, in the month of July 1861. The South did not have the strength in mine, factory, counting house, or field which the Northern states had, nor did it own, far down in reserve, waiting to be accepted and used, the overriding moral force of the anti-slavery cause. Yet it did have, somewhere, in an area beyond easy definition, the power to draw the loyalty of some very remarkable men—who, before they got through, might do great things with the lean, restless countrymen whose muscularity had so impressed Mr. William Russell. It could summon a man like Maury to steer a rowboat across a dark tide by the light of a comet, on a mission which ought to have been given to some twenty-five-year-old lieutenant; it could bring an Albert Sidney Johnston across the continent, riding toward destiny and a fated bullet on the off chance that he might be of some service; and its ability to command such men was a factor as significant, in the national response to the laws of war, as anything Thaddeus Stevens might call on the Federal Congress to do. Alec Stephens had looked without regret on the broken Union and had boasted “We are the salt of the concern.”6 Men like those would make his boast look as if it contained some substance.
Mr. Davis seemed unworried, although there was much that might have worried him. He went before the third session of the provisional Congress in Richmond on July 20 to welcome the states of Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Arkansas to the Confederacy and to pay his respects to the talk and the legislation that had been coming out of the Federal Capitol. These, he said, “strip the veil behind which the true policy and purposes of the Government of the United States had been previously concealed; their odious features now stand fully revealed; the message of their President and the action of their Congress during the present month confess the intention of subjugating these States by a war whose folly is equalled by its wickedness.” The Confederacy was getting ready for them. Crops were good; the yield of grain in the recent harvest was the largest in Southern history, such export staples as cotton, sugar, and tobacco were coming along well, and “a kind Providence had smiled on the labor which extracts the teeming wealth of our soil.” Army recruiting was flourishing, and “the noble race of freemen who inhabit these states” was volunteering “in numbers far exceeding those authorized by your laws.” The people of the South, in short, were thoroughly aroused, and Northern talk of subjugation was utter folly. The President stated both the faith and the determination of the Southern people with the defiant assertion: “Whether this war shall last one, or three, or five years is a problem they leave to be solved by the enemy alone; it will last till the enemy shall have withdrawn from their borders—till their political rights, their altars and their homes are freed from invasion. Then, and only then, will they rest from this struggle, to enjoy in peace the blessings which with the favor of Providence they have secured by the aid of their own strong hearts and sturdy arms.”7
Mr. Davis’s confidence seemed justified; his new government, with everything to do and little to do it with, had accomplished a good deal, and when he spoke, it had upward of 110,000 men under arms, not counting home guards and militia. But although volunteers were coming forward in an enthusiastic flood tide, there were not nearly enough weapons for them, and there was no possibility that the shortage could be overcome in the immediate future. Joe Johnston, up in the Valley, was calling for reinforcements, and a week before he addressed Congress, Davis had felt compelled to explain to the general that there were no reinforcements because men could not be armed. “From Missi. I could get 20,000 men who impatiently wait for notice that they can be armed,” he wrote. “In Georgia numerous tenders are made to serve for any time, any place, and to these and other offers I am still constrained to answer I have not arms to supply you.”8
This was a hard message to send to a soldier whose army was in contact with the enemy, but there was no help for it. At Manassas, Beauregard was calling for troops even more insistently than Johnston was, and although he was getting a few, he was not getting nearly as many as he believed he needed, and one of his staff officers was angrily complaining that the President and the War Department would send no help “unless it is dug out of them.” With bitter cynicism, he wrote: “I hear that the Prest. will send re-enforcements here. Perhaps tomorrow 4000 will arrive. We want 15,000.”9
This explosion was natural enough, in view of the fact that the Federals were obviously about to start an offensive campaign, but it was unjust because there was nothing whatever that Davis could immediately do as far as equipment was concerned. The North also had a shortage of arms just now, but it would be overcome as soon as the country got itself organized for war; the case in the Confederacy was different because the South had so little to organize. The very machinery of government had been improvised-improvised in a land whose fundamental faith was that the government which governs least is best—and this machinery was attempting to operate in a land where the financial and industrial base for a large-scale war simply did not exist. The lack of guns was the first symptom of a deficiency which could never really be overcome and which, if the war went on long enough, would be fatal.
The South, to be blunt, had a grave shortage of capital and of manufacturing capacity. Its wealth consisted largely of land and slaves. In
1860 it had produced a little less than 10 per cent of the total of American manufactured articles. The shortage of hard money was already being felt; the different state governments, overextended by money spent in the early days of secession, were being obliged to borrow in a very bad money market. Specie payments to individuals were being suspended, treasury notes based on state credit were being issued, and the Congress at Richmond within a month would be authorizing the issuance of $100,000,000 in Confederate treasury notes so that it could reimburse the states for what they were spending on war preparations. The touch of inflation was beginning to be felt before the war was well begun.
Mr. Davis had spoken with pride of the promising production of export staples. To possess a large surplus of cotton, tobacco, and sugar was good, provided that the export markets could in fact be reached, but there were difficulties. The Southern carrying trade had been conducted largely in Northern vessels, which were no longer at hand. The Northern market itself was of course gone: two months ago Davis had signed a law prohibiting the export of cotton except through the seaports, which Northern ships could not enter. Europe remained, and Commissioners Yancey, Mann, and Rost were overseas reminding the British and the French about all of that cotton. They were getting no hint that actual recognition would be extended, and they probably did not expect to, but the cotton business looked more promising. In Paris the Count de Morny, believed to be in the confidence of the Emperor Napoleon, had assured them (as they recently reported to Richmond) that “as long as we produced cotton for sale, France and England would see that their vessels reached the ports where it was to be had.” In London the British Foreign Minister, Lord John Russell, had indicated that his government would go no farther than its declaration extending the rights of belligerents to the Confederate states, but the commissioners felt that this attitude might change if “the necessity for having cotton becomes pressing.”10 The necessity was not yet pressing. There had been a big carryover of cotton stocks overseas—so heavy that New England textile mills would actually be able to import some from Europe during the year ahead—but time might tell a different story. The great supply of export staples was unquestionably a long-term asset, but right now it did nothing to relieve the shortage of war goods.
