ITIS EASY NOW to see that the removal of General Johnston was a mistake, but Mr. Davis was operating under a fatal limitation. His narrowing horizon left him little chance to see anything but the purely military problem—the maps, the tracks made by the moving armies, the things done on fields of battle—and he made a wrong choice that arose from his own faulty concept of his responsibilities. The Federal government was applying an unendurable pressure, and if it was not quite using all of its strength—Mr. Lincoln too had made a mistake, and his armies were paying for it—it was nevertheless beginning to win. To play for time, risking all on the chance that victory deferred would make the North give up the struggle, might conceivably have worked, but Mr. Davis did not have much time to spare.

Removing the general, Mr. Davis was supported both by his natural impulses and by his most trusted advisers, and as a result he saw a picture that was oversimplified and hence distorted. He had to remember the past. Johnston had retreated up the Virginia peninsula before McClellan in 1862, and the Yankees had been checked only when Lee came in and took the offensive. A year later, in Mississippi, Johnston had felt unable to attack Grant, and Vicksburg had been lost; this winter he had felt unable to strike toward Chattanooga, and now Sherman had driven him down to the suburbs of Atlanta. To argue from all of this that the man could do nothing but retreat was grossly unfair, but it was perfectly natural: when Secretary of State Judah Benjamin argued (as he was arguing now, incessantly) that "Johnston is determined not to fight, it is of no use to re-enforce him, he is not going to fight," the President was apt to listen. By the time Johnston retired across the Chattahoochee the entire cabinet was urging his removal, and when the general told Secretary Seddon that he would use militia to guard Atlanta while he maneuvered against Sherman with his main army, the President misread this as indicating a fixed intent to abandon the city entirely.¹

This prospect was wholly unacceptable. Not only was it painful to consider what such Georgians as Alexander Stephens and Robert Toombs would say, in public and in unguarded privacy; Atlanta had in fact become a center of war industries which the Confederacy could not afford to lose. Equally important was the transportation network that centered there; after the war, Mr. Davis testified to "our dependence on the system of Georgia railroads for the food with which we were holding the field in Virginia."² The plain fact was that the presence of a powerful Federal army on the edge of Atlanta was intolerable.

At the last minute, Mr. Davis sent the discredited General Bragg, of all people, to Atlanta for a confidential report, and after he got there and looked things over Bragg pointed out that it might be the Yankees who would play for time now. Sherman might not even try to capture Atlanta outright; he could elect to paralyze the place, and the central Confederacy along with it, and his position east of the Chattahoochee made it possible for him to do so. Bragg explained: "You will readily see the advantage the enemy has gained, and that it may not be his policy to strike on this side of the river unless he sees his success assured. Alabama and Mississippi will be devastated and our army will melt away. Our railroad communication with Montgomery is now at the mercy of the enemy, and a mere raid may destroy Montgomery." (The point here was that the railroad through Montgomery was the eastern Confederacy's last remaining link with Alabama, Mississippi, and the whole western country.) Bragg concluded: "There is but one remedy—offensive action."³

There was one adviser who lacked enthusiasm for the change. On July 12 Mr. Davis notified Lee that it was necessary to relieve Johnston "at once," and asked: "Who should succeed him? What think you of Hood for the position?" Lee immediately wired his reply: I REGRETTHE FACT STATED. IT IS A BAD TIME TO RELEASE THE COMMANDER OF AN ARMY SITUATED AS THAT OF TENNESSEE. WE MAY LOSE ATLANTA AND THE ARMY TOO. HOOD IS A BOLD FIGHTER. I AM DOUBTFUL AS TO OTHER QUALITIES NECESSARY. In a letter written a few hours after this, Lee enlarged upon these points: "It is a grievous thing to change commander of an army situated as is that of the Tennessee. Still if necessary it ought to be done. I know nothing of the necessity. I had hoped that Johnston was strong enough to deliver battle. We must risk much to save Alabama, Mobile and communication with the Trans Mississippi. It would be better to concentrate all the cavalry in Mississippi and Tennessee on Sherman's communications. . . . Hood is a good fighter, very industrious on the battle field, careless off, and I have had no opportunity of judging his action when the whole responsibility rested upon him. I have a high opinion of his gallantry, earnestness and zeal. Genl. Hardee has more experience in managing an army."⁴

Lee picked his words carefully when he wrote to the President, and Hood had been one of his most prized division commanders in the Army of Northern Virginia; altogether, Lee must have had powerful misgivings if that was the best recommendation he could write for Hood. But although he was thus warning that this choice would be a mistake, his advice was disregarded; inevitably so, probably, because Hood had been the heir apparent to the command ever since the campaign began. He had been in touch, all along, drawing attention to his commander's errors; much of what Richmond believed about Johnston's failure to accept good chances to bring Sherman to battle came direct from Hood. When Bragg visited Atlanta, Hood gave him a letter asserting that since leaving Dalton the army had lost 20,000 men without having fought a decisive battle, although chances to strike a blow had several times been offered. Atlanta, said Hood, should in no circumstances be given up, and he closed with the same note of diffident self-advancement that had been sounded for Mr. Lincoln under other circumstances by Secretary Seward and General McClellan: "I have, general, so often urged that we should force the enemy to give us battle as to almost be regarded as reckless by the officers high in rank in this army, since their views have been so directly opposite. I regard it as a great misfortune to our country that we failed to give battle to the enemy many miles north of our present position. Please say to the President that I shall continue to do my duty cheerfully and faithfully, and strive to do what I think is best for our country, as my constant prayer is for our success."⁶

With one point in General Lee's letter practically everybody agreed. The best way to stop Sherman was to turn the cavalry loose on his line of communications—and, specifically, not just any cavalry, but the cavalry commanded by Bedford Forrest, the one Confederate horseman who would be absolutely certain to concentrate on hurting the Yankees without having distracting thoughts about his own fame or the glamour of a dashing cavalry raid.

The railroad operation by which Sherman kept a steady stream of supplies coming all the way down from Nashville, via Chattanooga, was at the same time the gaudiest and the most vulnerable aspect of his entire campaign. It was wartime railroading of a kind never seen before and not often seen since, with everything subordinated to the need to get the required amounts of rations, forage, and ammunition laid down at the advanced depots on time. It was said that engineers on this railroad did not especially need to know much about operating locomotives but they did have to be daring and energetic, and few of them got any sleep to speak of. Trains came down without timetables or regular schedules, going when the dispatchers told them to go, and whenever there was a wreck or any kind of disabling accident the locomotive and cars were simply tumbled off the track to make room for the next train. It was asserted—with a degree of exaggeration impossible to assess properly, at this distance— that beside a long embankment, somewhere below Chattanooga, there was so much wreckage that a man could walk five miles on the debris, without once setting foot on the ground. Repair gangs were of fabulous speed and competence; the railroad bridge over the Chattahoochee, 900 feet long

(including the approaches) and 90 feet high, was rebuilt in four and one-half days, although all of the timbers used in the construction were living trees when the job began.⁸ Repairs were made so quickly that Johnston's soldiers used to say it did no good to destroy track behind Sherman because he carried spare tunnels. When Sherman called this campaign a big Indian war he used the wrong word; it was really a big railroad war.

Joe Wheeler had operated against this road all the way down from Chattanooga, but Sherman had his own cavalry protecting it, with infantry detachments at frequent intervals in blockhouses, and the damage Wheeler's men inflicted was an annoyance rather than a problem. As a matter of fact— and before he was much older Sherman would find that the same thing was true of his own troopers—cavalry in the Civil War was not very efficient when it came to railroad destruction. The job involved a little too much plain drudgery. Simply to remove a few rails and burn a bridge or two would not answer; that sort of damage could be made good before the cavalry raiders had got away far enough to start bragging properly.

But Forrest was different. One of his admiring troopers put the essence of him in one sentence: "Forrest never did anything as anyone else would have done or even thought of doing in regard to a fight." Forrest and his men were not recognizable as the romantic sabreurs of misty tradition; they were matter-of-fact people who believed that the object of all they did was to bring harm to their foes, and they went about their jobs with single-minded energy. When Forrest struck the Federal rear it took a real fight to keep him off; not just skirmish-line firing between galloping patrols but a grinding, man-killing battle in which everybody played for keeps. The admiring trooper told how, in action, Forrest "would curse, then praise, then threaten to shoot us himself if we were afraid the Yankees might hit us," and he remembered that the general was always telling people to hurry.⁷ When Forrest hit a railroad line with evil intent that line was obliterated, with as much care and effort devoted to its destruction as had gone into its original building. If Forrest ever got on Sherman's railroad line Sherman was likely to be in serious trouble.

Johnston had several times asked that Forrest (who was not under his command) be sent against Sherman's communications. So had Governor Joseph E. Brown of Georgia, a tireless mouthpiece for the Georgia dissenters. When Mr. Davis told Brown that Forrest had in fact spent weeks operating deep in Sherman's rear areas, although not on his railroad, and that he was kept very busy on important assignments far to the west of Georgia, Brown replied: "If your mistake should result in loss of Atlanta and the occupation of other strong points in this state by the enemy, the blow may be fatal to our cause and remote posterity may have reason to mourn over the error."⁸

This was somewhat unjust, because Forrest had been busy and effective. In March and April he had raided in western Tennessee and Kentucky, getting all the way to the Ohio River, occupying Paducah briefly, collecting recruits and horses and food and weapons and returning to his base in Mississippi stronger than when he started out.

On this raid he stormed Fort Pillow, on the Mississippi in Tennessee some forty miles above Memphis, held by approximately six hundred Federals, half of them Negro soldiers, the other half Tennessee whites whom the Confederates contemptuously called "homemade Yankees." The defense was poorly directed, no one seemed sure whether the fort was actually surrendered or was simply overrun, and a number of white and colored soldiers were killed after effective defense had ended. Radical Republicans in Washington charged that there had been an outright massacre, after Forrest went back to Mississippi the Committee on the Conduct of the War collected a hair-raising set of atrocity stories, and there were demands for stern retaliation. The retaliation never took place, but a new note of bitterness entered Northern war propaganda and the affair testified to the grimness of the fighting in the disputed border country.

