Accompanied only by his son, Grant reached Washington on March 8, 1864, and tried to check into the Willard Hotel. The manager took one look at his rumpled uniform with no clear indication of his rank and haughtily declared that he had only a small room left. Grant nodded and signed the register. The sight of the signature jolted the manager, who apologized effusively and ordered a bellboy to convey the guests to the hotel’s finest suite. The next day, before a crowd of dignitaries at the White House, Lincoln presented Grant with his lieutenant general’s commission. In his remarks, the president explained that Grant would be the first general since George Washington to bear that rank. Grant was always bashful and tongue-tied when he had to speak publicly and was especially overwhelmed at receiving such an honor. Fortunately the president was sensitive to Grant’s affliction and earlier had helped him prepare a short acceptance speech that he read.10
Grant got to work early the following morning, March 10, by sending orders to all field generals and the heads of all seventeen military departments, with combined forces of 530,000 troops, to attack the closest rebel forces as soon as possible. He hoped to crush the Confederacy by launching simultaneous offensives by all available forces. Of course, he recognized that two armies, Meade’s Army of the Potomac against Lee’s army in Virginia and Sherman’s Army of the Tennessee against Johnston’s army in northern Georgia, were central to that strategy’s success, while other forces played supporting roles. Lincoln graphically summed up this plan: “Those not skinning can hold a leg.”11 Nonetheless, Lincoln and Halleck altered Grant’s plan in two crucial and ultimately tragic ways that prolonged the war.
Grant had called for Gen. Benjamin Butler at Norfolk to crowd his Army of the James on transports, steam around to the federal enclave at New Bern, North Carolina, then march inland to Raleigh and cut the railroad that led north to Richmond. With that railroad severed, Richmond would have to rely solely on the railroad that ran through the western Carolinas to Lynchburg, then eastward to Richmond. Grant intended to cut that link with an army led by Gen. Franz Sigel marching up the Shenandoah Valley, then over to Lynchburg, a campaign that would take longer to realize and face more perils along the way than the one against Raleigh. Nonetheless, with both railroads in Union hands, Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia would be starved of supplies. Acting on Halleck’s advice, Lincoln prevailed on Grant to launch Butler’s army against Richmond instead.
That would have been the superior strategy had a skilled, decisive general led the campaign—as Grant attacked Lee from the north, the Army of the James could have captured Richmond from the south. This decisive blow combined with Sherman’s against Atlanta might have ended the war. Instead, rather than drive relentlessly against Richmond, Butler let Pierre Beauregard’s five thousand troops defeat his thirty-thousand-man Army of the James on May 16 at Drewry’s Bluff, just eight miles short of the rebel capital, then seal it off with entrenchments inside Bermuda Hundred, a loop of the James River. Skilled Confederate generalship also routed the Union drive up the Shenandoah Valley. With just five thousand troops, Gen. John Breckinridge routed Sigel’s sixty-five hundred at New Market on May 15. Sigel did not halt his retreat until he reached his supply base at Winchester.
Another element of Grant’s strategy for 1864 was an Army of the Gulf campaign, led by Gen. Nathaniel Banks, that captured Mobile, then marched northeast across Alabama toward Atlanta, where it would join Sherman. In one of his few strategic mistakes, Lincoln instead launched Banks and his army up the Red River. The president justified this campaign on political, economic, and diplomatic grounds. The Red River slants across Louisiana from the northwest to join the Mississippi River about two-thirds of the way down the state. Ascending the Red River would bring Louisiana’s cotton-growing hinterland under Union control all the way to Shreveport, a back door to northeastern Texas. The campaign’s most enthusiastic backers were northeastern textile factory owners who envisioned the tens of thousands of cotton bales that they could haul off and transform into millions of yards of cloth. Lincoln emphasized bringing a progressive government to most of Louisiana to serve as a reconstruction model for other rebel states. These political and economic rationales were as clear as the diplomatic angle was murky. Lincoln eventually hoped to use Shreveport as a staging area to invade Texas. To those who argued that Texas had no strategic worth, Lincoln replied that one day massing an American army on the Rio Grande would intimidate France’s Emperor Napoleon III, who in 1862 had dispatched an army to conquer Mexico and install a puppet emperor, Maximilian I. If that was Lincoln’s intent, he was literally going about it the wrong way; Shreveport is a long way from the Rio Grande.
