by Bruce Catton
The Marines landed to take full possession, followed by Sherman’s troops. Fort Beauregard, whose people had been front-row spectators of the whole affair, was abandoned when Fort Walker fell, and early next morning a landing party took possession. It found everything in good order, tents full of soldiers’ gear and personal effects, a flock of turkeys strutting around in a pen; found that the departing Confederates had booby-trapped a frame building formerly used as headquarters, with a mine which blew up when a sailor tripped over a wire. The sailor was stunned and the house was wrecked, but there was no other damage. Sherman’s troops went ashore, the turkeys were all eaten, and the Navy’s gunboats went ranging far into the sound to see how the victory might be exploited.
Residents of the area had panicked, most of them having fled when the troops fled. One gunboat found three deserted forts, and in his examination of the surrounding countryside the skipper could meet no one but Negro slaves, abandoned by their owners, luxuriating in their unexpected freedom: they were “perfectly demoralized, are doing nothing, and seem to be perfectly convinced that we have come to free them, and are in consequence most friendly.” Another naval officer got up to Beaufort, where the slaves were plundering the houses, loading rowboats and scows with their loot. He found only one white man, who “appeared to be suffering from some strong excitement or the effects of liquor,” assured him that the United States forces would protect life and property, and sent him off to spread the word. Hundreds of Negroes came out to the fleet in boats, hailing the Federals as heaven-sent deliverers, and a refugee camp was set up on the southeast end of Edisto Island, with a gunboat detailed to stand by and keep a watchful eye on things.16 And Du Pont and Sherman took counsel regarding the next step on the program.
As befitted men who have just won a great deal more than they had expected to win, the two commanders were in good spirits. Sherman considered Du Pont’s handling of the fleet “a masterpiece of activity and professional skill” and told the War Department that the performance had been “a masterly one” which could hardly be appreciated by anyone who had not actually seen it. Du Pont a little later wrote that the action had been “like driving a wedge into the flanks of the rebels” and reflected that if the nation had kept up an adequate Navy in the first place and had relied on it instead of on politicians and money it might have nipped the rebellion in the bud.17 Sherman went about establishing a camp on Hilton Head Island, and after a day of meditation he composed and issued a proclamation, in which he reminded the South Carolinians of the grievous error of their ways and invited them to return penitently to the Union.
He began by announcing that he himself had spent much time in South Carolina and that he and the soldiers and the warships “have come amongst you with no feelings of personal animosity; no desire to harm your citizens, destroy your property or interfere with any of your lawful rights or your social and local institutions.” This was all very well, except that the entire countryside within a fifty-mile radius was in a turmoil, social and local institutions had been turned upside down, and animate property was taking its ease in the sun and living off of Old Massa’s riches, precisely because the Federal soldiers and warships had appeared; and anyone who doubted that a general overturn was coming in with the huge black ships and the uneven ranks of blue-coated soldiers did not know what was going on. However, the general continued in the same vein … “I implore you to pause and reflect upon the tenor and the consequences of your acts.… We have come among you as loyal men, fully impressed with our constitutional obligations to the citizens of your state.… The obligation of suppressing armed combinations against the constitutional authorities is paramount to all others. If in the performance of this duty other minor but important obligations should be in any way neglected, it must be attributed to the necessities of the case.”18
No doubt this was excellent, but it meant nothing. The time for soft words had gone. The hammering of the guns was all that mattered now, and General Sherman’s vision failed to detect two things. The first was that where his army and Du Pont’s ships came, the white people ran away and the black people stayed to raise hosannas: the revolutionary upheaval which Secretary Seward saw germinating in this war was taking place wherever the war actually touched bottom. The second thing that went unobserved was that for the moment Sherman and his men could go just about anywhere they wanted to go. Du Pont said it: a wedge had been driven into the Confederate flank, and for the immediate future there was very little the Confederates could do about it. A woman in Savannah saw it more clearly than the Federal general could see it. The day after Sherman issued his proclamation she wrote: “The fleet was hourly expected & the decision with most was to burn their dwellings & let the Yankees have smoking ruins to welcome them.… The panic on Saturday cannot be described, & the cars twice a day are loaded down with women & children bound to the interior.… At the present time the enemy by the land route could walk into our city without let or hindrance.”19
4: “We Are Not Able to Meet It”
As it was to do so many times in the future, the Confederacy at this moment of crisis called on General Robert E. Lee. It did not yet recognize the full stature of the man on whom it would finally load everything, but the emergency was urgent and Lee was at least available. He had been ordered back to Richmond after the failure in the western Virginia mountains, and when Jefferson Davis realized that the Federals meant real harm in South Carolina, Lee was within reach. Mr. Davis created the Department of South Carolina, Georgia and East Florida and put Lee in command, thus making him responsible for the defense of all of the Atlantic coast below North Carolina, and Lee set out for the new task just as Du Pont was preparing to open his unanswerable bombardment.