Early in June, Forrest started north to do more damage, but learned that Sherman had ordered Major General S. D. Sturgis with 8000 men to come down from Memphis and destroy him. He turned to meet Sturgis, caught him on June 10 at Brice's Crossroads, Mississippi, where the Federals were all strung out on a muddy road with a mired wagon train blocking the path for the infantry, and inflicted on this luckless command one of the most startling defeats of the war. In this battle Forrest caused more than 2200 Union casualties and lost fewer than 500 of his own men, seizing sixteen guns and two hundred wagons and leaving the routed Federals, as Sturgis confessed, "in no condition to offer determined resistance." Sturgis was glad enough to get his bedraggled men back to Memphis, where he reported that he had been attacked by a force numbering somewhere between 15,000 and 20,000 men. In reality, Forrest had taken no more than 3500 into action.⁹

Forrest in short had been accomplishing a great deal; yet as far as the outcome of the war was concerned his efforts had been wasted. This man, who better than anyone else in the Confederacy could create chaos in the rear of an invading army, had not been used for that purpose when an invasion was threatening the Confederacy's very life. He had compelled the Federal government to waste money and manpower on what it had supposed was a thoroughly conquered area, and he had driven Sherman to cry angrily that there would never be peace in western Tennessee until Forrest was dead: but he had not made Sherman turn about and go north instead of south, and that was all that really mattered. He was a priceless resource and he had been used on a sideshow.

This was tragic, because Mr. Davis had no margin for error. His military resources were so limited that he dared not misuse any of them. Here Mr. Lincoln held an increasing advantage. In a military sense he had almost unlimited funds; he might lose the war by making political mistakes, but his military mistakes could be made good. This was an enormous point in his favor. Mr. Davis made the Federal invasion of Georgia easier by what he did with Johnston and Forrest, and Mr. Lincoln made it harder by what he did with General Banks; the difference was that the Northern President had something to spare and the Southern President did not.

When Mr. Lincoln authorized the Red River expedition he tried to do several things at once. He wound up by doing none of them, yet the big trouble was not that the expedition failed but that it was made at all. Like Forrest, Banks was put to work in the wrong place and he represented wasted effort. He carried out his assignment miserably, but the basic idea was bad to begin with.

The idea dated away back to the early days of the war, beginning to take active shape when General Banks got to Louisiana and sent back that glowing report about the enormous amount of cotton that could be had if the Federals controlled the Red River Valley. As the war grew older the Federal appetite for cotton increased, along with the price of cotton, and the profits that could be made by traders who laid their hands on it; and other events made that distant river valley look even more important.

The Red River came down from the country where Texas, Arkansas, and Louisiana touched corners, and the city of Shreveport, three hundred tangled miles from the place where the Red River reached the Mississippi, was several things at once. It was the temporary capital of Confederate Louisiana, and it was also headquarters of General Edmund Kirby Smith and so, in a way, the capital of the trans-Mississippi Confederacy. It was a big supply depot, and a first-rate gateway to Texas. If the Federals held Shreveport and the river they could frustrate all of Smith's plans, protect their own control of the Mississippi and states like Missouri, and invade Texas whenever they pleased; also, the insecure ten percent governments set up in Louisiana and Arkansas would be strengthened. Shreveport looked like a place worth taking, and early in January Halleck told Banks that he was to go ahead and take it.

The stated objectives were simple: occupy Shreveport and drive the Rebels away from the Red River. Banks would have help. From Arkansas Major General Frederick Steele was to march down to join him with 15,000 men; Sherman was ordered to send 10,000 more under Major General A. J. Smith, and Admiral Porter would take a powerful flotilla up the Red River, convoying transports and supply steamers. All in all Banks would command between 40,000 and 50,000 men. He had lost much of his early enthusiasm for the venture, but he considered its objectives good and he assured Halleck that "the occupation of Shreveport will be to the country west of the Mississippi what that of Chattanooga is to the east."¹⁰

This might well be so, although the precise value of a triumph gained west of the river at a time when the war was to be won or lost east of the river was never thoroughly examined. Military and political considerations were so mixed that it was hard to say what the basic idea back of the expedition really was, and when Congressional investigators later asked Admiral Porter what the operation was intended to do the admiral replied: "I never understood."¹¹ At the time he testified, Porter was on the most hostile terms imaginable with Banks, and this may have colored his answer; but it must be admitted that the thing was a jumble.

Whatever was meant, the expedition never came close to success. Banks himself was late, being held in New Orleans by ceremonies connected with the installation of the new loyalist government of Louisiana, but his troops took off on March 13 under General Franklin and ten days later they got to Alexandria, sixty miles up the Red River, where they met Smith's contingent and Porter's fleet. Banks overtook them there on March 24, and found waiting for him a dispatch from General Grant.

Grant had taken the top command intending Banks to join a combined movement of all the armies east of the Mississippi, and one of his first discoveries was that it was too late to cancel this Red River foray. He wrote his dispatch to Banks on March 15, immediately after his exploratory visit to Meade's army, saying frankly that he saw little point to this expedition and that the destruction of Confederate armies was "of vastly more importance than the mere acquisition of territory." If Shreveport fell, Banks and most of his men must return to New Orleans at once to mount an offensive toward Mobile; further—and this Banks found really troublesome—whatever happened, Smith and his 10,000 must go back to Sherman by April 25 at the latest, even if this wrecked the entire operation.¹²

Handicaps piled up so fast that this one made no difference. Coming down from Arkansas on bad roads swarming with hostile cavalry under General Sterling Price, Steele found it impossible either to drive Price away or to carry adequate supplies, and presently he had to beat a laborious retreat, giving Banks no help whatever. Water in the Red River was abnormally low, and it was April 3 before Porter could get his fleet past the rapids just above Alexandria. The army plodded on, two-thirds of the way from Alexandria to Shreveport, and on April 8 it encountered 8000 Confederates under Major General Richard Taylor, son of old Zachary and a good fighter in his own right. Taylor caught Franklin's column much as Forrest had caught Sturgis—strung out on a narrow road, with a wagon train stalled just where it would do the most harm—and at a place called Sabine Crossroads, south of Mansfield, he struck this column, mangled it and drove it back in confused retreat. Banks got things in hand, next day, and in a fight at Pleasant Hill A. J. Smith's men routed Taylor in a battle made odd by the fact that as soon as it ended both armies retreated as fast as they could go.

Kirby Smith took part of Taylor's force north to aid Price in driving back Steele, while Taylor, greatly depleted, managed an able harassing campaign against the gunboats and Banks. The Federal general wanted to confer with the navy and take stock, and he put his army in camp around the steamboat landing of Grand Ecore, where low water had brought the fleet's advance to a halt. What he learned here gave him scant comfort. The navy's luck had been worse than the army's, the river was falling so fast that if the fleet did not get out soon it could not get out at all, and under Grant's orders it was time to send Smith east. It had already been necessary to send away 3000 men who properly belonged to McPherson, 4000 more had been battle casualties, Steele and his 15,000 had never arrived at all, and without Smith's troops Banks felt that he would be forced to go back to New Orleans. He wired Grant that "this campaign cannot be abandoned without abandoning the navy and permitting the invasion of Missouri," and Porter sent an anxious message to Sherman saying that the safety of both the fleet and the army depended on keeping Smith: "He is the only part of the army that was not demoralized, and if he was to leave there would be a most disastrous result."¹³

In the end both the army and the navy escaped, but the thing was such a crashing failure that the mere fact that Porter's gunboats were saved came to look almost like a victory and was about the only point of the campaign the people in the North ever cared to remember. Low water made it impossible to get the gunboats down past the Alexandria rapids; the Confederates were bringing up sharpshooters and field artillery to harass them, Porter had already lost one light gunboat and two auxiliaries, and if the army retreated he must destroy all the rest. To blow up ten good gunboats was unthinkable, but to let the enemy have them would be far worse: give the Confederates a solid fleet of ironclads on the Mississippi and the war in the west might as well be started all over again.

The boats probably would have been lost if it had not been for Lieutenant Colonel Joseph Bailey of the 4th Wisconsin Infantry, chief engineer for Franklin's XIX Corps. Bailey had worked on western rivers and he saved the navy with a western river trick: when the water was too low the westerners simply built dams to make it higher. Banks gave Bailey two or three Maine regiments composed mostly of lumberjacks, handy with axes and used to riverside work, and Bailey put them to work building dams to create a suitable head of water. The river rose and hid the rocks, Porter's gunboats came bumping and grating over the shallows, and then the flood waters were released and the ungainly ironclads went careening downstream, all smoke and steam and spray, everybody whooping, army bands on the banks playing to cheer them along. On this gratifying but negative achievement the campaign came to an end, and by May 21 army and navy were back on the Mississippi.¹⁴

The campaign had been a blunder, not because it failed but because it was made at all. It prevented the Mobile offensive, kept 10,000 good men away from Sherman when he needed them most and enabled Mr. Davis to send Bishop Polk's corps to help Joe Johnston, and it would have had all of these effects even if Banks had been successful. It was an offensive that pointed in the wrong direction.

Also it was tainted. Nobody ever forgot about that Red River cotton, and although the campaign's basic objectives were clean enough the cotton business stained it. Washington wanted cotton and it also wanted to make good Unionists out of Southern planters: natural desires, both of them, but not compatible with purely military aims. In January the Treasury had issued new rules for the cotton trade: any Southerner who brought cotton inside the Union lines and took an oath of loyalty would be paid 25 percent of the cotton's market value in cash and could get a receipt for the balance, and at the end of the war, if he could show that his loyalty had remained firm after he made this deal, he could cash the receipt. In theory, this gave him a financial motive for wishing to see the Union restored; in practice it raised a whole mare's nest of problems, and later in the summer the Federal Major General E. R. S. Canby dilated upon these in a letter to President Lincoln.

When a Federal army entered a cotton-growing area, said General Canby, Confederate officers were supposed to burn cotton and Union officers were supposed to confiscate it. The cotton traders wanted neither thing to happen, and so they tried to make such invasions fail, tipping off the Confederate authorities whenever a move was being planned. Much worse, they swarmed all over everybody, trying to buy cotton before it could be either burned or seized, and they did this because the government's rules gave them a direct incentive. The government was actively promoting trade with the enemy at the very moment when it was trying its best to destroy him.

