by Bruce Catton
That question haunted him, as it haunted others. Was America ready for unlimited freedom? What would it do with the Negro? It had begun by making a slave of him, and whenever he managed to stop being a slave and tried to make his way as a free man in a free society it resented him, with the deep, illogical resentment we reserve for those whom we have wronged. Suppose the whole race suddenly came out of slavery: Was there a place for it in America?
There were discouraging signs. Wholly typical was a newspaper item which was printed within a fortnight of Mr. Lincoln’s talk with the cabinet about emancipation. Irish dock workers in Cincinnati had rioted all along the waterfront, stoning and beating free Negroes who had been hired (at wages much lower than the wages the Irish had been getting) to unload steamboats, driving them through the city, clearing the wharves of them; it was done in broad daylight, and the police stood by and offered no interference.10 The free Negro would come in on the very lowest level of the economic pyramid, and the people who occupied that level were uncomfortable enough already and did not want to be crowded; nor were the people on higher levels willing to concern themselves much with the implications of the turmoil beneath them. The majority in the North might dislike slavery, but it was by no means prepared for the seismic shock that would run through all society when millions of slaves tried to lay their hands on the benefits of freedom.
Perhaps there was a way out. If the freed slaves could be taken entirely out of the country and transplanted in some faraway land, America might avoid the distressing problems raised by universal freedom. The idea of colonization had been in Mr. Lincoln’s mind for a long time, and in the middle of August he discussed it frankly with a committee of free Negroes at the White House. The discussion was moody, clouded, unhappy. The Negro race, said the President, suffered under the greatest wrong ever inflicted on any people, yet nowhere in America could Negroes hope for the equality which free men normally want; “go where you are treated the best, and the ban is still upon you.” As President he could not alter this; he could only reflect that “there is an unwillingness on the part of our people, harsh as it may be, for you free colored people to remain with us.” Without slavery and the colored race America would not be fighting this war, and “it is better for us both, therefore, to be separated.”
So he urged the Negroes to embrace colonization. He was thinking about Central America. There was a country there (he did not name it) which ran from Atlantic to Pacific, with good harbors on both coasts, a fertile land endowed with deposits of coal, a place where political conditions were indeed rather unstable but a land without prejudice, eager for colonists—“to your colored race they have no objections.” If a fair handful of free Negroes would make a start there, with their families, the United States government would give its support and protection: “If I could find twenty-five able-bodied men, with a mixture of women and children, good things in the family relation, I think I could make a successful commencement.” Would these free Negroes put their minds on it for a while? The Negroes gravely assured him that they would think about the matter and let him know, and then they went away … and of course nothing at all ever came of it.11
Nothing could come of it. The freedom that was to be given, with such risks and at such cost, was to be given in America, and its effects would have to be faced there and not in some far-off colony. Also, a strange thing had taken place during the years of slavery, which hardly anybody had thought about. The people who were about to be freed were slaves and they were Negroes; but also, quite unexpectedly, they had become Americans, and Americans they would always be—then, thenceforward and forever. Having taken them, used them and shaped them, the country could discharge its responsibility only by taking on a new one of immeasurable dimensions. To define freedom anew for the Negro was to redefine it for everybody, and the act which enlarged the horizon of those in bondage must in the end push America’s own horizon all the way out to infinity.
3: A Long and Strong Flood
When President Lincoln gave command of the nation’s armies to General Halleck he supposed that he was rewarding diligence and promoting a soldier who had the secret of victory. It was quite a while before he realized that Halleck, although diligent, shared with General McClellan a singular genius for making war in low gear. Halleck understood everything except the need to be in a hurry. He carried moderation to excess, and he was aggressive only in theory. He could crowd a weaker opponent into a corner, but instead of exterminating him there he would give him a chance to get out; and in July of 1862, when he was called to Washington and placed in supreme command, he fully shared with General McClellan responsibility for the fact that the war’s tide had turned and that the Confederacy’s prospects were brighter than they had been for many months.
