THE SECTIONS DEVELOP AN IDENTITY
There had been many woeful misunderstandings between North and South in the years that led up to the Civil War, but the most tragic misunderstanding of all was that neither side realized, until it was too late, that the other side was desperately in earnest. Not until the war had actually begun would men see that their rivals really meant to fight. By that time it was too late to do anything but go on fighting.
Southerners had been talking secession for many years, and most people in the North had come to look on such talk as a counter in the game of politics. You wanted something, and you threatened that dire things would happen if you did not get what you wanted; but you didn't necessarily mean to do what you were threatening to do, and there was no sense in taking brash words at their face value. America as a nation of poker players understood all about the business of calling bluffs. Not until the guns began to go off would the North realize that when men like Jefferson Davis talked about seceding from the Union they meant every word of it.
The same was true, in reverse, in the South. It seemed incomprehensible there that the Federal Union meant so much in the North that millions of people would be ready to make war to preserve it. The North seemed to dislike both slavery and slaveowners; to the average Southerner, it stood to reason that the North would be happy to get rid of both. Furthermore, it was not supposed that the North could fight even if it wanted to do so. It was a nation of mudsills and undigested immigrants, ruled by money-mad Yankees, and any army it raised would dissolve like the morning mists once it ran into real soldiers. The Southern orator who promised to wipe up, with his handkerchief, all of the blood that would be spilled because of secession was expressing a very common viewpoint.
For a while it looked as if the doubters on both sides might be right. Abraham Lincoln was inaugurated in Washington, and in his inaugural address he gave plain warning that he would do all in his power to "hold, occupy and possess" the property and places belonging to the Federal government which lay in Confederate territory. But after this speech was made nothing seemed to happen, and the new Lincoln administration began to look strangely like that of the departed James Buchanan.
When Lincoln said that he would hold all Federal property he referred chiefly to Fort Sumter, a pentagonal brick stronghold on an island near the mouth of Charleston Harbor. The commanding officer there was Major Robert Anderson, a regular army officer from Kentucky, and Anderson had sixty-eight soldiers, enough food to last a few more weeks, and a United States flag which he was determined to keep flying until he was compelled to haul it down. The sight of that flag was an offense to South Carolinians, and through them to the entire Confederacy. An independent nation could not countenance the existence of a foreign fort in the middle of one of its most important harbors, and the Confederate authorities tried hard but unsuccessfully to induce Washington to evacuate the place. They also put some thousands of Southern troops in gun pits and encampments all around the harbor, planting batteries where they would do the most good. In the end, negotiations having failed, and Lincoln having sent word that he was going to run supplies into the beleaguered fort, a clear indication that he proposed to hold it indefinitely, Jefferson Davis gave the word to open fire and bombard the place into submission. The Confederate commander at Charleston was the flamboyant General P. G. T. Beauregard, and he obeyed orders promptly. Sumter was ringed with fire, and after a thirty-four-hour bombardment Anderson hauled down his flag, turned the fort over to the Confederacy, and embarked his men on a steamer for New York. And the war was on.
The bombardment of Fort Sumter was spectacular, momentous - and, somehow, anticlimactic. It was the visible symbol that the war had begun - the thunderous announcement, to America and to all nations, that the New World's experiment in democracy had taken a strange new turn - yet when the guns were fired they merely ratified decisions which Lincoln and Davis had already made. Both men had made up their minds to fight rather than to yield, and each man had come to see Fort Sumter as the place for the showdown. (Oddly enough, the long bombardment killed no one on either side, and the war which was to be so costly began with a bloodless battle. The only lives lost at Sumter were lost after the surrender, when Major Anderson was firing a last salute to his flag; a powder charge exploded and killed two men.)
A hysterical wave of emotion swept across the country when the news of Fort Sumter came out. War actually seemed to be welcomed, as if a tension which had grown completely unendurable had at last been broken. Whatever might happen next, at least the years of drift and indecision were over. Grim knowledge of the reality of war would come quickly enough, but right at first an unsophisticated people surged out under waving flags with glad cries and with laughter, as if the thing that had happened called for rejoicing.
The first move was up to Lincoln, and he made it without delay. He announced to the nation that "combinations too powerful to be suppressed" by the ordinary machinery of peacetime government had assumed control of various Southern states; to restore order and suppress these combinations he called on the states to place 75,000 militia at the service of the Federal government. This call to arms brought a rush of enthusiastic recruiting all across the North, but at the same time it immediately put four more states into the Southern Confederacy. Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Arkansas had not yet left the Union; their sympathies were with the states which had seceded, but they had been clinging to the hope that the schism might yet be healed without bloodshed. Now they had to choose, and they chose promptly: all four left the Union and entered the Confederacy, and the Davis administration began to make arrangements to transfer the Confederate capital from Alabama to Richmond.