The ins and outs of it were most complicated, and Mr. Lincoln tried to explain them in a somewhat labored letter to General Canby. The blockade, he said, had made the price of cotton six times as high as it used to be, and in spite of the blockade the enemy managed to export at least a sixth as much cotton as he ever did, so that he got a normal income for a fraction of the normal effort. "The effect, in substance," wrote Mr. Lincoln, "is that we give him six ordinary crops, without the trouble of producing any but the first; and at the same time leave his fields and his laborers free to produce provisions. You know how this keeps up his armies at home and procures supplies from abroad. . . . We cannot give up the blockade, and hence it becomes immensely important to us to get the cotton away from him. Better give guns for it than let him, as now, get both guns and ammunition for it."¹⁵

Wherever this kind of logic might take a man, cotton certainly gave the Red River expedition a peculiar coloration. Relying on the new Treasury rule, many planters brought cotton to the river as the expedition moved upstream, ready to take the oath and sell the stuff. Porter's naval officers promptly confiscated as much of this as they could get and sent it north as naval prize; they were far from the high seas, but the old high seas prize rule applied and naval officers got a certain percentage of the value of enemy goods seized. Considering this a gross breach of faith, the planters took thought of their innate Southern loyalty and began to burn their cotton. The army managed to buy some of it, turning it over to the quartermasters for shipment north and ultimate transfer to the Treasury; and the ever-present traders (two of them bearing passes signed by Abraham Lincoln) came along and bought whatever cotton had been missed by the navy, the army, and the flames of the indignant planters. An army officer remembered with glee that most of the bales the traders got were piled up at Alexandria and were at last seized by Colonel Bailey and used to build dams.

One thing the operation did accomplish; it created bitter friction between army and navy officers, and it may be that interservice antagonism reached its all-time peak on the Red River. Porter, who used language somewhat loosely, said that "the whole affair was a cotton speculation," and asserted that Banks came upstream in a steamer loaded down with speculators, with ice and champagne, and with bagging and ropes for the baling of cotton. Banks retorted that at Alexandria the navy sent marines inland with wagon trains to get cotton at the source, taking along engine room mechanics to put the cotton gins in operation. Army officers were furious because naval officers collected prize money (and bragged about it) and naval officers held that they almost lost their fleet because the army failed to do its job properly. Banks insisted, doubtless truthfully, that nothing in the way of a military operation was subordinated to a desire to get cotton, and one of his staff officers, Brigadier General William Dwight, said that only a few thousand bales were ever sent north although from 200,000 to 300,000 might have been had if that had been a genuine objective.¹⁶

An uncommonly bad odor was created, in other words; yet the trouble had little to do with cotton. The assistant medical director on Banks' staff rendered an indisputable verdict: "It seemed to me that any life lost in battle west of the Mississippi River after January, 1864, was an unnecessary sacrifice, and that the real theater of war was east of the river and the operations west of it only a sideshow."¹⁷

3. The Cork in the Bottle

THETRANSPORTS floated up Hampton Roads to the James River in a line ten miles long, sending up more than two hundred pillars of smoke to make a great cloudbank against the clear sky of a May morning. The navy led the way with five ironclads and a swarm of lesser craft, and on the transports there were more than 30,000 soldiers: veterans, armed and equipped with the best their country could provide, moving directly toward a Richmond that was hardly a day's journey away and that was defended now by no more than a totally inadequate handful. The spring breeze was warm and easy, and the air was bright with promise; the soldiers looked on the picture they were making, took pride in it, and saw in their own moving column a display of the Republic's armed might.

The commanding general felt as they felt. His steamer moved at the head of the line, but around mid-day it swung out, turned and went ranging downstream, and the general stood bareheaded on the upper deck and as each transport came abreast he swung his hat in an imperious full-arm gesture toward the west, lunging with his body, as he did so, to give the gesture added emphasis. On transport after transport the soldiers lined the rails and cheered with high enthusiasm. At this moment they believed in this general implicitly, and believing in him they believed also in themselves, and they had never a doubt that he was leading them to a triumph that would win the war and turn all of them into heroes.¹

The commanding general was Benjamin F. Butler.

In a war where the pressures of politics were always strong and at times irresistible, Butler was getting a final, dazzling chance to win the military distinction which he always wanted and never got. Of military capacity, to be sure, he possessed not a trace, but he was a lifelong Democrat who had wholeheartedly defected to the radicals, and so in this election year he had to be used; and it was sheer bad luck that he held a spot that was pivotal to Grant's whole Virginia campaign. Compelled to use him in a role that demanded a first-rater, Grant was trying to make the best of him; he had at least been able to encase him between two solid professional subordinates, on the hopeful theory that these lieutenants could steer him into competent behavior. Anyway, the odds favored this expedition so powerfully that ordinary incompetence could hardly spoil it.

Butler's expedition up the James was in fact a blow at the almost unguarded rear of Lee's army. It was the vitally important other half of the Federal campaign in Virginia, and the plans for Meade's army had been drawn up on the assumption that Meade's job would be made easier by what was done on the James.

On the afternoon of May 5, while Butler was sending hand-signals to fame from the hurricane deck of a steamboat, Grant and Meade were taking 120,000 men across the Rapidan to attack Lee's 65,000. Meade's army and Butler's were a hundred miles apart, but they were engaged in one operation. To Halleck, before the campaign opened, Grant was explicit: "Should Lee fall back within his fortifications at Richmond, either before or after giving battle, I will form a junction with Butler and the two forces will draw supplies from the James River. My own notions about our line of march are entirely made up, but as circumstances beyond our control may change them I will only state that my effort will be to bring Butler's and Meade's forces together." To Butler he was equally definite: "That Richmond is to be your chief objective point, and that there is to be co-operation between your force and the Army of the Potomac, must be your guide." Grant hoped that Butler could invest Richmond on the south side, with the left of his army touching the James just above the city; in that case, Grant would bring Meade's army down so that its right could join hands with Butler's left across the river. He emphasized that Butler was to "use every exertion to secure footing as far up the south side of the river as you can, and as soon as you can."¹

If Butler did what he was supposed to do Meade's success would be almost certain, because if Richmond were closely invested from the south Lee's army would face quick starvation. The capital city produced quantities of munitions, but the food it sent to the Army of Northern Virginia came from the west and south, and the approach Grant called for would cut the railroads by which this food came to Richmond. At sunset on May 5, when the head of the line of transports drew up at the Bermuda Hundred landing on the James, Butler's opportunity was as bright as any general could wish.

Coming down from Richmond to the sea, the James goes due south for seven miles, swings east past the height of Drewry's Bluff, where the Confederates had built Fort Darling, drifts southeast in a series of aimless hairpin turns, makes a final loop at Turkey Bend, with Malvern Hill lying a mile to the north, and then flows south past Bermuda Hundred. Here the river broadens, beginning to look more like an arm of the sea than a river, and two miles below Bermuda Hundred it is joined by the Appomattox River, which comes in from the west and south. The flat country enclosed by the two rivers is irregularly shaped, from west to east it is seven or eight miles long, and its western neck measures three miles, north and south, from one river to the other.

Once he landed at Bermuda Hundred, Butler's immediate job was to march straight west for about ten miles. Doing this, he would strike both the railroad and the turnpike that connected Richmond with the city of Petersburg, which lay on the south side of the Appomattox ten miles upstream from the James. Then he would have two options: turn right, as his orders directed him to do, and move on Richmond, or turn left and move on Petersburg. It did not matter much which he did, because if he took Petersburg either he or Meade would inevitably get Richmond shortly afterward. Of the railroads that connected the capital with the south, all but one came up to Petersburg, and the capital could not be held without them.³

The way was all but wide open, because the Confederate authorities had been deceived. All spring it had been known that Burnside's army corps, brought east from Tennessee, was being built up at Annapolis, and it was believed that the Federals planned to invade North Carolina with this force as a nucleus—exactly the move, as a matter of fact, that Grant had proposed early in the winter, before he became lieutenant general. Beauregard had been detached from Charleston and given command of Confederate forces in North Carolina and in Virginia below the James, and he had his headquarters and most of his troops in North Carolina. Butler had kept his cards well concealed, and not until May 3 was Lee able to warn the War Department that in his belief this Federal force was preparing to move against Richmond. To defend Richmond south of the James there was Fort Darling, at Drewry's Bluff, manned by heavy artillerists, and several thousand War Department clerks and munitions workers could be called up in an emergency to hold the fortifications immediately around the city; but of regular field troops to come out in the open and prevent the kind of investment Grant was demanding there were at that moment only two brigades of infantry, perhaps 3000 men in all. To defend Petersburg there were at most 2000 more. Against these, Butler (who detached a division of 5000 men to hold City Point, at the mouth of the Appomattox) could put at least 25,000 men into action. In addition he had sent 3000 cavalry on a long swing to the southwest to cut the railroads below Petersburg, and he had half as many more riding up the north side of the James. For a few days there was no way on earth for the Confederates to keep him from carrying out his orders.

On the night of May 5 Butler seems to have had an awareness of this fact, and as his troops began to disembark at Bermuda Hundred he called in his two corps commanders and proposed that they take the men who had already gone ashore and march forthwith on Richmond, midnight or no.

These corps commanders were the professional soldiers on whom Grant relied to keep Butler from folly. As far as Grant could see they were well chosen. The commander of Butler's X Corps was Major General Quincy A. Gillmore, who had conducted the siege of Charleston. He had failed there through no especial fault of his own. The experience had left him highly distrustful of any operation that involved attacking entrenched Confederates, but there was no way to know that it had left him very reluctant to make any attack at all. The other man, leading the XVIII Corps, was Major General William F. Smith, who had greatly impressed Grant by his handling of the engineering assignment at Chattanooga. Like Bragg's lieutenants at Chickamauga, Smith was capable but difficult: difficult in an erratic way that finally became altogether incomprehensible. At the beginning of May, Grant thought him one of the best generals in the army; by July, he considered him one of the worst.⁴

Anyway, these two professionals naturally advised Butler to curb his enthusiasm. To march that night would be to take no more than 10,000 men off through unfamiliar country, in pitch darkness, against no one knew how many Confederates; better wait for daylight and move with everybody. This advice was good, and Butler accepted it, and yet it seems a pity, somehow: this was the last time in the campaign that Butler showed a spark of initiative, and it was the only time these two generals gave him the kind of help Grant expected them to give. Immediately after this the expedition ran hard aground.

On May 6 the troops were ready and the march began, Gillmore's corps on the right and Smith's on the left. At noon the men reached the base of the Bermuda Hundred peninsula, where instead of going on with the advance they stacked arms and began to entrench. As good engineers, Gillmore and Smith laid out an excellent defensive line three miles long, facing west, right flank touching the James, left flank on the Appomattox; a good idea, no doubt, except that the army was supposed to be on the offensive. From the middle of this line the advance guards could just see the spires of Petersburg, seven miles to the south. Richmond lay fifteen miles to the north; two or three miles directly west of the Federal line were the turnpike and the railroad that linked those cities; and within fifty miles there were fewer than 10,000 armed Confederates, counting everybody. While his 25,000 industriously dug in, Butler forwarded orders: let each corps commander advance a brigade to seize the railroad and the turnpike.

