Terrible Swift Sword

by Bruce Catton

  Nothing went well. The battle plan itself was far too elaborate, calling for co-ordinated operations by five separate columns in a country so rough and tangled that contact between the moving columns was impossible; even veterans led by veteran generals would have had trouble with it, and later in the war Lee rarely tried anything quite so intricate. The rains continued, completing the ruination of roads which had been atrocious enough to begin with. Through September 11 and 12 the soldiers floundered along, wet and tired, dimly aware that things were going wrong. One detachment lost its sleep, on a night of especially heavy rain, when a bear blundered into camp and set the men caroming into one another in the dripping blackness. The detachment that was supposed to carry the mountaintop—the movement on which all the other movements hinged—found the place too strongly held and too well fortified to be carried; the Federals were alerted, the surprise which Lee had counted on was gone for good, the men ate the last of their food and could get no more without returning to camp: and, all in all, the elaborate plan fizzled out in dismal failure without ever producing a battle at all. Sensibly, Lee called everything off and took the army back to its starting point.9 Never again would Confederates try to regain the Cheat Mountain fastness.

  Lee had no leisure to brood over misfortune. The mess that Wise and Floyd had concocted seemed likely to let Rosecrans advance as far as his resources of supply would permit, and it was up to Lee to provide a solution. Ordering Loring to leave enough men to watch Reynolds’s brigade and to bring the rest down to the Lewisburg Pike, Lee went on in advance to see what could be done.

  Having retreated from Carnifix Ferry, Floyd had dug in, some twenty miles to the southeast, at a spot called Meadow Bluff, and he had ordered Wise to join him. Floyd had the rank, and was entitled to issue orders, but Wise refused to obey. Instead, he built entrenchments ten miles nearer the enemy, on Little Sewell Mountain, and demanded that Floyd come up to support him. The situation was fantastic. Between them, Wise and Floyd had fewer than 4000 men, and the advancing Rosecrans had substantially more than twice that many. Yet the two Confederates were flatly refusing to join hands against him, each man staying doggedly where he was and calling on the gods, the government, and General Lee to witness how stiff-necked and perverse the other man was. The situation was complicated, as Lee quickly discovered, by one final oddity. By military law General Wise was as wrong as a man could be, but tactically he was dead right; the position he had chosen was far better than the one Floyd had selected, and if Rosecrans was to be stopped the place to stop him was obviously Little Sewell Mountain. Lee ordered all hands to concentrate there, and quietly notified Richmond that one of these two generals would have to be relieved. Mr. Davis recalled Wise, and a semblance of harmony descended on the Confederate camp while Lee got ready for the Federal assault.10

  The assault never came. Rosecrans moved up to Little Sewell Mountain, examined its defenses, endured another torrential rainstorm, concluded that Lee’s position was too strong to be carried and that a real advance through this mountain land was impossible anyway, and presently drew his army back to Gauley Bridge.11 Lee found it impractical to pursue, and soon after Mr. Davis called him back to Richmond. From a Confederate viewpoint the campaign had been a distressing failure, and most of the blame was ascribed to Lee. E. A. Pollard, the hypercritical Richmond editor, wrote angrily that the losing campaign had been conducted by a general “whose extreme tenderness of blood induced him to depend exclusively on the resources of strategy, to essay the achievement of victories without loss of life.”12 (Of all the criticisms ever made of Lee, this one probably has the least validity.) Lee quietly accepted the criticism and made no public reply, but he was stung and he wrote to Mrs. Lee: “I am sorry, as you say, that the movements of the armies cannot keep pace with the expectations of the editors of papers. I know they can regulate matters satisfactorily to themselves on paper. I wish they could do so in the field. No one wishes them more success than I do and would be happy to see them have full swing.”13

  Altogether, the Federals had gained something significant, and a youthful Confederate confessed: “A decided reaction had taken place since the wonderful battle of Manassas. It had not been followed up by the extermination of ‘the Yankees,’ as I expected it would be.”14 The Northern government now held western Virginia permanently; it would be West Virginia just as soon as the formalities could be attended to, and a good third of the Old Dominion had been sheared away forever. The Federals were not yet beginning to win, but they were taking the ground on which they could begin to win a bit later. Imperceptibly, the scales were being weighted in their favor.