MISCALCULATIONS, ILLUSIONS, AND LITTLE TRAINING
Neither North nor South was in the least ready for a war, and very few people in either section had any conception of the immense demands which the war was going to make. When the conflict began, the country's regular army consisted of no more than 16,000 men - barely enough to police the Indian country and the frontier and to man the coastal fortifications on a skeletonized basis. For whatever it might be worth, the army was at the disposal of the Federal government. It was obvious, however, that even if all of it could be massed in one spot (which was out of the question), it would not be nearly large enough for the job at hand. The load would have to be carried mainly by volunteers - which, at the beginning, meant state militia - and neither the weapons which the volunteers would use nor the uniforms they would wear, to say nothing of the officers who would lead them, as yet existed. Both sides were going to have to improvise.
The states did have their militia regiments, and these went to the colors at once. They were of uneven quality; none of them had ever had anything resembling combat training, and the best of them were drilled almost solely for parade-ground maneuvers. Even for parade, most units were poorly prepared. The average militia regiment was composed of one company from this town, another from that town, and so on, the ten companies scattered all across the state, and in many cases the individual companies had never been brought together to maneuver as a regiment. This was a serious handicap. By the military tactics of the 1860's, the ability of troops to maneuver as regiments or brigades was extremely important. To get from column into line - that is, from the formation in which they could march into the formation in which they could fight - called for a variety of highly intricate movements, for which incessant drill was required. A first-rate militia company which had never worked as part of a larger unit would be of little use on the battlefield until it had put in many hours of regimental and brigade drill.
Still, both sides were equally unready, and in both sections the work of preparation went on with excited haste if not with complete efficiency. All of these assorted military outfits went in for gaudy and impractical uniforms; most of them adopted flamboyant names, not realizing that the separate companies would quickly lose their identities as cogs in a larger machine. There were Frontier Guards, Rough-and-Ready Grays, Susquehanna Blues, and the like, and there were Game Cocks, Tigers, Invincibles, Fencibles, and Rangers beyond computation. (Some of the Blues, at this stage, were Southern, and some of the Grays were Northern; the adoption of recognizable national uniforms would come later, after a certain amount of battlefield confusion.) These separate companies were led by officers elected by the rank and file, which was also the case with most of the regiments. In most cases the officers owed their election to their talents as vote-getters, or simply to the fact that they were "leading citizens." Very few were chosen because they had any special qualifications for military command. In time, field experience would weed out most of the misfits, but in the beginning the rival armies would consist of amateurs led by amateurs.
There were regular officers on hand, to be sure, but in the North the government did not quite know what to do with them. Lieutenant General Winfield Scott was general in chief: a fine soldier and an able strategist once, but very old now, physically all but helpless, perhaps touched with senility. He hoped to keep the regular army more or less intact, as the hard core around which the army of militiamen and volunteers would be built, and he did not want to see regular officers resign to take commissions with the amateurs. From the regulars, to be sure, would come the general officers - but not all of the general officers, at that, for the administration was going to make generals out of a certain number of political leaders, and some of these would be given very important commands. The army immediately in front of Washington, which would be known as the Army of the Potomac, was given to Brigadier General Irvin McDowell, a regular. An army which was being raised in Ohio, which presently would invade western Virginia, was led by Major General George B. McClellan, a brilliant young West Pointer who had served in the Mexican War and then had left the army to become a railroad president. In St. Louis command was held by another regular, Brigadier General William A. Harney; he would be replaced before long by Major General John Charles Fremont, who had served in the regular army and had won fame as "The Pathfinder" of Far Western exploration. He was no West Pointer, and his service had been with the topographical engineers rather than with the line. Many new brigadiers would be named, some of them West Pointers, others not. For some time to come the administration would feel its way toward its new command setup, with no fixed program.
The Confederacy was a little more systematic. Jefferson Davis was a West Pointer himself, with a good deal of field experience, and he had served as Secretary of War. He had a good understanding of the military arts, although he apparently believed that his talents in this field were a bit more extensive than was actually the case, and as far as possible he intended to use trained soldiers for his general officers. About a third of the West Pointers in the regular army had resigned to serve the South; one of the Confederacy's assets lay in the fact that these included some of the most capable men on the army roster. There was Robert E. Lee, for instance, to whom the outbreak of the war command of the Federals' principal field army had been offered. Lee had rejected the offer and had gone with his state, Virginia, and Davis would make him a full general. The Beauregard who had taken Fort Sumter, and who now commanded the chief Confederate army in Virginia, was a professional soldier, highly regarded. From the West was coming another West Pointer of substantial reputation, General Albert Sidney Johnston. Still another former regular who would play a prominent part was General Joseph E. Johnston, who had many talents, but who would prove utterly unable to get along with President Davis.