To do even this might have insured success, as it would have broken Richmond's principal railroad connection with the south, but that did not happen. Gillmore for some reason made no advance at all. Smith dutifully sent one brigade forward; it marched two miles, sparred lightly with a thin Confederate skirmish line, and presently went back to its starting point. Smith reported that to try to carry the railroad would have risked loss of his entire force (which was opposed that day by no more than nine companies of infantry); and Butler, the commanding general, instead of riding to the front to see to it that his orders were carried out, followed his political orientation and wrote an indignant letter to Senator Henry Wilson of Massachusetts, demanding that Gillmore's recent nomination to the grade of major general be rejected.

Next day, May 7, the army had been ashore for thirty-six hours, and Butler tried again. This time he managed to get 8000 men sent forward, but these men accomplished nothing; they ran into 2600 Confederates under a determined general named Bushrod Johnson, skirmished until they had 339 casualties, held the railroad briefly without harming it, and before sunset were recalled to their entrenchments. That night the Federal soldiers began to circulate a wry joke: How long will it take to get to Richmond if you advance two miles every day and come back to your starting point every night?

At-this distance it all seems rather unbelievable, but the surface of the incredible had barely been scratched. On May 9 Butler at last came to the front in person, and this time he got most of his army in motion. On the right Gillmore reached the railroad at Chester Station and actually tore up a little of the track. Four miles to the south of him Smith marched on Port Walthall Junction, but his skirmishers ran into a spatter of musket fire before they got there and Smith immediately called a halt and sent couriers off to Gillmore with an urgent request: if Gillmore would at once march south along the turnpike, his force and Smith's together, could pinch off and capture the Confederates who held the junction. Gillmore complied, suspending most of his railroad-destroying activities, and the whole thing was quite logical except for the fact that there were hardly any Confederates at the junction to be captured. Johnson had moved out the night before, and today he was dug in two miles to the south, behind an inconsequential stream known as Swift Creek; he had left no more than a few platoons behind to annoy the Yankees.

In the end, 14,000 Federal soldiers spent the afternoon trying to capture a hundred Confederates, who got away; and eventually Smith and Gillmore learned where Johnson was, made as if to attack his position, concluded that it was too strong to be taken by storm, and advised Butler that he had better attack Petersburg, if at all, from the east. Unhappily, they who so advised him were then due north of the place, unable to get at Petersburg from the east unless they went all the way back to Bermuda Hundred and got on the steamboats or bridged the Appomattox with pontoons.

Butler was furious, a fatal quality when it is blended with complete impotence. Undeniably, he had been poorly served by his lieutenants; but he was in addition utterly lacking in any military insight of his own, and so he never realized that he ought at least to keep his army on the Richmond & Petersburg Railroad, now that he had it there. He climaxed this day of errors by ordering everybody to come back once more to the fortified lines between the James and the Appomattox.

The blind were being led by the blind, and because nothing at all had been accomplished so far the unlimited opportunity that had been so obvious on May 5 was beginning to disappear entirely. During the next forty-eight hours some quiver of concern about this fact seems to have disturbed Butler, and on May 12 he got his army on the road once again, turning north this time to move up to Fort Darling and Drewry's Bluff and the immediate approaches to Richmond. The first part of the movement was unopposed, but it was made with great caution, and two days saw a total advance of approximately four miles; and at last the army entrenched, facing north, a mile short of the Confederate works that ran west from Fort Darling. Some dim premonition of on-coming trouble led Smith on May 15 to bring up a bale of telegraph wire and weave a cunning network of it, from stump to fence-post to felled timber, a foot off the ground, along the front of his corps.⁶

Among them, the leaders of this army had given away altogether too much time, and they had given it to men who knew how to use it—chiefly to General P. G. T. Beauregard, who was given to bombast but who underneath it all was an extremely able general. By the end of the second week in May Beauregard had had just time to get to the scene himself, and, with the aid of Braxton Bragg, to assemble close to 20,000 Confederate soldiers. He conferred hastily with President Davis and then, on May 16, he struck savagely at Butler's advance, trying to break Butler's right loose from the bank of the James, drive the Federal force inland, and capture it entire. Ten days after Butler had disembarked the tale of lost opportunities had come down to this: he no longer had any chance to do what he was supposed to do, and the only question remaining was whether his army would simply be defeated or would be destroyed outright.⁸

The Confederate attack came on a foggy dawn in a wet gray twilight that hid the rival lines from each other until they were at point-blank range. It struck Smith's corps, drove his right brigade away from the James, and seemed likely to crumple the whole line; but Smith partly atoned for his wretched performance down to date by handling his part of the battle with unflustered competence, and his network of telegraph wire threw the Confederate attack into confusion at the right moment. Men running forward through the fog never saw the wires until they fell over them, and when they got up and tried to get realigned the Federals shot them down; in Smith's expressive phrase, the attacking Southerners "were slaughtered like partridges." However, this did no more than stave off disaster. After half a day of hard fighting the Federal army had to retreat, and by late afternoon it was back in those entrenched lines on Bermuda Hundred neck once more. It had lost more than 4100 men, killed, wounded and missing, and although Beauregard's own losses had been severe the one fact that mattered was that the Yankee blow at Lee's rear had been completely frustrated. Beauregard felt that his victory would have been complete if a division which he had ordered up from Petersburg had pitched vigorously into Butler's rear, as instructed, while everybody else was assailing him in front, and he wrote that "we could and should have captured Butler's entire army." Considering the way Butler's army was commanded, this was probably correct, but even so Beauregard had accomplished a good deal. Half of Grant's plan for the Virginia campaign had been disrupted, and something like ten additional months of life had been won for the Confederacy. Generals have fought larger battles to win less.⁷

Butler's lines on the Bermuda Hundred neck were strong, and once he got his army back in them he was safe. Reflecting on this he felt that he had done all that could have been expected of him, and he revealed his glassy inability to understand either his responsibilities or the fate that had befallen him by assuring Secretary Stanton that "we can hold out against the whole of Lee's army," adding that "Grant will not be troubled with any further reinforcements to Lee from Beauregard's force." Half of this statement was irrelevant, inasmuch as Lee's army never had any intention of attacking Butler, and the other half of it was dead wrong, because Beauregard did reinforce Lee, promptly and substantially. If the Confederates could not break through Butler's lines, he could not now break out of them: it was simple enough for Beauregard to entrench an opposing line as invulnerable as Butler's, and Grant described the situation perfectly by remarking that as soon as Butler's army had withdrawn to the Bermuda Hundred position "it was as completely shut off from further operations directly against Richmond as if it had been in a bottle strongly corked." Shortly after the battle of Drewry's Bluff a good 6000 of Beauregard's troops joined Lee, who needed more troops desperately just then, on the dismal battlefields around Spotsylvania Courthouse.⁸

As a matter of fact, these 6000 were not the only reinforcements Lee received. He also got 2500 from the Shenandoah Valley, where Major General Franz Sigel became involved in a fiasco fully as humiliating as Butler's, although it was on a smaller scale. Like Butler, Sigel was politically important, because he had a devoted following among the German-Americans, who if left to themselves had a tendency to line up with the Democrats. Unlike Butler, he had had solid military training, in Germany, although it does not seem to have done him much good; he was a fretful, intellectually wizened sort who knew war by the books but could not handle it when he met it in person. Sigel took 6500 men up the Shenandoah early in May, intending to capture the town of Staunton and break the Virginia Central Railroad, and nothing went right. There were heavy rains, his little force got stretched out along fourteen miles of muddy roads, and at New Market on May 15 his advance guard met some 5000 Confederates led by Major General John C. Breckinridge, who had once run for President of the United States against Abraham Lincoln.

Breckinridge had brought 2500 veterans in from the western mountain country, had picked up such other units as were available in the upper valley, and from Lexington had drawn a spirited battalion that won part of the battle and almost all of the headlines—the corps of cadets from Virginia Military Institute, spruce and trim in parade-ground uniforms.

The cadets are about all many people remember of the battle of New Market, and some accounts make it appear that they beat Sigel all by themselves, with the rest of the army looking on in admiration. It was not quite that way— after all, there were only 247 of them, and Sigel probably would have been beaten if they had stayed at the Institute— but they did fight extremely well, and more than fifty of them got shot, making their ratio of casualties to numbers engaged something any combat outfit could be proud of; and they earned their right to the praise they got. When they joined Breckinridge's troops before the battle the veterans greeted them with tolerant derision. Some band struck up a tune which a cadet remembered as sounding like "Rockabye Baby," one lean foot soldier came around with a pair of scissors offering to cut off lovelocks, to be forwarded to next-of-kin after the battle, and others inquired whether the boys wanted their remains sent home in rosewood coffins lined with satin; and the muddy roads soon turned the trim uniforms into something that would never be tolerated on any parade ground. After the battle the cadets were made much of, and ever since then the anniversary of New Market has been a great day at the Institute.⁹

Sigel rode to the front when the firing began, and unwisely accepted battle without waiting for all of his troops to come up. He became boisterous, under fire, and rode about snapping his fingers at shell-bursts and shouting orders to his staff in German—unfortunate, since most of the staff spoke nothing but English—and Breckinridge drove back the advance, pounded the supporting regiments with artillery, and finally swept the Federals away in complete rout, capturing six guns and a number of prisoners, and compelling Sigel to retreat to Strasburg, twenty-five miles to the north.

Grant did not get the news for two or three days, and before it reached him he asked Washington to urge Sigel to speed up his advance on Staunton, pointing out that Lee was drawing supplies from that point and saying that "if Sigel can destroy the road there it will be of vast importance to us." Halleck replied that Sigel was in full retreat, adding: "He will do nothing but run. He never did anything else." Years afterward Douglas Southall Freeman summed it up: "Seldom did a small victory have so large an effect. Had Sigel not been driven back when he was, the Valley of Virginia might have been occupied by the Federals before the wheat crop was harvested. Hunger would have come sooner."¹⁰

About all that can be said for Sigel is that he spent little time afterward trying to explain away the disaster. Butler did. Butler came to see, at last, that his expedition might perhaps have done more than it did do, but he never could see that he himself was at fault in the least degree. He pointed out that Grant, after all, did not get Meade's army down to the James promptly so that the two armies could co-operate in an assault on Richmond, and he had bitter words for his subordinates. Smith and Gillmore, he asserted, "agreed upon but one thing and that was how they could thwart and interfere with me," and he went on to say that when they were not thwarting him they were trying to thwart each other, because "neither . . . really desired that the other should succeed."¹¹ Neither failure is worth extended study: Sigel's defeat is self-explanatory, and Butler's military operations defy rational analysis. All that matters is that a great opportunity had been missed.