  It was hard to see, at the time, because the summer and fall looked like a period of unbroken Confederate successes. There had been Bull Run, overshadowing everything, and there had been Wilson’s Creek, with the unforgettable Lyon killed and his army driven into a long retreat. Before September was over there was another sharp Confederate victory in Missouri, bringing further discouragement to Unionists and giving General Frémont a new portion of woe.

  Shortly before Lyon met his fate, a Union force had been thrust far up into the northwestern corner of the state to occupy Lexington, an attractive little town on high ground bordering the Missouri River, once a noted outfitting depot for trading expeditions to the Rockies. This force was commanded by Colonel James A. Mulligan of the 23rd Illinois—a regiment composed largely of Irish from Chicago, known at the time as “the Irish brigade”—and included Mulligan’s own regiment, additional Illinois infantry, a regiment of cavalry, detachments of the Missouri militia and a little light artillery; probably 3000 or 3500 men, altogether. Mulligan was to hold the line of the upper Missouri, and also prevent the state’s secessionist government-in-exile from seizing specie held by banks in that area. He seized the specie himself so that he could protect it adequately, fortified a little hill on the edge of Lexington and awaited developments, which came promptly in the shape of General Sterling Price and a substantial army of Missouri state guards fresh from their triumph at Wilson’s Creek. Kept from destroying Lyon’s beaten army by Confederate McCulloch’s refusal to campaign any longer in Missouri, Price had come up to pinch off this isolated Union outpost. He had 18,000 men and unless Federal reinforcements came up fast he could do exactly as he proposed to do.

  The nearest Union base was at Jefferson City, more than one hundred miles away, commanded by a colonel with the unlikely name of Jefferson Davis. Learning about Price’s advance, Frémont, in St. Louis, tried to get a relief column in motion, but Davis lacked transportation equipment, the Rebels had obstructed the river, and Price had all the time he needed. As he approached Lexington some of Mulligan’s officers proposed a speedy retreat, but Mulligan was scornful. “Begad, we’ll fight ’em!” he cried. “That’s what we enlisted for, and that’s what we’ll do.” Price hemmed Mulligan’s camp in closely, cutting off its water supply and ingeniously devising a set of movable breastworks out of water-soaked bales of hemp. After two days of fighting, Mulligan was compelled to surrender, on September 20. He had suffered about one hundred casualties, he and all of his men were prisoners of war, and the Missourians had recovered $900,000 in cash.15 They also, to all appearances, had won full control of all of the western part of the state.

  Coming as it did on the heels of Wilson’s Creek this looked to Union men like a setback of shocking dimensions. General Scott curtly notified Frémont that the President “expects you to repair the disaster at Lexington without loss of time,” and Frank Blair (whom Frémont had put under arrest for insubordination) fumed that Frémont had an ample force but that “he simply lacked the capacity of wielding it.”16 But Price could not stay in Lexington and his “control” over western Missouri dissolved before the month was out. He marched south, and by late October he had got all the way to Neosho, in the extreme southwest corner of the state—farther from the center of things, actually, than he had been before the battle of Wilson’s Creek. He had made a dazzling raid, dishea
rtening Northern patriots, depriving the Union army of several good regiments and driving one more nail in General Frémont’s coffin, but that was all.

  Price led no more than 7000 men to Neosho. He had furloughed a number of people so that they could go home and provide for their families—after all, nobody in particular was supporting his army—and a good part of the force which he commanded at Lexington appears to have been local talent, minuteman types who would turn out for a fight in their own neighborhood but could not be counted as part of a permanent field army. At Neosho, Price touched base with his government. Claiborne Jackson was there, convening a fragment of the state’s legislature—the minority that favored the Southern cause—in extraordinary session; and on October 31 this legislative fragment passed an ordinance of Secession, carefully complying with all of the forms and electing Senators and Representatives to the Confederate Congress. To the extent that they could speak for Missouri, Missouri at last was in the Confederacy.17

  It was no more than a gesture, because these men could not now speak for Missiouri. Victorious in two battles, the Confederates had nevertheless lost the state. Seeming to win, they had been defeated; even while the vote was being taken, Frémont—on the move at last!—was bringing an army of 40,000 men down to the very town of Springfield which the Federals had had to evacuate six weeks earlier. Governor and legislators decamped, their flight the visible symbol of the shape affairs had taken.