One oddity about the whole situation was the fact that the regular army before the war had been very small, with an officer corps whose members knew one another quite intimately. A Civil War general, as a result, was quite likely to be very well acquainted with the man who was commanding troops against him, knowing his strengths and his weaknesses. There would be times when this mutual knowledge would have a marked effect on strategic and tactical decisions.
The war aims of the two sides were very simple. The Confederacy would fight for independence, the North for reestablishment of the Union. So far, slavery itself was definitely not an issue. The North was far from unity on this point; it was vitally important for Lincoln to keep the support of Northern Democrats, most of whom had little or no objection to the continued existence of slavery in the South; and both he and the Congress itself were explicit in asserting that they wanted to restore the Union without interfering with the domestic institutions of any of the states. In addition, there were the border states, Maryland and Kentucky and Missouri, slave states where sentiment was apparently pro-Union by a rather narrow margin, but where most people had no use at all for abolitionists or the abolitionist cause. If these states should join the Confederacy, the Union cause was as good as lost; probably the most momentous single item on Lincoln's program was the determination to hold these states in the Union. If he could help it, Lincoln was not going to fight a straight Republican war.
War aims would govern war strategy. The Confederacy was a going concern: it had built a government, it was building an army, it considered itself an independent nation and it was functioning as such, and as far as Davis was concerned there would be no war at all unless the Lincoln administration forced one. The Confederacy, then, would act strictly on the defensive, and the opposite of this coin was the fact that it was up to the North to be aggressive. Unless he could successfully take the offensive and keep at it until all of the "combinations too powerful to be suppressed" had been overthrown, Lincoln would have lost the war. In plain English, Northern armies had to invade the South and destroy the opposing government. This fact would go far to counterbalance the enormous advantages which the Federal government possessed in respect to manpower, riches, and the commercial and industrial strength that supports armies.
These advantages were impressive - so much so that Northern officers like William T. Sherman and James B. McPherson warned Southern friends at the outbreak of the war that the Confederacy was bound to fail. In the North there were over eighteen million people; the South had hardly more than nine million, of whom more than a third were Negro slaves. Nine-tenths of the country's manufacturing capacity was situated in the North, which also had two-thirds of the railway mileage, to say nothing of nearly all of the facilities for building rails, locomotives, and cars. The North contained most of the country's deposits of iron, coal, copper, and precious metals. It controlled the seas and had access to all of the factories of Europe; it was also producing a huge surplus of foodstuffs which Europe greatly needed, and these would pay for enormous quantities of munitions. Taken altogether, its latent advantages were simply overpowering.
They did not, however, mean that Northern victory would be automatic. For the North had to do the invading, and in any war the invader must have a substantial advantage in numbers. The Confederacy occupied an immense territory, and the supply lines of the invader would be long, immobilizing many troops for their protection. Although the North controlled the seas, the Confederacy's coast line was almost endless; to seal the Southland off from the outside world would require a navy far larger than anything the United States previously had dreamed of possessing. Finally, the terms on which the war would be fought meant that the average Southerner would always have been a clearer, more emotionally stimulating picture of what he was fighting for than the average Northerner could hope to have. For the Southerner would see himself as fighting to protect the home place from the invader; the Northerner, on the other hand, was fighting for an abstraction, and the sacred cause of "the Union" might look very drab once real war weariness developed. To put it in its simplest terms, the North could lose the war if its people lost the desire to go on with the offensive; it could win only if it could destroy the Confederate people's ability to fight. In the end it would need every ounce of advantage it could get.
Old Winfield Scott had sketched in a plan. It would take time to raise, equip, and train armies big enough to beat the South; start, therefore, by blockading the seacoast, seal off the inland borders as well, then drive down the Mississippi, constricting the vitality out of the Confederacy - and, at last, send in armies of invasion to break the Southern nation into bits. As things worked out, this was not unlike the plan that was actually followed, but when it was first proposed - news of it leaked out immediately, Washington's ability to keep things secret being very limited - the newspapers derided it, calling it the "Anaconda Plan" and intimating that it was far too slow for any use. Very few men, either in the North or in the South, were ready to admit that the war would be a long one. The militia had been called into Federal service for just ninety days, the limit under existing law; it seemed reasonable to many people to suppose that before their term of service expired they ought to win the war.
