Terrible Swift Sword

by Bruce Catton

  All of the possibilities were visible to everyone, and no one was more impressed by the extent of them than Jefferson Davis.

  Mr. Davis was coldly furious over the fact that Halleck had been permitted to take Corinth without a battle, and he promptly sent a military aide to Tupelo with a set of icy questions to which Beauregard was ordered to reply in writing. Why had the army retreated from Corinth? What plans were there for recovering the lost territory? Why had the camp at Corinth been so sickly, why was not a stronger defensive line chosen, could not Halleck’s communications have been cut, what if anything had been done to hold the Mississippi and Memphis—and, in general, how about the whole sorry business anyway?

  Beauregard replied in writing, answering the questions with dignified formality, pointing out that the retreat had been approved by all of his chief subordinates. As to future plans, they would depend largely on what the enemy did. If Halleck divided his forces, Beauregard would move against one of the separated contingents; if Halleck tried to keep his army together, every effort would be made—by demonstrations along his flanks, and by the spreading of false reports in the newspapers—to induce him to split it up. Also (Beauregard told the aide) if the President thought the retreat a mistake Beauregard would ask for a court of inquiry; he himself considered the movement the equivalent of a brilliant victory.8

  Whatever his army did next, Beauregard would not be directing its movements. His health had been bad all spring, and once his troops were established at Tupelo—the camp site was much better than the one at Corinth, the water was good, and the list of invalids immediately grew shorter—he took sick leave, on advice of his doctors, going to the noted watering place of Bladon Springs, Alabama, to recover his health. Mr. Davis considered that the general had deserted his post without getting War Department permission and he at once removed Beauregard from command, putting Braxton Bragg in his place. From Bladon Springs, Beauregard wrote to his trusted aide, Brigadier General Thomas Jordan, expressing himself about Mr. Davis in terms which sounded much like McClellan’s more impassioned remarks about the Federal administration. “If the country be satisfied,” wrote General Beauregard, “to have me laid on the shelf by a man who is either demented or a traitor to his high trust—well, let it be so. I require rest & will endeavor meanwhile by study and reflection to fit myself better for the dark hours of our trial, which, I foresee, are yet to come. As to my reputation, if it can suffer by anything that living specimen of gall & hatred can do—why it is not then worth preserving … My consolation is, that the difference between ‘that Individual’ and myself is—that if he were to die today, the whole country would rejoice at it—whereas, I believe, if the same thing were to happen to me, they would regret it.”9

  The situation in Mississippi was oddly like that in Virginia. Two Federal armies had made slow, methodical, and apparently irresistible advances, and each had reached a position from which a decisive victory might be won. Halleck had his army well in hand and was meditating an advance on Chattanooga; McClellan’s army was more extended, the unpredictable Chickahominy flowing between its separated wings, the weaker wing lying nearer the enemy; but the river was being bridged, he had disposed of the threat to his right flank and rear, he would soon be able to wheel up his heavy guns, and he was preparing for what he himself had spoken of as “the last struggle.”

  It might be the last struggle in sober truth. At the end of May 1862, it was still possible (and for the last time) to believe that the war might be won, might be lost, might at least be ended, before it became all-consuming. Senator Sumner, in Washington, was musing darkly that “except at New Orleans the real strength of the Rebellion has not been touched,”10 but now the Federal government had two immense armies placed where they could touch it directly and with decisive effect. Everything depended on what those armies did. They could end everything in a matter of weeks; could end it (and this would not be true much longer) while it was still possible to imagine the men of the contending sections making a peace that would contain saving compromises and evasions—a peace which could relieve the nation from the necessity of redefining its own meaning in the terrible heat of war. It might yet be that this war was an incident rather than an absolute.

  What these great armies would do depended on many things: on the men at arms who composed them, on the limited mortals who commanded them, on the armies that stood against them, and their men at arms and commanders, on the accidents of wind and weather … and, it may be, on the wheeling stars in their courses, and on forces no man will ever understand.…

  On the night of May 30 a violent rainstorm swept down the valley of the Chickahominy. An impressionable Northern newspaper correspondent wrote that “nature’s artillery rolled and clashed magnificently, as if in stately mockery of the puny efforts of martial men,” and spoke of the “tropical grandeur and sublimity” of the scene. A more matter-of-fact courier on General Johnston’s staff called it simply “the worst night I ever saw.” A Massachusetts officer remarked that the storm caused a flood in “the treacherous Chickahominy, of which it was hard to say at the best of times where its banks were, and of which no man could say today where its banks would be tomorrow.” General Johnston concluded that this storm put McClellan at a grave disadvantage—with the banks flooded, the Army of the Potomac might be unable to use its bridges—and he ordered an attack.11

  McClellan’s position was awkward. He had two-fifths of his army, the corps of Keyes and Heintzelman, south of the river. Keyes held a mile-wide front from the station of Fair Oaks, on the Richmond & York River Railroad, to the crossroads of Seven Pines, southeast of Fair Oaks; Heintzelman had his two divisions several miles to the rear, guarding the flank at White Oak Swamp and the bridge by which the main road from Williamsburg crossed the Chickahominy. All the rest of the army—McClellan himself, and the corps of Porter, Franklin, and Sumner—was north of the river, the whole position was fifteen miles from flank to flank, and on the wet morning of May 31 it was quite likely that some or even all of the bridges would soon be out of service. Keyes and Heintzelman were temporarily isolated, and Johnston could hit them with vastly superior numbers.