It was not easy to see this, because Halleck had been in command in the west and in the west the Federals had been winning decisively. The trouble was that what was won did not stay won. Victories were not spiked down and made permanent. The beaten foe always got a chance to get up and renew the fight. Since the foe had infinite determination, this chance was always accepted.
Federal armies had occupied New Orleans and Memphis, driven the foe from Missouri and western Tennessee, seized northern Alabama and Mississippi, occupied Cumberland Gap, paralyzed the Confederacy’s vital western railway network and (working with the powerful Federal fleets) had opened all but a tiny fragment of the great Mississippi waterway. By the middle of July they had thus gained an advantage that the Confederacy could not possibly overcome without plenty of time to repair damages, harness unused resources and fight according to its own plan rather than to the plan of the invader. General Halleck let it have this time, just as General McClellan had done. If the consequences were less spectacular they were equally expensive.
After he took Corinth, General Halleck did exactly what beaten Beauregard hoped he would do. Instead of moving boldly on with a force too large for his opponents to meet he divided his army into halves, separated the two halves, and presently lost the initiative without even knowing he had lost it.1
Restored to his old command, Grant became head of an army of occupation, protecting the ground that had been gained but unable to do more than that. His troops were spraddled out from Memphis eastward to the Tennessee River, holding a belt of northern Mississippi, repairing and garrisoning the railway line that went all the way north to Columbus in Kentucky. He had plenty of men to do all of this, but he did not believe that he had enough to do this and in addition mount a real offensive; furthermore, what he did would be conditioned to a large extent by the doings of the other half of the victorious army, the half commanded by General Don Carlos Buell.
While Grant held western Tennessee, Buell was instructed to go out and take eastern Tennessee. He would move almost directly eastward from Corinth, crossing the Tennessee River at Decatur and following that river and the Memphis & Charleston Railroad to Chattanooga; the project had such high priority that when Mr. Lincoln and Secretary Stanton called on Halleck for 25,000 men to reinforce McClellan after the Seven Days defeat they told him to send no one at all if to do so would delay or imperil Buell’s move. Naturally enough, Halleck sent no one, but the all-important campaign west went slowly—apparently because both generals seemed to worry more about what Buell was moving away from than about his destination. His base of supplies lay at Louisville, far to the north, and when he began to move he had to repair and protect the Memphis & Charleston road so that these supplies (coming down from Louisville most roundabout) could reach him; difficult, because the road ran parallel to the Confederate front and could be broken easily. At Decatur, Alabama, he reached a north-south line from Nashville, and eighty miles farther east, at Stevenson, a second line from Nashville came down, and these routes seemed infinitely preferable, once he got to them; but during July, while his army inched its way toward Chattanooga, Buell learned something about the kind of cavalrymen the Confederacy had in its service and the lesson was so instructive
that he never did get to Chattanooga.
The first teacher was a soldier who, like the Jeb Stuart who plagued McClellan, combined jaunty flamboyance with solid competence: a big Kentuckian named John Hunt Morgan, who left Knoxville early in July with nine hundred troopers and rode northwest into Kentucky. Here, for more than three weeks, he went rampaging about, destroying Federal supply dumps, dodging or beating the Federal cavalry detachments that came out to stop him, wrecking railroad lines, beating up the environs of Lexington and Frankfort and raising such a disturbance that the President notified Halleck: “They are having a stampede in Kentucky. Please look to it.” Halleck in turn told Buell to suppress Morgan even if it delayed the advance on Chattanooga.2 It was quite beyond Buell’s power to suppress Morgan, but the Chattanooga expedition was unquestionably delayed.