THE ISSUE OF THE BORDER STATES
Before the war could be won, however, the border states had to be secured, and to secure them the Lincoln administration used a strange combination of tactful delicacy and hardfisted ruthlessness.
Kentucky got the delicate handling. This state had a secessionist governor and a Unionist legislature, and in sheer desperation it was trying to sit the war out, having proclaimed its neutrality. For the time being both Lincoln and Davis were willing to respect this neutrality. They knew that it could not last, but the side that infringed it was apt to be the loser thereby, and until the situation elsewhere began to jell, both leaders were willing to leave Kentucky alone. (Both sides unofficially raised troops there, and there was a home guard organization which might turn out to be either Unionist or Confederate.)
If Kentucky got delicate handling, what Maryland and Missouri got was the back of the Federal government's hand.
Not long after Fort Sumter, the 6th Massachusetts Regiment was marching through Baltimore en route to Washington. There were many ardent Southerners in Baltimore, and these surrounded the marching column, jeering and catcalling. Inevitably, people began to shove and throw things, and finally the troops opened fire and there was a bloody fight in the streets. Soldiers and civilians were killed - more civilians than soldiers, as it happened - and although the 6th Regiment finally got to Washington, railroad connection via Baltimore was temporarily broken, and Lincoln took speedy action. Federal troops occupied Baltimore. Secessionist members of the legislature were thrown in jail, as were various city officials of Baltimore, and they were kept there until the Unionists got things firmly in hand. All of this, of course, was plainly illegal, but the Federal government was not going to let the secessionists cut Washington off from the rest of the North, no matter what it had to do to prevent it; with dissident legislators in jail, the Unionist governor of Maryland had little trouble holding the state in the Union.
What happened in Missouri was somewhat similar. The state had refused to secede, sentiment apparently being almost evenly divided, but like Kentucky it had a pro-Southern governor, and he maintained a camp of state troops on the edge of St. Louis. The presence of these troops worried the Federal commander, General Harney, not at all, but it worried other Unionists a great deal, the fear being that the state troops would seize the government arsenal in St. Louis. With the weapons taken there the governor could arm enough secessionist Missourians to take the state out of the Union. So Washington temporarily replaced General Harney with a fiery young regular, Captain Nathaniel S. Lyon - putting a captain in a brigadier's job was stretching things a bit, but not all of the old rules would be valid in this war - and Lyon took his soldiers out, arrested the state troops, disarmed them and broke up their camp. As he marched his men back to barracks a street crowd collected; as in Baltimore there was jostling, shoving, name-calling, and a display of weapons; and at last the troops opened fire, killing more than a score of civilians. It may be instructive to note that the first fighting in the Civil War, after Fort Sumter, involved men in uniform shooting at men who were not in uniform - the classic pattern of a civil war.
Lyon was all flame and devotion, too impetuous by half. In an effort to keep some sort of peace in Missouri, Harney had worked out an informal truce with the governor of the state, the essence of it being that nobody would make any hostile moves until the situation had taken more definite shape. Lyon swiftly disavowed this truce, drove the governor away from the machinery of government, and marched his little army clear down into southwest Missouri in an effort to rid the state of all armed Confederates. He got into a sharp fight at Wilson's Creek and lost his life. His army had to retreat, and the Confederates continued to hold southwestern Missouri; and partly because of the bitterness growing out of Lyon's high-handed actions the unhappy state was plagued for the rest of the war by the most virulent sort of partisan warfare. But Missouri did not leave the Union, which was all that Washington cared about at the moment. Legally or otherwise, the Federal government was making the border secure.
Western Virginia also had to be dealt with, but that was easier.
The western counties of Virginia had long been antipathetic to the Tidewater people, and when Virginia left the union, the westerners began to talk about seceding from Virginia. Young General McClellan got an army over into the mountain country early in the war and without too great difficulty defeated a small Confederate force which he found there. With victorious Federal troops in their midst, the western Virginia Unionists perked up; in due course they would organize their own state of West Virginia, which the Federal government would hasten to admit to the Union; and although there might be a good deal to be said about the legal ins and outs of the business, the government had at least made certain that the Ohio River was not going to be the northern border of the Confederacy.
But if the border states had been held, the gain was negative. The South seemed unworried, and it was visibly building up its strength. Richmond was now the capital, new troops were pouring in for its defense, and cadets from the Virginia Military Institute were putting in busy days acting as drill masters. (They had been led to Richmond by a blue-eyed, ungainly professor, a West Pointer who would soon be a Confederate general of renown, Thomas J. Jackson.) The North was never going to win the war by thwarting secessionist designs in Missouri and Maryland. It could win it only by moving south and giving battle; and as the summer of 1861 came on the time for such a move was at hand.