4. However Bold We Might Be

THEWILDERNESS was lonely, with few roads and fewer clearings, lying under a shadow so heavy that most of its unproductive acres never saw sunlight. Armies operating here moved blindly and took their fighting where they found it, and in the spring of 1863 Lee and Stonewall Jackson came into the eastern fringe of this area to defeat Joe Hooker in a savage and confused battle around the weedy Chancellorsville crossroads. In May of 1864, exactly a year later, Lee's army was drawn up near Orange Court House, west of the Wilderness, astride the turnpike that went east to Fredericksburg, and eighteen miles to the northeast Grant and Meade had their host in camp above the Rapidan. On May 5 the rival armies marched into the heart of the Wilderness and began a fight that lasted until the end of the war. Except for part of a week in June, when there was a short break in contact, these two armies remained at close quarters for eleven months, with men killed every day—a great many of them on some days, only a few on others, but some every day, month after month, all the way to the end.

When May began Lee had probably 65,000 effectives, of all arms. The corps led by Ewell and Hill were on the turnpike, and Longstreet with two divisions was ten miles southwest, near Gordonsville. (Longstreet's third division, Pickett's, had been sent to North Carolina in the fall, when Longstreet went to Chickamauga, and had not yet been brought back.) Lee suspected that the Federals were likely to try to move past his right flank, and by May 3 he became virtually certain. His patrols reported smoke clouds by day and bonfires by night all along the Federal front—sure sign that the men were burning the winter's accumulation of wood and "fixings," always an army's last act when it broke up a winter camp; and then there were moving banks of dust beyond the forests, and occasional glimpses of white wagon tops and the glint of sunlight on musket barrels, to show that Grant's force was marching down to the lower fords of the Rapidan.¹ Grant had 120,000 men; probably close to 100,000 foot soldiers, of whom 84,000 were in the Army of the Potomac, which Meade had recently regrouped into three corps—II Corps under Hancock, V Corps under Warren, and VI Corps under Sedgwick. Attached to this army, but answerable then to Grant rather than to Meade, was Burnside with the IX Corps, perhaps 15,000 infantry. On May 4 this vast array crossed the Rapidan and headed south, and Grant telegraphed Halleck that FORTY-EIGHTHOURS NOW WILL DEMONSTRATE WHETHER THE ENEMY INTENDS GIVING BATTLE THIS SIDE OF RICHMOND.²

It took much less than forty-eight hours, and the demonstration was conclusive: Lee intended to fight as far "this side of Richmond" as he could possibly manage it. His army moved at noon on May 4, with Ewell going east along the Orange Turnpike and Hill marching on the Plank Road two or three miles to the south. Longstreet had much farther to go, and it would be close to forty-eight hours before he could come up into line with the others, but Lee refused to wait. He wanted to strike this Federal army while it was entangled in the Wilderness, with its inadequate roads and almost impenetrable thickets. Grant's advantage in numbers would count for less here, his superiority in artillery would be nullified because there were few places where guns could be used, and the 4000 wagons that moved with his army would be a cumbersome handicap. So the armies rapidly drew closer, the Federals going south and the Confederates moving east.

Collision point was reached promptly on May 5. The advancing Confederates met Yankee skirmishers on both the Turnpike and the Plank Road, drove them away, and brought on an expanding fight whose battle lines grew longer and longer until they ran beyond vision in the trackless woods. Lee had told Ewell he wanted to bring the enemy to battle as soon as possible, and he had his wish. By noon his two corps were fighting what seemed to be most of Meade's army, and now Lee wanted to wait for Longstreet before he made this fight any bigger. But the Wilderness battle was hard to control. The Federals had been flanked, but by mid-afternoon they were forcing the fighting and the Confederates could only hold on, dig in and take advantage of the fact that in this woodland the odds were all in favor of the defense.³

Grant's men were learning what Sherman's men learned in similar country around Dallas and New Hope Church— that it was almost impossible for any attack to succeed in a tangle like this. Warren and Sedgwick sent their brigades in against Hill and Ewell, and late in the day Hancock got some of his men into action, and the disjointed Federal lines were driving westward, trying to sweep the Confederates away by sheer force of numbers; but in woods like these men fought blindfolded, and a historian of the Army of the Potomac said that this was one of the strangest battles ever fought—"a battle which no man could see." Hancock said that men who tried to make a charge could not tell where their enemies were until they ran full tilt into them, and generals knew where the battle lines were only by listening to the roar of musketry—which was not much of a guide because it was everywhere, unbroken, always getting louder, a wall of sound that seemed to trap the battle smoke and turn the forest twilight into a choking fog full of unseen dangers. One Confederate infantryman reported that although everybody was fighting at close quarters, men hardly ever saw their enemies. The smoke was too heavy and the saplings and underbrush were too dense; one could only crouch and shoot at spurts of flame in the twilight. Men lost all sense of direction. At times whole divisions went astray, ran into flanking fire and were broken up before they knew what had hit them. Gaps in opposing lines went unexploited because nobody saw them; contrariwise, advancing reinforcements sometimes lost their way and fetched up behind units that needed no help. Toward evening the dead leaves and dry branches took fire, and there were spreading pools of flame running along hillsides and into ravines, trapping helpless wounded men and burning them alive. On most battlefields, the wounded tried to be stoical, and suffered in silence; here they kept screaming for help, and their cries echoed through the night. It was hard for men in either army to rescue them, for anyone who stood up and moved about in the firing zone was likely to get shot.⁴

Next day, May 6, was a series of climaxes muffled by fire and darkness. Hill's corps, badly mauled in the first day's fighting, was hit at dawn by Hancock's corps; wavered, fell back, and came to the verge of destruction. Just in time the head of Longstreet's corps arrived, reaching a little clearing where Lee himself was trying to restore his battle line.

Altogether, a legendary moment. Lee rode hat in hand to greet these stout fighting men, who had been on the march since midnight: found the famous Texas brigade, once Hood's, and tried to lead it against the Yankees in person. The Texans refused to budge unless he stayed behind, and their cry of "Lee to the rear!" sounded across the clearing above the clatter of musketry. Lee submitted, at last, and the Texans swept past him, struck the Federal advance and broke it, giving Hill's men a chance to rally. Burly Longstreet rode to the front, found an opening on the left of Hancock's line, sent troops there in a swift flanking attack, and compelled Hancock's entire line to beat a panicky retreat which was all the worse because most of the men who fled could see no enemies and knew only that something up in front had gone wrong.

Now, abruptly, the obstacles to a decisive offensive in the Wilderness began to work for the Federals. Longstreet tried to press the advantage his men had won, but the Confederates could see no farther into the smoky woods than the Yankees could see. Two of Longstreet's units moved at right angles to each other, collided, opened fire—and Longstreet was critically wounded, Brigadier General Micah Jenkins was killed, and the assault fell into a confusion that gave Hancock ample time to rally his men behind log breastworks a mile or so to the rear. When the Confederate counterattack at last was renewed the men had to advance through what amounted almost to a forest fire, and the Federals drove them back.

At the close of the day opportunity opened, briefly, at the other end of the Confederate line, on Ewell's front, where it was found that Sedgwick's right flank was exposed. John B. Gordon's brigade struck this flank in the twilight, drove it back, captured several hundred prisoners, and then met stiffening resistance that could not be overcome before night ended the fighting. After the war Gordon argued that if his attack had been ordered earlier the whole Federal right would have been crumpled and Grant would have been soundly defeated. Perhaps the lost chance looked larger than life-size, as the years passed, and perhaps the whole episode was simply one more proof that in this woodland fighting the brightest opportunities could go unseen until it was too late; whatever the truth of it, the two-day battle ended at last, the armies grimly facing each other at close range on a field fearfully littered with dead and wounded. Casualty lists had been prodigious. The Federals had lost more than 17,000 men, of whom more than 2200 had been killed outright; Lee's losses had been smaller but bore about the same relation to the numbers engaged; neither side had won anything worth mentioning.⁵

One thing was clear: Grant and Lee did not make war in the style of Sherman and Johnston, sparring cautiously and looking for openings. They simply looked for each other, and as soon as they found each other they began to fight. Neither man had yet met anyone like the other. Trying to go around his opponent's flank, Grant got nothing but a head-on engagement out of it, and his army received a tactical setback nearly as severe as the one Hooker got at Chancellorsville; yet the Chancellorsville pattern did not repeat itself and the setback lost its meaning—if Grant was not Sherman he was not Hooker, either. Having seized the initiative, Lee could not hold it because the Federals had both the will and the power to make him fight a continuous battle in which he could do no more than follow their lead. On the evening of May 7, after a day in which the tired armies faced each other across a dull smolder of skirmish-line firing, Grant put his men on the road and moved off in the night—not back toward the river crossings, but on toward the southeast, heading for the crossroads of Spotsylvania Courthouse, beyond Lee's right

Lee recognized the move as soon as it began, and countered it with great skill, getting infantry down to the crossroads barely ahead of the Federals and turning this blow at his flank into another head-on engagement. Both armies swarmed up to the firing line, and the battlefield expanded as it had done in the Wilderness, spreading out across farms and woodlots, division after division coming into action on each side under directives which amounted to little more than the stern imperative: Find the enemy as soon as you can and fight him where you find him. There was no subtlety in this battle, and no let-up either. It went on and on, day after day, for almost two weeks, the whole ponderous engagement revolving slowly, like a clumsy hurricane, as the Federals tried in vain to force their way past Lee's right. Among the many Federals who died in this fighting was one irreplaceable: Major General John Sedgwick, commander of the VI Corps, killed on May 9.