Even worse was a simultaneous raid mounted by Nathan Bedford Forrest, the untaught soldier who made war with driving fury, and who had just been appointed a brigadier general. Forrest took a thousand men out of Chattanooga on July 9 and rode into middle Tennessee, picking up reinforcements along the way, capturing a whole brigade of Buell’s troops, a live brigadier general and half a million dollars worth of supplies at Murfreesboro. He got away clean, destroyed three important railroad bridges near Nashville, and came so close to Nashville that the Federals there thought he was actually going to capture the place. He no sooner went away than Morgan came back, riding across Tennessee not far north of Nashville and making a serious break in the Louisville & Nashville line near the town of Gallatin; when Federal cavalry came out to fight him, Morgan beat and dispersed it and captured the commanding general. Federal reports on all of this bristle with complaints about disgraceful conduct on the part of Yankee cavalrymen, but the complaints do no more than prove that Morgan and Forrest knew how to find and hit the weak spots. They also knew how to show Buell that the north-south railroads in Tennessee were little safer that the east-west line in northern Alabama.3
But the real trouble was not with the supply lines. Buell’s march was leisurely from beginning to end—one officer in Buell’s army said it was “like holiday soldiering,” with the average day’s march beginning at dawn and ending long before noon—and the notion that it might be well to beat the Confederates to Chattanooga bothered hardly anybody. Buell left Corinth on June 10, came within striking distance of Chattanooga before July ended, and never struck; in effect his army went aground along the Alabama-Tennessee border and remained aground until late in August, stirring into active movement only when the Confederates at last assumed the offensive. Buell was an extremely deliberate soldier and Halleck could not hurry him. One of Halleck’s defects was that he did not know how to spur a subordinate on: he could only nag at him, filling the record with warnings but never actually infusing a sense of urgency into anyone. A Lee or a Grant in Halleck’s position that summer would have had faster movement on the Chattanooga expedition or a new commander; Halleck could only call for speed without getting it.4
So Chattanooga, which might have been taken, was not taken. The same was true of Vicksburg.
In the month of June 1862, Vicksburg was just waiting for someone to come and capture it. Hasty fortifications had been built, eighteen guns had been mounted, and 3600 infantry had been assembled, but the great fortress that was to block the Federal advance for a year had hardly begun to take shape. Just below the city was Admiral Farragut, with Hartford and ten other deep-water cruisers and Porter’s mortar flotilla; just above was Flag Officer Davis, who had four armored river gunboats and some more mortars. With all of this naval power on hand, two divisions from Halleck’s army could have taken the place with ease; and the three miles along the Vicksburg waterfront were at that time the only piece of the entire Mississippi River which the Confederacy really controlled.
But Halleck was still digesting Corinth. The Navy Department, in turn, inspired by what Farragut had done at New Orleans, believed that the old admiral and his squadron had unlimited capabilities, and without waiting for Halleck it told Farragut to go ahead and smash the Vicksburg batteries the way he had smashed Forts Jackson and St. Philip. Ben Butler had sent three thousand soldiers up the river with Farragut, under Brigadier General Thomas Williams; once Farragut had pulverized the defenses, these could go ashore and occupy the town just as Butler had occupied New Orleans.
Admiral Farragut was game but skeptical. His ships badly needed repair, it was hard to get coal, the river was falling and deep-draft ships might run aground, his crews were sickly, and anyway he had not actually smashed these lower-river forts; he had pounded them and passed by, and they had surrendered because once New Orleans was occupied they were hopelessly cut off. At Vicksburg the case was very different, because Vicksburg could not be cut off by water. It could never just be occupied; it would have to be fought for, and most of the fighting would have to be done by soldiers on dry land.
Farragut tried. On June 28, after Porter’s mortars had bombarded the Confederate works without great effect, he took his burly ships up the river. There was a spectacular two-hour running fight, in which three of the Federal ships were turned back. The rest got through, with moderate losses to personnel, the Confederate batteries had suffered little damage—and Farragut, as he had anticipated, found that he had indeed got the bulk of his fleet past Vicksburg but that nothing noteworthy had been accomplished. Williams’s brigade was altogether too weak to take Vicksburg by storm; lacking anything better to do, it went ashore on the Louisiana side of the river and began trying to dig a canal across the base of the long, narrow point of land opposite Vicksburg, in the hope that the Mississippi would cut a new channel there and leave Vicksburg high and dry. (It was a vain hope. The soldiers dug a huge ditch but it had been planned badly and the river refused to do its part. The scheme fascinated Federal planners for months to come, and hundreds of thousands of man-hours of hard work were expended in the steaming heat, but was all a wasted effort.) Farragut’s fleet above the city was no better off that it had been below.5
Meanwhile, Vicksburg ceased to be an easy mark. Before June ended there were 10,000 Southern soldiers in the place, with energetic Earl Van Dorn to command them, and day by day the defenses grew stronger; and presently it was the Federals rather than the Confederates who were in difficulty. Visible sign of this change was a remarkable exploit by a remarkable warship, C.S.S. Arkansas, which came out on July 15 to the intense embarrassment of the United States Navy, and which eventually gave Admiral Farragut an excuse to go all the way back to salt water.