  There were other symbols—guerrilla warfare at its ugliest flaming up and down the western border, and a black and desolate path that marked Frémont’s line of march. A correspondent for the New York Times who was with Frémont’s army felt that “the country through which we pass seems weighed down by something like a nightmare,” with all the landscape wearing “that same mark of desolation which is upon everything in this state.” The people seemed not so much hostile as apathetic. Many houses were deserted, and a strange silence seemed to prevail; even the ring of the village blacksmith’s anvil was stilled, largely (the correspondent felt) because the soldiers had stolen all of the blacksmith’s tools.18 To the west, the whirlwind had cut a sharper swath. Here were the “Jayhawkers”—Federal troops from Kansas, composed largely of frontiersmen who had learned to hate slaveholding Missourians beyond all reason during the wild times of the fifties, when newspapers a thousand miles away had printed columns about Bleeding Kansas, the Border Ruffians, and the fearful doings of Osawatomie John Brown. The Jayhawkers had been making war out on the fringes of the country Price had marched through, descending on town after town to ferret out Confederate sympathizers and confiscate their goods and chattels. They were followed, as often as not, by non-military Kansans with wagons who would glean where the soldiers had reaped, returning with wagons full of plunder. Price’s irregulars behaved in the same way whenever they had the chance, and there were enough beatings, burnings, robberies, and shootings along the Kansas-Missouri border to satisfy the most vengeful.

  Chief of the Jayhawkers—as far as any one man was chief—was a singular character named James H. Lane: a tall, lean, red-haired demagogue whom the good people of Kansas had chosen to represent them in the United States Senate and to whom Abraham Lincoln had given a brigadier general’s commission and authority to recruit Kansas regiments for the Union. Lane was out from under anyone’s effective control, although he did share Frémont’s views about the need to emancipate secessionists’ slaves. “Confiscation of slaves and other property which can be made useful to the Army should follow treason as the thunder peal follows the lightning flash,” he asserted, and wherever his troops went confiscation took place—not merely of slaves, but of anything valuable which could be carried off. Lane was said to have told his men that “everything disloyal from a Shanghai rooster to a Durham cow must be cleaned out,” and his men did their best to obey orders. Swooping down on the town of Osceola, where Price had left a quantity of supplies under guard, Lane shot up the town, carried off or destroyed everything it contained, and then set fire to the houses, ignoring the fact that much of the property thus laid waste was owned by Loyalists. A newspaperman who saw Lane in action said that he looked like “some Joe Bagstock Nero fiddling and laughing over the burning of some Missourian Rome.”19

  There was not very much to laugh at. A band of Jayhawkers would descend on a farm home, carrying off Negroes, horses, and wagons, returning a few days later to sweep up all the cows and sheep the farmer had, coming back still later to carry away the bed-clothing from the house. Farmers thus molested formed armed bands to protect themselves, laying ambushes in the dark by country roads and touching off fights that never got recorded because they had not the least military significance but which nevertheless took their steady toll of deaths. A woman living near Westport, who had seen her once-prosperous home completely despoiled, wrote despairingly: “Our property is all taken from us and I am left without a home with four little children to take care of … what will become of us God only knows … Times here are very hard; robbing, murdering, burning and every other kind of meanness on every side.”20 Without any question the Jayhawkers made Confederates out of many who had not been Confederates originally. The Jayhawkers’ motives were mixed but their minds were simple. They were moved by patriotism, by old grudges and by a desire for loot, and when they made war they followed an uncomplicated rule: the man who owned slaves was no doubt a Rebel, and so he was an enemy, and it did not matter what happened to him. Like Ambrose Bierce’s Indianians, the Kansans considered the Rebel “a fiend accursed of God and angels,” and they behaved accordingly.