In the end, Banks failed to win any of these objectives. With less than half the number of men, Gen. Richard Taylor’s Confederates defeated the Federals at Mansfield, forty miles short of Shreveport, on April 8. Low water stranded the Union fleet of transports and gunboats as they withdrew back down the Red River. They evaded capture only when Col. Joseph Bailey damned the river to raise the water level, then exploded the dam so that the flotilla could race downstream on the surging current to safety. Grant then replaced the utterly hapless but politically powerful Banks with Gen. Edward Canby and assigned him the task of organizing a thrust against Mobile. That campaign eventually would take place, but only nearly a year later in the war’s closing days.12
Although Meade officially headed the Army of the Potomac, Grant was actually in charge. He established his headquarters beside Meade’s and used that general simply as a conduit for his plans. He organized the 120,000-man Army of the Potomac into three infantry corps; Philip Sheridan led the cavalry corps. Gen. Ambrose Burnside commanded a fifteen-thousand-man corps encamped around Warrenton in northern Virginia guarding the approach to Washington.
Grant launched his campaign on May 5 by marching his army into the Wilderness region a dozen miles west of Fredericksburg. Lee rapidly converged sixty-five thousand troops to block that advance. The result was a vicious two-day battle that ended in a bloody stalemate. Rather than withdraw his army to safety, Grant sidestepped Lee southeastward and raced his troops to the enemy’s rear, while sending Sheridan and his cavalry toward Richmond to sever the supply line. On May 11 Gen. J. E. B. Stuart led his cavalry against Sheridan’s at Yellow Tavern and repelled them; Stuart died in the fighting. Meanwhile Lee again blocked Grant’s advance, this time at Spotsylvania. What ensued was another bloodbath from May 9 to 17. Grant barely gave his men time to rest before he marched them farther south, but the rebels blocked them at North Anna from May 23 to 26. Grant tried his campaign’s fourth turning but Lee once again nosed ahead at Cold Harbor, where his men strengthened existing fortifications. Grant launched his army against the rebel lines on June 2, and in two days of fighting suffered twelve thousand casualties to the enemy’s twenty-five hundred. He later admitted that ordering these attacks was his worst mistake of the war.13
Within a month the Union army had suffered 39,259 casualties while inflicting 25,000 on the Confederates.14 Ever more politicians and newspaper editors attacked Grant as a “butcher” and called for his dismissal. Grant’s defiant reply was, “I propose to fight it out on this line if it takes all summer.”15 Lincoln fully supported Grant’s strategy: “I have seen your dispatch expressing your unwillingness to break your hold where you are. Neither am I willing. Hold on with a bull-dog grip, and chew and choke as much as possible.”16
Grant tried to crack the stalemate in mid-June with yet another flanking movement, this time one that marched the army to the James River, where it crossed a twenty-one-hundred-foot pontoon bridge, the largest ever constructed, on June 14. He sent his advanced troops racing toward Petersburg, a critical railroad junction twenty miles south of Richmond. Tragically, rebel troops got there just in time and repelled the initial attack. This won Lee time to transfer most of his army there by railroad and dig an increasingly elaborate system of trenches that began east of Petersburg on the Appomattox River, then curled south around th
e city. As Grant brought up more troops and extended his line westward, Lee stretched his own men thinner in his own parallel line.
Haunted by what came to be called the “Cold Harbor syndrome,” Grant swore off any more frontal assaults unless there was an excellent chance of success. For the indefinite future the only apparent strategy was literally and figuratively to dig in for a prolonged siege. Then Grant was presented a scheme that just might break the stalemate.