It was hard for anyone to tell what was happening. In Washington, Secretary Stanton reflected that at least this fight was not going as previous fights had gone. Before, he said, "the enemy's strength has always been most felt in his first blows"; here Lee's first blows had been heavy but they had failed, instead of retreating Grant was continuing to advance, and perhaps complete success was in sight. Grant believed that the result of the Wilderness fight was "decidedly in our favor," but he confessed that it had been "impossible to inflict the heavy blow on Lee's army I had hoped"; significantly he added that the exact route he would follow to reach the James River was "not yet definitely marked out." Lee told Mr. Davis that every Federal attack had been repelled and that his own army was still on the front and flank of its opponent, and he closed stoutly: "With the blessing of God I trust we shall be able to prevent Gen. Grant from reaching Richmond."⁶

There was reason for Lee's assurance. He had proved that the Federal host could neither slip past him nor overpower him; whatever happened, there was not going to be the helter-skelter "race for Richmond" which Grant had looked forward to when he marched toward Spotsylvania.⁷ Yet Lee was paying a high price for this. He was accepting the defensive. His genius was for the dazzling maneuver that could cancel the weight of numbers and give his own army the initiative, and this continuous all-out fighting gave that genius insufficient scope. He had compelled McClellan and Pope and Hooker to give up their own plans and fight defensively to escape destruction, but the most he could say now was that he believed he could keep Grant from getting to Richmond. He could interfere with Grant's plans, but he could not impose plans of his own.

Originally the crossroads at Spotsylvania seemed important because it lay behind Lee's right flank. As the armies moved that ceased to be true, but the crossroads still drew the fighting: to possess it, or to destroy each other, or perhaps just to explore the grim potentials of modern war, the armies struggled and pounded each other, day after day, all about a vast semicircle west and north and east of the road center. The fighting taught certain lessons, at a remarkably high price. In the Wilderness it showed the futility of trying to win a significant victory in an untracked forest; at Spotsylvania it proved that trench warfare was even more constrictive—with both sides well dug in, a breakthrough meant little because the defenders could repair the break faster than the attackers could exploit it, and the only sure result would be an immense loss of life under conditions more than ordinarily abominable. If there could be a climax to a battle of this kind it came on May 12, in a heavy rainstorm, when Grant and Meade ordered a frontal assault on a bulging crescent of Confederate trenches and brought on one of the most terrible fights of the entire war—a close-range struggle in the mud that began before dawn and lasted until nearly midnight, the worst of it centering about a little angle in a trench line remembered ever afterward as the bloody angle. Here Hancock's corps broke Lee's line, capturing an infantry division and twenty guns, and by the old standards the Federals had won the day—except that actually they had won no more than a pen-full of prisoners and a quarter section of splintered groves and pastures, crisscrossed by rifle pits where dead bodies had been trampled out of sight in the mud. Next day the fighting went on as if nothing had happened, except that for a time the tempo was rather subdued.

Before the bloody angle offensive, Grant had told Halleck that he intended to "fight it out on this line if it takes all summer," and this blunt vow greatly pleased Northern patriots—few of whom noticed that in little more than a week Grant abandoned "this line" entirely and went off to find another one. In effect, he had said that he would make Lee fight here until the end came, but this abruptly ceased to be a good idea because the things that should have happened far in Lee's rear, which would have made this a ruinous fight for the Confederacy, did not happen.⁸

Butler and Sigel had failed, one man bottled up, the other driven off, both men utterly thwarted: hollow men, punctured by their betters. Even Phil Sheridan had done less than was expected. Sheridan had been given the Army of the Potomac cavalry, on the ground that he was enough of a driver to get some effective work out of it, and on May 9 he had ridden off with 10,000 troopers to threaten Richmond, which was supposed to be under attack by Butler. Stuart met him and fought him, two days later, at Yellow Tavern; Stuart himself was mortally wounded and his cavalry was beaten, but the Richmond defenses were too strong to penetrate, Butler's people were nowhere in sight, and Sheridan could do no more than ride down the peninsula to refit under protection of Federal gunboats. He had made a spectacular raid and he had ended the career of one of the Confederacy's most famous soldiers, but he had not shaken Lee's grip on Spotsylvania.

Because of these failures—most especially, because of Butler's failure—Spotsylvania was no longer an impossible place for Lee to make an extended stand. Grant's promise to fight here if the fight lasted all summer was based on the expectation—fully justified, at the time he voiced the promise—that the subsidiary offensives on the Shenandoah and the James would compel Lee to use part of his inadequate resources to defend his rear. Overnight, these offensives had evaporated; instead of having to look out for his rear, Lee was drawing new strength from it—the reinforcements Richmond sent him, once Butler and Sigel had been disposed of, made up for the total he had lost in the Wilderness. Lee wanted to keep Grant away from Richmond, and after the middle of May Spotsylvania was a perfectly good place for him to do it.

For that matter it was a perfectly good place for Grant to fight, if Grant sought nothing more than the war of attrition which is sometimes written down as the basis of his strategy. A good deal of attrition had already taken place at Spotsylvania, and there could be as much more as anybody needed; the armies were locked together, and the remorseless, two-men-for-one kind of killing such a program demanded could take place there as well as anywhere else. Actually, Grant wanted something different. He wanted precisely what Lee hoped to deny him—to get close to Richmond, attacking the geographical rear of the Army of Northern Virginia, pinning that army in a tight circle on the James River so that it must either counterattack against long odds or submit to a siege that would deprive it of all mobility. With the Butler-Sigel moves canceled he could not hope to do this by continuing to fight within fifteen miles of the Rapidan crossings. So he re-cast his plans in the middle of the campaign and on the night of May 20 he began to move again.

His army was large and Lee's army touched it everywhere, and to move it was a ponderous business. Bit by bit, Grant shifted strength to his left, heading southeast again as he had done after the Wilderness, trying to establish himself beyond and behind the Confederate right. Once again, Lee understood the move and shifted to meet it. The armies were never wholly out of contact, there were incessant stabbing fights between cavalry and infantry patrols, and after three days the armies faced each other once more at the crossings of the North Anna River, twenty miles from Spotsylvania. Lee got there first and chose his ground here with care, and after several days of unrewarding fighting Grant shifted again, moving once more by his left, the armies striking sparks as they brushed against each other. They got below the Pamunkey River, and as May came to an end they confronted each other along Totopotomoy Creek, eighteen miles below the North Anna battlefield and hardly ten miles northeast of Richmond. Here again they sparred and struck at one another, looking for openings and finding none; then the Federals side-slipped once more, bringing up on June 1 at the desolate crossroads of Cold Harbor, out on the fringe of the Gaines' Mill field where Lee's men and McClellan's had fought so desperately two years earlier.

By now the armies were running out of space. They had covered more than fifty miles in the unmanageable, rolling series of battles that began in the Wilderness, and now they could roll no farther. Beyond the Federal left at Cold Harbor was the Chickahominy River, a swampy barrier to additional maneuvering; behind Lee's army was Richmond itself, less than a day's march away. Now battle line faced battle line, with tangled abatis to protect the hastily dug trenches, and with field guns sited to cover all of the approaches. Grant had summoned W. F. Smith's corps from its bottled-up idleness at Bermuda Hundred to help in the assault, and Lee had his entire strength in line, with virtually no reserves. When the fighting began it would be head-on because there was no other way to fight here.

The armies had reached this spot after unending fighting and appalling losses; yet in the week just before this battle the high command on each side was hopeful. Grant told Halleck that Lee's army "is really whipped" and would not fight outside of entrenchments; Meade assured his wife that "we undoubtedly have the morale over them," and G. K. Warren wrote that "the Rebs are getting dispirited" and predicted that "they would fall back if they had any place to go to." At the same time, Lee wrote Mr. Davis that Grant's army "has been very much shaken" and said that the spirit of his own army was never better; "I fear no injury to it from any retrograde move that may be dictated by sound military policy." In the same vein, Colonel Venable of Lee's staff wrote that the Federals were "dispirited by the bloody repulse of repeated attacks on our lines." Actually, there is little to show that the rank and file on either side was discouraged. The average soldier remained ready to try to do whatever he was ordered to do, although every man would doubtless have agreed with a remark made by one of Lee's veterans: "There has never been such fighting, I reckon, in the history of war."⁹

Late on the afternoon of June 1 Federal infantry attacked at Cold Harbor, won minor successes, and led Grant to feel that a hard blow at daylight on June 2 might break the line. The idea was good, in a way, because the Confederates at Cold Harbor were not ready to meet an all-out attack; unhappily, the Federals were not ready to make one. Massing the troops took much longer than had been anticipated, twenty-four hours were lost, the big assault could not be made until June 3, and when it was made a storm of Confederate rifle fire tore the Federal columns and inflicted a resounding defeat—the most unrelieved and tragically costly one the Army of the Potomac had suffered since it crossed the Rapidan. The assault was made by three army corps—Hancock's, Smith's, and Sedgwick's old VI Corps, now led by Horatio G. Wright. Wright's men took some out-works but were pinned down by rifle fire before they could make an effective penetration, and they had to give up after suffering severe losses. Hancock attacked with two divisions and Smith with one, and these three divisions were wrecked. Altogether, the Federals lost close to 7000 men in less than an hour. Even Burnside's hopeless attack on the stone wall at Fredericksburg had not been more brutally smashed.¹⁰

Here was final proof of the truth that had been emerging for the past month: the rifle and the trench now dominated the battlefield, so that good field works adequately manned by determined men could not be taken at any price. (Fifty years later, in the First World War, European generals would have to learn this lesson all over again.) As Thomas had said at Kennesaw Mountain, an army fighting thus could literally use itself up. For a week after the battle, both sides perfected their defenses, and the armies faced each other along miles of intricate entrenchments, enduring agonies of heat and thirst and weariness, and daily losses from fitful bombardments and unending sniper fire; and General Grant had to make new plans.

From the beginning he had hoped to strike Lee's vulnerable rear along the James River. He could not roll to the left here, because he had run out of space, and yet if he could not somehow get past Lee's flank his whole campaign was a failure and the Confederacy was substantially nearer to independence. Two possibilities were open, and he undertook to use both of them at once.

For one thing, he would try again to break Lee's important supply line to the Shenandoah Valley. Sigel had failed ignominiously, but his troops had been pulled together and entrusted to Major General David Hunter, strengthened by a solid body of infantry under Brigadier General George Crook that had come eastward from the West Virginia mountains. Early in June Hunter was moving up the Shenandoah Valley, defeating Confederate forces that tried to stop him and showing a marked talent for burning homes and spreading destruction and bitterness among the civil population as he advanced. Now Hunter was striking toward Lynchburg: Grant concluded to send Sheridan off, with two divisions of cavalry, to join Hunter and destroy the line of the Virginia General Railroad some distance west of Richmond, and Sheridan started on June 7.