  The original plan had been to attack north of the river. President Davis, who was most impatient to have the Yankee Army beaten before it could impose siege warfare on Richmond’s defenders, had urged this several days earlier and Lee had agreed with him; and so, for that matter, had Johnston, feeling that it was important to defeat that part of the Federal Army with which McDowell, whose advance was anticipated, would make contact. Then came the news that McDowell was marching to the Shenandoah Valley and not toward Richmond. Johnston quickly revised his plans. He would attack the soft spot, south of the river, and he would do it while the river was still rising. On the morning of May 31 he put his army in motion.

  Johnston’s battle plan was excellent, but its execution was sadly bungled. Orders were misunderstood, James Longstreet got his division on a road someone else was supposed to use, Huger’s division ran into this roadblock and was crowded completely out of action, a number of Longstreet’s brigades were unable to reach the firing line, and the pulverizing attack which was to have been delivered by overwhelming numbers turned into a straight slugging match in which much of the Confederate advantage was unused. McClellan ordered Sumner to take his corps across the river and get into the fight, and Sumner—a tough, literal-minded old-timer, who had been an Army officer before McClellan was born and who joined a complete lack of imagination to an unshakable belief in the overriding importance of obeying orders—got his men across on a bridge that was beginning to float away, and gave the shaken Federal lines the stiffening they had to have. Much of the fighting took place in a wooded swamp, where fighting men stood in water to their knees, and where details went along the firing lines to prop wounded men against trees or stumps to keep them from drowning. The Confederates gained a good deal of ground on May 31, lost most of it the next morning, and finally accepted a drawn battle which
left things just about as they had been before the fighting started.12 If things had gone well, they might have destroyed a large part of McClellan’s army. Nothing went well. Seven Pines, or Fair Oaks—the battle went by both names—was a victory for no one.

  But it had certain effects. Its casualty list was grimly instructive. Union losses ran to slightly more than 5000 and Confederate losses were about 6000—higher totals, for each side, than had been run up at Bull Run and Williamsburg put together. The war was getting tougher, and the hard fighting qualities of Northern and Southern soldiers had been tragically emphasized. Leadership had been defective—neither commander had really put his hand on the battle to exert firm control—but the men in the ranks had met the test magnificently. There had been little of the runaway panic that had marked Bull Run. For the two armies together, the “captured or missing” total, always high when shaky troops are in action, came to hardly more than 1000.13

  In addition, this drawn battle served as a definite check on McClellan. He had apparently been nearly ready to begin his final offensive when this battle took place; more than three weeks passed, after it, before he considered himself ready to resume the advance. He did, to be sure, bring Franklin and Sumner south of the river, leaving only Porter’s corps to guard his flank and his supply line, but the whole attitude of his army was defensive. There was no more talk about “closing in on the enemy preparatory to the last struggle.” The battle was a stalemate and it was followed by a more extended stalemate.

  Finally, there was one development of high importance in the story of the Civil War. On the evening of May 31 General Joseph E. Johnston was severely wounded. On the following day, Mr. Davis put Robert E. Lee in command of the Army.

  4: Railroad to the Pamunkey

  The Southern Confederacy had no gift for statecraft, and the ins and outs of domestic politics were always a snare for its feet, but it had a definite talent for making war which might in the end make up for all other deficiencies. This talent was manifest in various places—in the amazing pugnacity and endurance of the ordinary citizen, for one—but it was most strikingly and powerfully embodied in the person of General Lee.

  When Lee took command of the army in front of Richmond—significantly, he immediately began calling it the Army of Northern Virginia, although its chance of ever seeing northern Virginia again seemed remote—he was the unknown quantity in the story of the Civil War: the incalculable, the factor no one could figure on in advance. This gray man in gray rode his dappled gray horse into legend almost at once, and like all legendary figures he came before long to seem almost supernatural, a man of profound mystery; but his basic approach to the war was quite simple. He seems to have worried not at all about the ultimate meaning of the war: he knew that he was a Southerner and he would fight to the end to bring victory to the South, and that was enough. But he understood the processes of war as few men have ever done. He knew, apparently by instinct, the risks that must be taken and the gains that can be won thereby, the way to impose his will on his opponent, and the fact that sooner or later a general must be willing to move in close for a showdown fight regardless of the cost. Because he was what he was, the war lasted much longer and was fought much harder than seemed likely at the beginning of June in 1862.