The colonel of the Forty-Eighth Pennsylvania, whose ranks were filled with coal miners, overheard a private remark that “we could blow that damn fort out of existence if we could run a mine shaft under it.” He hurried with the idea to his brigade’s general, who led him to the division general, and so on up the hierarchy to the commanding general himself, who approved. It took nearly a month for the miners to burrow a 511-foot-long shaft ending with a 40 foot cross-shaft that they packed with gunpowder barrels. Meanwhile a division of black troops was trained to spearhead the attack through the gap blown in the enemy line. Tragically, General Burnside, the corps commander, doubted the black troops’ fighting abilities and on the attack’s eve substituted an inexperienced division of white troops. On July 30 the mine was detonated in a deafening roar that blew the rebel fort apart and left behind a smoldering hole 170 feet long, 60 feet wide, and 30 feet deep. The Union troops rushed forward but charged into the crater rather than surging around either side and then fanning out to roll up the rebel lines. The result was the latest debacle. Rebel troops rushed to the brink and fired at will on the trapped soldiers below, killing, wounding, or capturing four thousand men while routing the rest. Grant described the battle of the Crater as “the saddest affair I have witnessed in the war. Such an opportunity for carrying fortifications I . . . do not expect again to have.” And so the siege dragged on for month after month.17
Sherman, meanwhile, launched his own one-hundred-thousand-man army south against Johnston’s sixty thousand rebel troops on May 7. Like Grant, he tried to sidestep the enemy and get to their rear, but Johnston always managed to get wind of the movement and race his own army to block Sherman’s advance. Small battles were fought at Dalton on May 7, Resaca on May 14 and 15, Cassville on May 19, and New Hope Church from May 23 to 28. All along Sherman spared his men and ordered attacks only if they appeared to have a reasonable chance of success. Within four weeks his army had marched eighty miles and was within twenty miles of Atlanta. But Johnston had fortified a string of hills centered on Kennesaw Mountain so Sherman called a halt to rest his men and bring up supplies. Nearly a month later, on June 27, Sherman opened his campaign’s second phase with an assault on Kennesaw Mountain. When the rebels drove back his men, Sherman sent them on yet another wide turning movement that finally forced Johnston to withdraw into Atlanta’s ring of defenses on July 9.
Sherman’s juggernaut was now within sight of Atlanta’s church spires. Over the previous two months Johnston had proved himself a worthy opponent; although his army was outgunned nearly two to one, he checked every Union advance and slowly withdrew, trading space for time. The campaign had cost the Federals and Confederates seventeen thousand and fourteen thousand respective casualties, a fraction of the bloodbath between Grant and Lee in Virginia. Sherman admitted that he felt lucky beating “Johnston, for he had the most exalted reputation with our old army as a strategist.”18
Yet President Jefferson Davis did not appreciate Johnston’s Fabian strategy and replaced him on July 17 with John Bell Hood, renowned for his reckless courage and aggression. Lee’s description of Hood was apt: “All lion, none of the fox.”19 The result was a disaster for the rebel cause. Hood immediately launched a series of attacks on Sherman’s forces stretching around Atlanta, at Peachtree Creek on July 20, at various points on July 22, and at Ezra Church on July 28. These battles cost the Federals about six thousand men to the Confederates’ fifteen thousand. For the next month Hood hunkered down with his troops in the city’s ring of entrenchments while Sherman steadily tightened his grip.
By late August 1864 the Union siege of Atlanta had been dragging on for nearly a month when Sherman conceived a strategy to flush Hood into the open. On August 30 the Federal troops abruptly abandoned their trenches, but rather than withdraw north, Sherman led them south to capture the railroad juncture of Jonesborough, Atlanta’s umbilical supply line. Hood abandoned Atlanta on September 1 and Sherman led his army triumphantly into the city the next day. The news of Atlanta’s fall inspired jubilation in the North and provoked despair in the South.
A blockade of southern ports was among the many interrelated actions that contributed to the American victory. This mission was anything but easy. The navy somehow had to seal off thirty-five thousand miles of coastline that included ten major ports and 180 bays, inlets, and river mouths perfect for smuggling. To this end, Navy Secretary Gideon Welles expanded the navy from 76 ships manned by seven thousand sailors when he took office to 671 ships and fifty-one thousand sailors when the war ended. Usually 150 ships in a dozen flotillas were on blockade patrol at any one time, while the rest were refitting in safe harbors. All these vessels weekly consumed five thousand tons of coal.20
The rebel coast was split into four regions, two along the Atlantic Ocean and two along the Gulf of Mexico, with each headed by an admiral. The naval blockade steadily tightened to painful if not crippling levels. Even at its height, the blockade was hardly foolproof. Of the war’s eight thousand smuggling voyages, perhaps as many as five of six ships slipped past, with the ratio dropping as the number of Union ships and ports in Union hands increased; in 1861 nine of ten got through compared to one of two in 1865. During these four years, the rebels smuggled out half a million cotton bales and smuggled in a million pairs of shoes, half a million rifles, a thousand tons of gunpowder, and several hundred cannons.21
If these figures appear to discredit the blockade, one must question how the war would have ended had the attempt never been made. The rebels could have imported all the military supplies that they needed. They would not have had to divert tens of thousands of troops to coastal or inland defense. They would have evaded the hyperinflation that rendered their currency worthless, with a Confederate dollar worth a penny by the war’s end.