Simultaneously, Grant would take a leaf from the book written at Vicksburg: break off contact with Lee entirely, move fast, get his army clear over to the other side of the James and strike directly into the rear area before Lee knew what was happening. This would be a move unlike any Grant had tried in Virginia—harder and riskier, with disaster as penalty for failure—but there was no other good card to play. Grant played it; and while Sheridan's troopers set out for Charlottesville, Warren's V Corps left the trenches, crossed the Chickahominy by the old Long Bridge Road, and took position on the edge of White Oak Swamp, for all the world as if the Federal army planned to march on Richmond between the Chickahominy and the James.¹¹

The risk of course was that when Lee's army was left to itself its commander had a way of doing unexpected things, and one of Grant's prime responsibilities from the day the campaign began had been to grip that army so tightly that it could not move off on an offensive of its own. So far he had done this, at substantial cost; now he was letting go, and the armies were moving out of contact. Yet the risk was smaller than it seemed. Lee was restricted, not because Grant's army was immediately in front of him but because Richmond was immediately behind him. Maneuvers that might have been possible fifty miles north were impossible here. At all costs Lee had to wait and counter whatever move his opponent might be making now.

The thrust was made deftly. The Federals left Cold Harbor on the night of June 12, and next morning the long chain of trenches was empty. The Yankee army had gone off the map, and while Confederate patrols located Warren's corps, and reported that Smith's corps had gone back to the Pamunkey and embarked on transports, it was hard to tell what this meant. Lee could only shift his army down below the Chickahominy to await developments; meanwhile, the Federal army went all the way to the James, where monitors cruised back and forth to protect the engineers who were laying a long pontoon bridge. Then Warren's corps withdrew, all the road crossings were held by Federal cavalry, and Lee was in the dark. To make matters much worse, the threat posed by General Hunter became so grave that Lee had to detach troops to meet it—8000 men, or thereabouts, under General Early, sent off at a time when Lee needed every man he could get. A few days earlier Lee had told Secretary Seddon: "If we can defeat Grant here the valley can easily be recovered, but if we cannot defeat Grant I am afraid we will be unable to hold the valley."¹² It was more than the valley that was in danger now, however. If Hunter took Lynchburg, came east and joined Sheridan the pressure on the capital and on Lee's army would be overwhelming.

Grant's plan worked perfectly up to the point where it was about to win the war. Then it did not work at all. For one thing, Grant left altogether too much to his lieutenants; for another, some of them did not measure up properly. In addition, it was easier to deceive Lee for a few days than to beat him permanently; and for a climax David Hunter was no match for Jubal Early.

But it did begin well. On June 15 Grant was squarely in Lee's rear. He was south of the James and Lee was north of it, and a column of 15,000 Federals led by Baldy Smith was marching up to Petersburg, the railroad center whose fall would mean the fall of Richmond. Beauregard, defending Petersburg, had 9000 men, but 7000 of them were holding the lines at Bermuda Hundred, keeping the cork in the bottle that held Ben Butler. To meet Smith, Beauregard had hardly more than 2000 men, including cavalry and home guards, and that evening Smith broke the Petersburg line and the road into the little city was wide open. Beauregard testified after the war that "Petersburg at that hour was clearly at the mercy of the Federal commander, who had all but captured it,"¹³ but Smith served Grant now as he had served Butler a few weeks earlier; he saw risks rather than opportunity, went on the defensive, and made no further advance. By noon of the next day, June 16, three Federal army corps were present—Smith's, Hancock's, and Burnside's, a total of more than 50,000 men—and Beauregard was forced to withdraw the force that had been watching Butler (taking the cork out of the bottle, at last) and bring it down for a last-ditch defense of Petersburg.

By all the odds, Grant's troops should have won a shattering victory, but they did not. Butler could do nothing with his own opportunity, and by the time he was ready to try something Pickett's division had come down and reoccupied the empty Confederate lines at Bermuda Hundred. The 50,000 Yankees at Petersburg somehow did not attack until evening, and Beauregard was just able to throw them back. Next day, June 17, most of Meade's army was on hand and most of Lee's was not, but the Federal assault was miserably co-ordinated and although it finally broke the Confederate line Beauregard managed to draw a new line and hold it until darkness ended the fighting. On June 18 Meade's command arrangements seemed to come apart altogether, and the blow he wanted to strike was halting, disjointed, and ineffective; Lee's army reached the scene, the Federal offensive ground to a standstill, and by the end of the day Petersburg was wholly secure, Lee was on hand and in charge, and Grant had concluded that it was time to give up frontal assaults and resort to siege warfare.

The stroke that had taken the Federal army across the James, brilliantly begun, ended in fumbling futility. When the leading elements of the army most needed skillful and aggressive leadership they were left to themselves. Grant unfortunately devoted himself largely to rear-area operations during this expedition, and while that ordinarily was proper enough for a commander-in-chief it did assume that competent lieutenants up front knew what to do and would do it quickly; but Butler did nothing, Smith failed abjectly, and Meade himself put on the weakest performance he made in all the war.¹⁴ To round out the picture, Early defeated Hunter at Lynchburg on June 18 and drove him off in full retreat, Sheridan fought an inconclusive battle with Wade Hampton's cavalry at Trevilian Station, near Gordonsville, and withdrew after failing to do any substantial harm to the Virginia Central Railroad, and the dire threat to Lee's line of supplies was ended.

So the campaign that began on the Rapidan on May 4 ended, six weeks later, in the trenches around Petersburg. In those weeks the Federals had lost between 60,000 and 70,000 men, Lee's army was still undefeated, and it seemed —in the North, and also in the South—that Grant's massive campaign had been wasted effort. On the one side there was profound discouragement and on the other there was extravagant hope, and each condition took shape so quickly that men were bewildered. Appraising what had taken place in the light of what had been anticipated, men could not at once understand that the war in Virginia had permanently changed: that the two armies had gone south of the James River under circumstances which meant that they would stay there, intimately embraced, until the war ended. Never again would either of these armies see the area for which it was named—Northern Virginia, the Potomac River. Although Lee's army was safe enough, in Petersburg, it could not get out. Never again would it take the offensive, threatening to win the war by sheer aggressive brilliance. Already it was under dominance: it was pinned down, and it could only fight for time. As one Confederate general remarked, afterward: "However bold we might be, however desperately we might fight, we were sure in the end to be worn out. It was only a question of a few months, more or less."¹⁵

5. Vested Interest in Failure

THE WAR WAS an exercise in violence bounded by two presidential elections; one had brought it on, and another would help to end it. The election of 1860 indicated that great change was coming to a society that could endure no change, and there had been an appeal to arms from that finding; now, in 1864, there was going to be a new election to determine whether the appeal should be sustained or denied. No matter what the election said, the mere fact that it was being held was significant. It was an act of faith, an affirmation that even war itself must at last be subject to a decision reached at the polls. Perhaps the strangest thing about this strangest of all elections was that it never occurred to anyone not to have it. Whether any nation so conceived and so dedicated could long endure . . . well, they would vote.

How they would vote was unpredictable because the appeal to war had wondrously clouded all matters of politics.

By mid-summer it was clear that the opposing candidates would be Abraham Lincoln and General George B. McClellan, with Pathfinder John Charles Fremont hovering on the fringe as a third-party candidate. The issues were mixed. The war was an issue, and the way to win the war, and the course to be taken in respect to the Negro. Also there was a point Mr. Lincoln had raised in his first inaugural, more pressing now than when he said it: "Suppose you go to war, you cannot fight always; and when, after much loss on both sides, and no gain on either, you cease fighting, the identical old questions as to terms of intercourse are again upon you." These identical old questions were an issue, their weight resting on every voter; the nation must presently face what it tried to avoid four years earlier.

Confederates of course could not vote in this election. Yet it was everlastingly to their interest that the election be held, because this proved that constitutional government still functioned; and the future offered them no other safeguard. Grim General Sherman had recently warned them that when they appealed to war they put themselves utterly at the mercy of the rules of war—which, he asserted (and he was a rising authority on the subject), were altogether merciless. When the Southern states seceded, he said, they made it possible for the Federal government to do literally anything it wanted to do with them because "war is simply power unrestrained by constitution or compact."

Sherman put these thoughts in a letter to his brother, Senator John Sherman of Ohio, suggesting that to publish the letter "would do no harm except turn the Richmond press against me as the prince of barbarians." He did not understand democracy, he had nothing against slavery, and he certainly belonged to no political faction; he was, in fact, that most unpredictable of persons, a completely radical arch-conservative, and his footnote to the pending election deserved attention. It was almost as if this election was an appeal from war back to the ballot. As Sherman said, war was power unrestrained; here was the restraint coming back into play again—a restraint which unhappily could be applied only in the atmosphere created by war.¹

This disturbed Governor Horatio Seymour of New York, a devout Democrat whose appeals for restraint were so unrestrained that some Republicans considered him a Copperhead. Seymour now was raising a perfectly valid point. "The rights of the states were reserved, and the powers of the general government were limited, to protect the people in their persons, property and consciences in time of danger and civil commotion."² Yet because the war had been fought so long and so hard, neither the rights of the states nor the powers of the general government would ever again look quite as they had looked in 1860, and with an election approaching this colored everything men did. Congress discovered this early in the spring when it found that it could not provide a temporary government for the new territory of Montana without first arguing hotly about the Dred Scott decision.

Montana was empty and faraway, and so was the Dred Scott case, but the two were fused by the heat of an election year. It began when the House sent to the Senate a territorial bill providing in a routine way that "any white male inhabitant" could vote in Montana; whereupon Senator Morton S. Wilkinson of Minnesota moved to amend the bill by giving the vote to "any male citizen of the United States." This was an avowed attempt to let Negroes vote in Montana, and Senator Reverdy Johnson of Maryland protested that in the Dred Scott case Chief Justice Taney had held that a Negro was not a citizen. But the Senate liked Wilkinson's amendment, and after Senator Sumner cried that Congress should no longer "wear the strait-jacket of the Dred Scott decision" the amendment was adopted.

When the amended bill went back to the House it was quickly apparent that in this chamber the radicals were not in control. The Ohio Democrat, George H. Pendleton, asserted that the amendment was nothing less than an attempt to reverse a ruling of the Supreme Court, and he pointed out that in addition it was a bold leap into the dark. He wanted everyone to understand "that now, for the first time in the history of the government, one of the branches of Congress has attempted to establish Negro political equality." A majority felt as he did, and by a vote of 75 to 67 the House refused to accept the amendment and instructed its conferees to agree to no bill that did not limit the franchise to white men.