As Lee himself doubtless realized, this job was much like the one which had meant trouble beyond the Blue Ridge: an assignment in which things had begun to go irretrievably wrong, and where a good man could lose much through little fault of his own. Here at Port Royal the Federals held high cards, and if they played them expertly they were likely to win. Still, they might make mistakes; the initial victory opened so many opportunities that it automatically increased the number of things which might be done wrong, and within a year or two it would be evident that Federal generals who were opposed to Lee usually did make mistakes, at substantial cost to themselves.
Lee made his headquarters at Coosawhatchie, a little station on the Charleston & Savannah Railroad some twenty miles inland from Port Royal. It was the nearest point on the railroad to the scene of action, but the action was over by the time Lee arrived. Forts Walker and Beauregard had been taken, and Lee could do no more than try to save the troops and perfect the defenses of Charleston and Savannah. His first report to the War Department was gloomy: “The enemy having complete possession of the water and inland navigation, commands all the islands on this coast and threatens both Savannah and Charleston, and can come in his boats within four miles of this place.… We have no guns that can resist their batteries, and have no resource but to prepare to meet them in the field.” This would be difficult, because there was nothing much to meet the Federals with: “I fear there are but few state troops ready for the field. The garrisons of the forts at Charleston and Savannah and on the coast cannot be removed from the batteries while ignorant of the designs of the enemy. I am endeavoring to bring into the field such light batteries as can be prepared.” Inhabitants of the coastal area were in a panic, there were few troops at hand, arms for new recruits seemed to be almost non-existent, and many weeks later Lee had to confess: “The strength of the enemy, as far as I am able to judge, exceeds the whole force that we have in the state; it can be thrown with great celerity against any point, and far outnumbers any force we can bring against it in the field.” To his daughter Lee wrote that this assignment was “another forlorn hope expedition—worse than West Virginia.”1
From their new base the Federals could attack Charleston or Savannah or they could cut the vital railroad line anywhere bet
ween the two cities. The country was ideally adapted for amphibious operations, and the Federals had an overwhelming fleet and substantially more land forces than could be brought against them. Clearly, Lee could not hope to hold any point on the interconnected sounds and rivers which could be reached by the Yankee gunboats. His only course was to strengthen the defenses of the two important cities and to draw an interior line, out of the Navy’s range, which might save the railroad.2
As he had written, it was hard to make a good plan without knowing what the enemy meant to do. Fortunately for the Confederacy, the enemy at this moment did not really mean to do much of anything. Having won a much bigger victory than they had expected to win, the Federals were slightly baffled. They had hoped to seize a good harbor as a base for the South Atlantic blockading squadron; they had won a full half-dozen harbors, a protected inland waterway controlling half of the South Carolina coastline, and a spot from which the heart of the South was open to invasion. Port Royal was not so much a conquest as a point of departure, but Sherman expressed the full truth about the situation when he frankly confessed that “we had no idea, in preparing the expedition, of such immense success.”3 He had the opportunity and the means, but he had no instructions, beyond a rather generalized order that he and the Navy ought to move farther south if they could do so conveniently and occupy the harbor at Fernandina, Florida.
He was quite aware that something more ought to be done, and he seems to have suspected that it ought to be done rather quickly, but there were a great many details to be attended to. The army of occupation had to lay out and fortify its camp, the islets and coastal settlements must be overrun, provision had to be made for the masterless slaves who seemed to be sole occupants of most of the countryside—and, all in all, Sherman was very busy. Young James Harrison Wilson, a restless lieutenant of topographical engineers on Sherman’s staff, fumed that “the army did practically nothing but sit down and hold the sea islands which the navy had captured for it”:4 a complaint which, besides being tinged with the perfectionism of youth, was written much later in the clear light of after knowledge. Sherman began to come in for bitter criticism in the North, although the men in Washington who wanted direct action so much never touched him with their spurs. In the end he devoted himself to planning a movement which would be executed during the spring, although by that time another general would be in charge: the bombardment and capture of Fort Pulaski, at the mouth of the Savannah River.
Sherman can be blamed too much. It was only the Confederates who realized (as they could hardly help doing) that if the Yankees followed up their advantage with energy it would be extremely hard to stop them. Two months after Du Pont’s ships had overwhelmed the forts, Lee wrote that all along he had been expecting Sherman to send one column inland to cut the railroad while he used the fleet and the rest of his troops to isolate and capture either Charleston or Savannah: in Lee’s opinion “this would be a difficult combination for us successfully to resist.” As a matter of fact the entire Confederate coastline was vulnerable, both on the Atlantic and in the Gulf, and General Braxton Bragg, who commanded coastal defenses beyond the Florida peninsula, saw the danger. If the Federals struck hard at Mobile, he said, he did not see how the place could be defended, and he added significantly: “Our strength consists in the enemy’s weakness.”5 Weakness of intent, that is; the Federals had all the power they needed if they used it vigorously.