The navy plugged a large hole in the blockade on August 5, 1864, when Adm. David Farragut led four monitors and fourteen wooden ships through a barrage of cannon fire from three forts and floating mines guarding Mobile Bay’s entrance. A mine blew up and sank the lead monitor. When an officer called for turning back, Farragut uttered his immortal reply: “Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead!”22 Over the next three weeks, combined operations of the navy and army captured each fort, although the expedition lacked enough troops and supplies to take Mobile, thirty miles north.
The American enclaves carved out along the rebel coast might have served as bases for raids or even campaigns into the interior. Instead operations were usually confined to aiding the blockade. The few times that local commanders tried something more ambitious they met with failure. The worst defeat was Gen. Truman Seymour’s five-thousand-man expedition from Jacksonville. Seymour’s mission was to march west and capture Tallahassee, Florida’s capital. A rebel army of equal numbers led by Joseph Finnegan routed the invaders at the battle of Olustee on February 20, 1864, inflicting casualties of 203 killed, 1,152 wounded, and 506 captured, while losing 93 killed and 841 wounded.23
The blockade hurt not only the South but also Britain, at least initially. Indeed, the Confederacy actually boycotted any cotton exports to Britain, ideally to pressure Whitehall into an alliance. This gamble failed to pay off literally and figuratively. In 1862 the British imported only 3 percent of the amount of southern cotton that they had imported the previous year. The loss of the South’s cotton and markets threw a quarter million Britons out of work and put half a million on relief. But rather than aid the Confederacy, the British swiftly adapted by importing cotton from Egypt and India. Textile production rose and unemployment fell. By 1863 th
e crisis was over.24
Indirectly Britain did give some limited aid to the rebels. British shipyards built three Confederate warships, of which the most notable was the CSS Alabama that destroyed 250 American ships valued at $15.5 million. Charles Francis Adams, America’s minister to Britain, warned Foreign Secretary Russell that if two more warships that were currently being built were delivered to the rebels, “This is war.” Russell conceded. Tension eased when the uss Kearsage sank the Alabama in June 1864.
The British and French took advantage of the Civil War to assert their interests in America’s backyard. Mexico typically owed enormous sums of money to foreign creditors and refused to pay. In 1861 Britain, France, and Spain launched a joint expedition that occupied Veracruz and refused to leave until the Mexicans paid up. Britain and Spain withdrew their contingents in 1862 after cutting a deal with the Mexicans for partial repayment. The French insisted on full repayment. When the Mexicans stonewalled, Napoleon III used this as an excuse to send a thirty-five-thousand-man army all the way to Mexico City. The French deposed the Mexican government and installed their emperor’s distant cousin in the presidential palace, where he reigned as Emperor Maximilian I. Troops were dispatched to secure other key regions and cities, including Matamoros, at the Rio Grande mouth just across from Brownsville, Texas.
Straightjacketed by the Civil War, the Lincoln administration could do nothing but protest France’s conquest of Mexico. Eventually Lincoln reasoned that if Union troops overran Texas, they would at once weaken the Confederacy and pressure the French in Mexico. Virtually all of Lincoln’s decisions during the war were strategically sound except the expeditions he ordered directly or indirectly against Texas. The state was a strategic sideshow and the more forces that he committed to there, the fewer troops, transport, munitions, and provisions that were available at crucial fronts. As if this were not bad enough, nearly all of the Texas expeditions suffered humiliating defeats, including Gen. William Franklin’s up the Sabine River in 1863 and Gen. Nathaniel Banks’s up the Red River in 1864. Although Banks did succeed in capturing Brownsville at the mouth of the Rio Grande in September 1863, the rebels thwarted his attempts to seize other Texas ports.
The Age of Lincoln and the Art of American Power, 1848-1876 Page 23