The whole business was somewhat unreal, inasmuch as Montana then contained no Negroes at all and it seemed unlikely that it would ever have very many. Yet the war itself was based on a similar bit of unreality, because it had developed out of a furious demand for a slave code for territories almost equally devoid of Negroes; possibly the abstract principle governing the granting of human rights ran roughly parallel to the one that governed their denial. At the moment, however, the question hardly seemed worth developing, and Senator James Doolittie of Wisconsin protested earnestly against interjecting this disturbing element— "I mean the issue of Negro suffrage"—into an election campaign. The Senate finally backed down, saving face slightly by agreeing that the government in Montana should be organized by the class of persons previously authorized to organize the territory of Idaho: that is, by white male citizens.

Ben Wade, one of the toughest of the radicals, said that this was all right because the non-existence of Negroes in Montana made the case inconsequential; but he served notice that "whenever this question shall be raised in such sort as to affect the rights of any man, I shall take the broad principle of right and stand by it as firmly as anyone else."³

The Dred Scott decision had been controlling, once, and it had helped to create the conditions that brought on a war, but now it was nearing the end of its existence. So was its author, Chief Justice Taney, a frail man living out the summer, sere and shrunken as an oak leaf in February. Senator Wade made a rough joke about him, and General Halleck, who loved to collect bits of Washington gossip, passed it along in a chatty letter to his friend Francis Lieber:

"You speak of Chief Justice Taney's health. Did you ever hear of Ben Wade's joke about the Chief Justice? Ben (who is probably the most profane man in Congress) says that he used to pray for Taney every night during Buchanan's administration, that his life might be spared till a new president could appoint his successor; but he over-did the business & his prayers were likely to carry him through this administration also! 'If the Lord will forgive me this time, I will never pray for a Chief Justice again!' "⁴

Wade had stopped praying—possibly the exercise was unfamiliar and exhausting—and in mid-July he was denouncing the President in a fine fury. Mr. Lincoln had applied a pocket veto to the Wade-Davis bill, which held that Congress rather than the President must control the process of reconstruction, but he had refused to make an issue of it and had said that any Southern state wishing to be rebuilt by the Wade-Davis formula, which was most restrictive, could have its way. Now Wade and Davis were out with an angry manifesto, making the issue Mr. Lincoln had refused to make, warning the President that "if he wishes our support he must confine himself to his executive duties—to obey and execute, not make, the laws—to suppress by arms armed rebellion and leave political reorganization to Congress." The manifesto sounded ferocious, and it led Mr. Lincoln to remark that "to be wounded in the house of one's friends is perhaps the most grievous affliction that can befall a man"; yet it was a warning for the future rather than a real and present danger.⁵

Proof of this lies in what did not happen in connection with the presidential candidacy of General Fremont.

Fremont was nominated at the end of May by a group styling itself the party of the Radical Democracy, meeting in Cleveland and drawing some four hundred delegates of whom a scant handful had national reputations. It listened to oratory, received a letter from Abolitionist Wendell Phillips denouncing the President's ten percent plan, "which puts all power in the hands of the unchanged white race, soured by defeat, hating the laboring classes, plotting constantly for aristocratic institutions"; and after nominating Fremont it adopted a platform which seemed to express the fullest desires of the Republican radicals. The platform called for reunion, a Constitutional amendment to end slavery, limitation of presidential tenure to one term, Congressional control of reconstruction, and confiscation and redistribution of all lands held by Rebels. This caused rejoicing among Democrats, who were delighted to see a split in the opposition, but it failed to win the support of the principal radicals, including the impassioned Senator Wade and Congressman Davis.⁸

One reason may have been that Fremont failed to be as fierce as he was expected to be. He quickly disavowed the plank on confiscation, saying that such a program was neither practical nor wise and that "in the adjustments that are to follow peace no considerations of vengeance can consistently be admitted." A bigger reason was that if the radicals defeated Mr. Lincoln by throwing their strength to Fremont they would certainly cause the election of a Democrat, which was the last thing on earth they wanted. After all, they could live with President Lincoln. What he wanted most, they wanted: reunion on terms imposed in Washington, and abolition of slavery by constitutional amendment. They were just warning him.

For that matter Mr. Lincoln could issue warnings of his own. He issued one on June 30 when he abruptly dropped Salmon P. Chase from his cabinet, replacing him as Secretary of the Treasury with Senator William P. Fessenden of Maine.

Chase was a radical, tried and true; the senatorial bloc considered him too erratic and too self-righteous, but he was unquestionably thoroughly sound on the essentials. For months he had done all he could do to win the presidential nomination, and when at last he failed—his political ineptitude was almost as unlimited as his political ambition—Mr. Lincoln quietly waited for an opening. It came when the two men differed about a Treasury appointment. Chase sent in a resignation, as he had done several times before, meaning only to put on a little heat, and immediately got a starchy note accepting the resignation. . . "you and I have reached a point of mutual embarrassment in our official relation which it seems cannot be overcome, or longer sustained, consistently with the public service."⁷ Chase was out.

For the moment Mr. Lincoln was leading from strength. In the winter and spring there had been sporadic attempts to find another nominee, but the hard fact was that the Republicans had no other man of comparable stature, and by the time the party convention opened in Baltimore—officially it was the National Union Party now, to prove that it welcomed war Democrats—the opposition was helpless. David Davis, who had managed Mr. Lincoln's candidacy at the Wigwam in Chicago in 1860, did not even bother to attend, and he wrote to Mr. Lincoln to explain his course: "If there had been a speck of opposition I would have gone to Baltimore. But the opposition is utterly beaten. The fight is not even interesting, and the services of no one is necessary."⁸ Davis was correct. Mr. Lincoln was renominated on June 8 without trouble, and although the Missouri delegation did vote for U. S. Grant it swung into line as soon as the ballot ended and successfully moved that a unanimous vote for Mr. Lincoln be recorded. Without visible guidance from the White House, the convention discarded Vice-President Hannibal Hamlin in favor of an anti-slavery war Democrat from the South, nominating Andrew Johnson, military governor of Tennessee, for the vice-presidency.⁹ Mr. Lincoln warmly endorsed the party platform, emphasizing his support of the plank that called for a constitutional amendment to end slavery, and for the moment the party was in harmony.¹⁰

The platform was straight war-party doctrine. It was not, actually, very different from the one the Cleveland convention had given Fremont. It endorsed the President, whereas the Clevelanders wanted him out, and instead of demanding confiscation of Rebel lands it recommended undefined "punishment"; and where the Cleveland platform specifically asserted that reconstruction was a matter for Congress, the Baltimore platform avoided this issue and simply called on the administration to demand unconditional surrender, without compromise. At Cleveland the radicals had laid their demands on the line; at Baltimore they had been flexible, accepting harmony in the belief that they could control what would follow. They risked little, for if the President grew soft on secession during the summer they could swing over to Fremont; Fremont's candidacy was, in effect, the fine type buried in the contract reached at Baltimore.

The platform had one plank that seemed pointless but was not: a declaration that harmony must prevail in national councils and that "we regard as worthy of public confidence and official trust only those who cordially endorse the principles proclaimed in these resolutions, and which should characterize the administration of the government." This shaft was aimed at Montgomery Blair, the Postmaster General—at him, at the Blair family in general, and through them at all of the conservative Republicans who might backslide from the true faith. The radicals wanted Blair out of the cabinet and this was their way of saying so.¹¹

Montgomery Blair was trying to make a deal with the Democrats. He wanted Mr. Lincoln re-elected and he wanted slavery destroyed, but he also most passionately wanted the radicals beaten. He was trying to put together a conservative coalition that would accept emancipation and yet keep America a white man's country, and if his proposal was somewhat Byzantine it would be copied (now with success and now without it) for a century or more. He put it bluntly in a letter to S. L. M. Barlow: "By giving up the past, conceding slavery to be extinct, you can make an issue upon which not only the Democrats of the North and South may unite against the Republicans, but on which the larger portion of the Republicans will join in sustaining this exclusive right of Government in the white race."¹²

Blair had a specific plan. Believing McClellan the strongest candidate the Democrats could name, he wanted him out of the way, and all through the winter and spring he had been calling for action: let McClellan take himself out of the presidential race, make his peace with President Lincoln, and accept once more some command in the army. For McClellan, Blair confessed, this might be a wrench: "He is young and there is a great future opening to one of his genius and antecedents. But you must bear with me when I tell you that it does not lie in the direction of waging a war against the chief magistrate, who is waging a war for the liberties of this continent at home and also will soon have to do it against despots abroad." The renunciation need not be permanent: "You must not understand that when I object to his being a candidate for the presidency that I would call upon him to remove such pretensions for all time. I mean only that now is not the proper time for indulging such thoughts—we have on hand a Rebellion."¹³

It was a curious proposal, all in all, and it was supported not long after the Baltimore convention when Francis P. Blair, Sr.—redoubtable Old Man Blair, in person—went to New York to talk to General McClellan. The Old Man repeated what Montgomery had said, urging McClellan to ask President Lincoln for reassignment to the army with the express proviso that this was not a step toward the Democratic nomination; and he added, "In case the President should refuse this request he would then be responsible for the consequences." McClellan listened courteously, nodded, said he would let him know—and that was that.¹⁴

McClellan was unmoved, and so was Barlow, who told Montgomery Blair that although a hot election campaign probably would be bad, its evils would be nothing compared to those that would follow a victory for President Lincoln, "whose re-election will be claimed to be, and will in fact be, an endorsement by the people of every fallacy and monstrosity which the folly and fanaticism of the radicals may invent, including miscegenation, Negro equality, territorial organization and subjugation, all to end in bankruptcy, dishonor and disunion." But Barlow's recital of the catalog of horrors showed that he had not got Blair's point—which was that it really ought not to matter much, either to Northern Democrats or to actually embattled Confederates, if Mr. Lincoln won both the war and the election, so long as nothing more than slavery died. Unadorned emancipation, all naked and defenseless, need not be feared because it could be handled. Blair believed that what had frightened Congressman Pendleton was the phantom that had driven Southerners to war in the first place, and in another letter he became most explicit:

"The people of the South have not been aroused against the people of the North by the love of slavery. I am to the manner born and know whereof I speak—it is Negro equality, not slavery, that they are fighting about, and it is necessary to demonstrate that the North is not fighting for Negro equality. The late vote on the Montana question in the House of Representatives, on which the Democrats voted in the majority for the first and only time this winter, shows how important it is to get rid of the slavery question in order that we may get at the Negro question which lies immediately behind it. My object is, if possible, to make this the Presidential issue, with a view to a restoration of the Union. If we can dispose of the slave question, and not without, we shall have the miscegenators in a party to themselves and can beat them easily, but whilst they can cover themselves behind the slave question they will prevail."¹⁵