In the Confederate capital the hypercritical Richmond Examiner believed that the Federals would fritter away their big chance. The editor did not think much of professional soldiers anyway, and he wrote petulantly: “There cannot be much bloody work where a LEE is opposed by a SHERMAN; and a SHERMAN confronted by a LEE. These generals are true scions of West Point, and both will take time before they go into action. When West Point meets West Point, spade meets spade, then comes not the tug of war.… West Point Sherman does not mean to fight until he gets perfectly ready.” Because of this, the Examiner believed the blow at Port Royal might be a blessing in disguise: “It is much to be desired that something should occur in this latitude to rouse the people to energy and tear the speculating mandrakes bleeding from their spoils.… The effect of these grand demonstrations of the Yankees at various points will be admirable upon the Southern people, government, army and generals. All had grown over-confident and had consequently relapsed into listlessness and inactivity. The enemy are curing all of this for us.”6
No eloquence matches that of an editor who finds that his readers, despite his best efforts, have grown hopeful; at which time bad news becomes a welcome stimulant, and editorial vision grows keen enough to find a silver lining in almost any disaster. And now, suddenly, the silver lining became real enough for any Southern eye to see, and there were a few weeks of wild surmise in which it was possible once more to credit the hoariest of the myths that had preceded secession—the theory that the outside world just would not let the Yankees win the war.
This came because U.S.S. San Jacinto, one of the Federal Navy’s serviceable steam sloops of war, slipped in past the Virginia Capes on November 15 and anchored in Hampton Roads, bearing an exultant skipper, two important prisoners and an incalculable load of trouble.
The skipper was Captain Charles Wilkes, one of the best-known men in the Navy and one of the most self-willed. Opinionated and contentious, Wilkes was a lean man in his early sixties who had won fame for explorations along the Antarctic coast twenty years earlier, mapping 1600 miles of bleak shoreline and leaving Wilkes Land as an enduring name on the charts. (Characteristically, the feat that made him famous brought him also a court-martial and a public reprimand for inflicting illegal punishments on the enlisted men who served under him.) Wilkes was to have commanded U.S.S. Merrimack this summer, but that ship had been scuttled when the Navy Yard at Norfolk was lost, and he had been given San Jacinto instead and had gone down to cruise off Cuba.7 Returning now from this cruise, he was in high spirits. He had given the tail of the British lion a vigorous twist (he did not like the British, although their Royal Geographical Society had once given him a medal) and he had also, as he believed, done much harm to the Southern Confederacy.
His prisoners were much more famous than their captor; were, indeed, two of the most prominent leaders of the South, men who, like himself, had reached their sixties trailing records of achievement—James Mason of Virginia and John Slidell of Louisiana. These elderly veterans of Democratic politics had slipped out of the country in October to go abroad as Jefferson Davis’s commissioners to the governments of England and France, traveling with a dignity derived both from their own eminent positions and from the letters of instruction given them by Secretary of State R. M. T. Hunter. They were to make clear, said Hunter, that the Confederate states “are not to be viewed as revolted provinces or rebellious subjects seeking to overthrow the lawful authority of a common sovereign.” The South was making no revolution; on the contrary it was simply trying to get away from a revolution which aggressive Northern sectionalists had tried to make “in the spirit and ends of the organic law of their first union.” Withdrawing from that first union, the South had set up a government “competent to discharge all of its civil functions and entirely responsible both in war and peace for its action.”8 In simple justice, full recognition ought to follow.
Reaching Havana on a blockade-runner, Mason and Slidell on November 7 had taken passage on the British mail steamer Trent, a regular liner plying between the West Indies and the United Kingdom. Wilkes, whose ship was in Havana at the time, heard about it, sailed on ahead to lie in wait at a suitable spot in the Bahama Channel, and on November 8 boldly extracted the two men from the Trent, compelling that vessel to heave to by firing a shot across its bows, and compounding the indignity thus offered to the British flag by sending armed men aboard to make the arrests. For the first time the Federal power had laid its hands on two leading secessionists, and Wilkes felt that this was a substantial achievement. What he did not see was that it might also c
ause Great Britain to declare war.
Wilkes came into Hampton Roads to get coal, to tell his government what he had done, and to learn what he should do with his prisoners. He was ordered to go on to Boston and turn the men over to Army authorities at Fort Warren, which he promptly did, reaching Boston on November 24 to find that he was a national hero. Secretary Welles wrote a letter of commendation, pointing out that Mason and Slidell had been most “conspicuous in the conspiracy to dissolve the Union” and assuring Wilkes that his action “has the emphatic approval of this department.” The city of Boston gave him a great banquet, bombarding him with oratory. The House of Representatives a little later passed a vote of thanks, editorial writers exulted, and all in all the people of the North showed much more enthusiasm for Wilkes’s capture of two men than it had shown for Du Pont’s capture of two forts.9
In the South the news brought expectant optimism. At first nothing was clear except that this Yankee skipper had committed an outrage which the British were likely to resent, and Mary Boykin Chestnut, the South Carolina diarist, felt that “something good is obliged to come from such a stupid blunder,”10 but as the weeks passed it appeared that this “something good” might be fabulous indeed—might even take the form of a British fleet scouring the Southern coast clear of blockaders and invaders and presenting the Confederacy with immediate and permanent independence. The disaster at Port Royal began to look insignificant. Southern valor and British sea power could make an unbeatable combination.