Like all of Secretary Mallory’s ironclads, Arkansas faintly resembled Merrimack-Virginia. Her 180-foot hull was low in the water, with a central citadel for guns and machinery protected by an armor belt three inches thick, ingeniously but precariously made out of railroad rails bolted to stout wooden bulwarks. She had an iron beak for ramming, ten powerful guns, twin screws, and rickety machinery that was quite likely to break down just when a breakdown would be most damaging; with all her defects she was a most formidable antagonist, and that she existed at all was largely due to her commanding officer, Lieutenant Isaac N. Brown, who would have been an asset to anybody’s navy.
During the winter and spring Arkansas had been under construction at Memphis, and after the fall of Island Number Ten, the unfinished craft was towed down the Mississippi and up the Yazoo, which enters the big river just above Vicksburg, and moored at the town of Greenwood, two hundred miles upstream. On May 28, Lieutenant Brown was ordered to go to Greenwood, finish the warship, arm and man her, and then take her out and fight the Yankees. He found that he had an empty hull, with disassembled machinery, no carriages for the guns, and most of the railroad iron lying at the bottom of the river in a sunken scow. Since the Yazoo was in a state of flood, the place where the Arkansas was moored was four miles from dry land, and Greenwood lacked machine shops and other manufacturing facilities. Somehow he got the hulk towed 150 miles downstream to Yazoo City, where there was high ground. He fished up the sunken rai
lroad iron, got a detail of two hundred soldiers to toil as ships’ carpenters, sent armed men around the neighboring plantations to seize fourteen forges and attendant blacksmiths, hired men to fell trees, cut green timber and make gun carriages (which had never before been made in the state of Mississippi) somehow kept the job going on a twenty-four-hour basis—and, in a little more than five weeks, got the thing done. Arkansas was given a crew—sailors from the river fleet that had been lost at Memphis, plus a number of volunteers from Jeff Thompson’s Missouri command—and Lieutenant Brown was instructed to report to General Van Dorn for orders.
Brown wanted to stay in the Yazoo and hold that river for the Confederacy: an idea that made sense, for the Yazoo came down from some of the richest farming country in North America, and it would be well to keep out Yankee marauders. Van Dorn wanted him at Vicksburg, however, so Brown headed downstream—stopping for a day, en route, to make repairs and dry out damp powder, his wheezy engines having leaked steam into one of his magazines. On July 15, Arkansas came down to the mouth of the Yazoo looking for a fight.
The Federals had heard rumors about her, and this day they sent three warships up the Yazoo to investigate—two wooden craft and the armored gunboat Carondelet, which had run the batteries at Island Number Ten, and whose commanding officer, Henry Walke, had been a messmate and friend of Isaac Brown on a round-the-world cruise in the prewar Navy. Arkansas met the trio a few miles from the Mississippi and immediately opened fire; Carondelet was disabled and driven into shallow water, the unarmored gunboats fled at top speed, and Arkansas came out into the big river to find the entire Federal fleet, Farragut’s and Davis’s ships together, anchored in two long lines on opposite sides of the river. This probably would have been the end of it, except that the Federals were caught napping, with no steam up. Brown cruised past the combined fleets, firing as he went, taking a hammering but reaching the Vicksburg waterfront triumphantly and making fast to a wharf under the protection of Confederate batteries. Brown had been wounded twice, the armor on Arkansas’s port side was almost ready to fall off, and the ship had a staggering casualty list, but she had unquestionably wiped the eye of the United States Navy.6