  6: The Road to East Tennessee

  It worked both ways, depending on geography. In western Missouri the country folk were harried by Jayhawkers, and the smoke of their torment went up to the impassive heavens; and far away in eastern Tennessee other country folk were getting the same treatment from Confederate troops, whose methods were equally rough except that they ran off with no slaves. East Tennessee was highland country, and like the people of the Virginia highlands the Tennessee mountaineers were Unionists. Slavery had never taken root in the mountains, and the people cared little for states’ rights, and when the state went out of the Union they lost no time declaring themselves.

  In mid-June there was a Union convention at Greeneville, home town of Senator Andrew Johnson—an exceedingly hardheaded man who was proud of his plebeian origins, hated the cotton aristocracy, and considered himself still a member of the United States Senate no matter what his state had done—and this convention adopted a bristling declaration of grievances. The “disunion government,” this declaration said, had obstructed the right of free suffrage, fired on flags, and sent in “a merciless soldiery” which insulted people, broke into their homes, shot down women and children and arrested large numbers of people. This soldiery was accused of foraging its horses in cornfields, of stealing hay and provisions, and—according to a contemporary Northern account—of “offering the people, male and female, every indignity that ruffian bands are capable of.” Because of all of this the convention named a committee to petition the state legislature to let east Tennessee have a separate government of its own.1

  Such a step the state legislature did not dream of taking, and when the voters of Tennessee ratified the ordinance of secession the people in east Tennessee grew slightly more quiet, with Andrew Johnson taking off for Washington to argue his people’s cause at the White House. But the lull was only temporary. A Knoxville secessionist warned Governor Harris that he must act at once “to repress a most fearful rebellion,” and the Confederate authorities began arresting Unionists, their most noteworthy prisoner being a fiery itinerant preacher named William Gannaway Brownlow who had become editor of the Knoxville Whig, denouncing secession in every issue and keeping a United States flag flying over his own house. His paper was suppressed, its type and presses destroyed, and Brownlow was lodged in jail. General Polk wrote to President Davis from Nashville saying that east Tennessee was held by 2000 Southern troops but that
it needed a good 10,000, and a Mississippian told Mr. Davis that agents of the Lincoln government had been dismayingly active, preaching sedition and arousing hatred to such an extent that “the people only await the occasion to rise in revolt against the Confederate government.”2

  New regiments were sent in, from Nashville and from Richmond, and Brigadier General Felix Kirk Zollicoffer was put in general command of the troubled area. Zollicoffer was one of Tennessee’s leading citizens; a newspaperman and a politician, who had served in Congress and had edited the influential Nashville Banner, and who had had some military experience during the Seminole War. He was quiet, frail and unassuming, just turning fifty, a former Whig who had voted for the mildly Unionist Bell-Everett ticket in 1860 and had turned down command of the state’s troops in the spring, taking a commission from the Richmond government a bit later. He hurried to the mountain country, found that until the reinforcements arrived he would have only thirty-three companies of infantry and six companies of cavalry, most of them untrained, to cover a large tract of wild country and overawe a most intractable populace. Understandably, General Zollicoffer felt that the assignment was a hard one.3

  Washington would have been delighted to do for east Tennessee precisely what it was doing for western Virginia; the trouble was that east Tennessee was very hard to get at. It was shielded, to begin with, by Kentucky, which throughout the summer was a neutral no man’s land not to be crossed by Federal troops. It was shielded even more by its own peculiar geography—by the great mass of mountains which lay over it like a turtle’s shell, sealing it off from the North, complicating the long miles of bad roads with an almost impenetrable tangle of peaks, valleys, and forests. As a practical matter, people usually got into this part of Tennessee from due east or due west, or they stayed out. Unless some extraordinary effort could be made, Lincoln’s soldiers would have to stay out.