  When Lee took command the army was moderately unhappy. It had had a costly fight and it sensed that the fight had been badly directed. The swampy bottom lands were hot and humid and stank fearfully from the debris of battle, there was a good deal of sickness, and some regimental surgeons were easy marks for malingerers who suffered from nothing worse than a desire to take it easy. Rations were ample, but poor; a Louisiana soldier said the bacon was strong and the bread was sour, and for good measure he added that he could not find one soldier whose pants were not worn out in the seat. Still, morale was good enough, in the main—General Longstreet insisted after the war that the chief result of Seven Pines had been to give the men greater confidence in their own fighting capacity—and the men in the ranks cocked a collective eye at the new commander and waited to see what he would do with them.1

  What he would do first was put all hands to work digging trenches. The army had a long line to hold—it ran from Chaffin’s Bluff on the James, crossed all of the main roads coming into Richmond from the east, touched the Chickahominy a little above New Bridge, and ran along the south side of that stream to Meadow Bridge—and Lee ordered this line strongly fortified. The soldiers grumbled a bit, considering day laborers’ work with pick and shovel beneath the dignity of fighting men, and Jefferson Davis noted bitterly that “politicians, newspapers and uneducated officers have created such a prejudice in our Army against labor that it will be difficult until taught by sad experience to induce our troops to work efficiently.”2 But the men who complained nevertheless toiled as directed, and before long the field fortifications were impressive.

  Creating these defensive works, Lee was actually getting ready to take the offensive. McClellan was busily fortifying his own lines, making them so strong that the blow which had been struck at Seven Pines could not be struck again. What Lee needed was a line of his own strong enough to be held for a short time by a small force. If he had that he could take the rest of the army out and compel McClellan to fight in the open. Digging trenches, he was freeing his army for maneuver.

  If he could not do this the war would probably be lost before the summer ended.

  Everything McClellan had done so far indicated that he was getting ready for siege operations. Behind lines too strong to be attacked, he could prepare short advances which, in the end, would give him positions for his matchless siege artillery. With those terrible guns properly sited he could flatten the strongest fortifications, and then his infantry could do the rest; and the very fact that he overestimated Lee’s numbers so greatly increased the probability that he would follow this course, because if Lee had as much infantry as McClellan thought he had this was the only course that made any sense at all. His siege train was the great equalizer, and if he were allowed to play the game in his own way it would inevitably win for him—as Joe Johnston had pointed out weeks earlier and as Lee himself quickly realized. Lee was taking the first step toward compelling McClellan to play a different sort of game, in which the equalizer could not be used.

  The second step would involve Stonewall Jackson, who was just now finishing his spectacular valley campaign.

  During the first week in June, Jackson retreated from Strasburg, pursued by Frémont and followed on a parallel course, east of the Massanutten Mountain, by Shields. At the southern end of this mountain, where Frémont and Shields could join forces, Jackson paused to rest his troops briefly at the hamlet of Port Republic, posting Ewell a few miles west at Cross Keys, in Frémont’s path. On June 8 Ewell repulsed a rather spiritless attack by Frémont, and on June 9 Jackson at Port Republic had a much more severe fight with the advance regiments of Shields’s division. If the entire division had been present Jackson might have had more than he could handle, but as it was the Federals were too weak to make serious trouble and Jackson finally drove them off in full retreat. Then he withdrew to a convenient gap in the Blue Ridge, from which point he could either strike the flank of any Federal Army which tried to continue on up the valley, or if his government wished could move to Richmond; and on June 13 he wrote to Lee, outlining the situation and asking what Lee wanted him to do next.

  A little before this, Lee had considered reinforcing Jackson and sending him back to disturb the peace of the lower valley once more, but the time for this had passed. Jackson in his letter had said he did not think he ought to return to Winchester “until we are in a condition under the blessing of Providence to hold the country,” and Lee sent his letter on to Mr. Davis with the significant note: “I think the sooner Jackson can move this way, the better—the first object now is to defeat McClellan. The enemy in the Valley seem at a pause. We may strike them here before they are ready there to move up the Valley—they will naturally be cautious
and we must be secret & quick.” Mr. Davis endorsed this, “View concurred in,” and Lee set about making his arrangements.3

  The preliminaries were already under way. Before he made final plans Lee needed to know where McClellan’s right flank was anchored, how it was guarded, and what sort of protection there was for the all-important Federal supply route, the Richmond & York River Railroad line back to White House on the Pamunkey. He told his cavalry commander, the youthful, flamboyant, and highly gifted Brigadier General James Ewell Brown Stuart, to go and find out. With 1200 troopers Stuart on June 12 rode off on what quickly became one of the most spectacular missions of the war.

  Stuart was storybook romance incarnate. He had a compulsive desire for the limelight and just the right combination of daring and military skill to get it, and along with his theatrical qualities he was a hard worker and an unusually competent cavalry commander. He rode far to the north, crossed the headwaters of the Chickahominy and swung east, went slicing down behind the Federal right flank, crossed the railroad near the great base at White House, and wound up by riding entirely around McClellan’s army, recrossing the Chickahominy far downstream and returning to the Confederate lines on June 15 after days and nights of gaudy adventure. The ride made him famous, and was most embarrassing to McClellan—if a Confederate cavalry brigade could ride all the way around the army without even getting into a serious fight there must be something wrong with the Federal security arrangements—but the important thing was that Stuart gave Lee exactly the information Lee needed.4