THE NORTH AND SOUTH REACT TO BULL RUN
For the time being there was an uneasy breathing space. The victory at Bull Run left the Confederate command feeling that the next move was pretty largely up to the Yankees, and the Yankees would not be ready to make another move for months to come. The Confederate army around Manassas built extensive lines of entrenchments, and in many redoubts General Joseph Johnston mounted wooden guns, which looked like the real thing from a distance but which would never kill any Yankee if a fight developed. He also edged patrols forward to the hills on the south bank of the Potomac and erected batteries downstream so that during the summer and fall the water approach to Washington was fairly effectively blockaded. To the Shenandoah Valley, Johnston sent Stonewall Jackson with a division of infantry and a handful of undisciplined but highly effective partisan cavalry led by a minor genius named Turner Ashby.
In Washington glamorous young General George McClellan applied himself to the creation of a new army. It would be a national army - the ninety-day militia regiments were sent home and demobilized - and except for a small contingent of regular troops this army would composed of volunteer regiments enlisted for a three-year term. Yet although these were Federal troops, the states' rights tradition was still powerful, and the new volunteer regiments were recruited and officered by the governors of the separate states. In effect, each governor was a separate and largely independent war department. Washington told him how many regiments he was to provide, but the raising and organizing of troops were entirely up to him. Only after a regiment was fully up to strength, with its proper complement of officers, was it transferred from state to Federal control. The system was cumbersome, and because the appointment of officers provided a governor with a handy form of political patronage, it made impossible the creation of any effective system of replacements for battle-worn regiments. When new men were needed, it was politically profitable for a governor to raise whole new regiments rather than to recruit men to strengthen outfits that already existed. However, in the summer of 1861 the system worked well enough, and scores of new units came down to the chain of camps around Washington.
McClellan was an exceptionally able organizer. Camps were laid out in formal military pattern, the service of supply was reorganized so that food, munitions, and equipment were properly distributed, and there was an unending program of drill. At frequent intervals there would be reviews, with McClellan himself riding the lines to inspect the newly organized brigades and divisions, and the men were taught to cheer lustily whenever the general appeared. They needed very little urging. McClellan made them feel like soldiers, and they responded by giving him their complete confidence and a deep, undying affection. As summer drew on into fall the Washington scene was completely transformed. The army was beginning to be an army, and the slapdash informality of the militia days was gone. The capital took heart.
But it was clear that there would be no major campaign in the Virginia area for some time to come. McClellan was going to do what the luckless McDowell had not been allowed to do - get everything ready before he moved - and in addition he was excessively cautious - cautious, his detractors finally would complain, to the point of outright timidity. He had put Allan Pinkerton, already famous as a detective, in charge of military intelligence, and Pinkerton was sadly out of his depth: through a series of fantastic miscalculations he consistently estimated Confederate numbers at double or treble their actual strength, and McClellan trusted implicitly. On top of all this, the disaster at Ball's Bluff served as a powerful deterrent to hasty action.
Ball's Bluff was a wooded hill on the south bank of the Potomac, thirty-odd miles upstream from Washington. Confederate infantry was camped in the area, and in October McClellan ordered a subordinate to make a reconnaissance in force and see what the Rebels were doing. Several regiments crossed the river, inexpertly led, blundered into a more expertly handled force of Confederates, and were routed with substantial losses. The whole affair had little military significance, but Congress made an issue of it - Colonel Edward D. Baker, a prominent member of the Senate, was among the killed - and the subsequently notorious Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War was set up to look into the doings of the generals. All in all, enough fuss was raised to make it clear that any general who stumbled into defeat might be in for a rough time in Washington.
Still, for the time being McClellan's star was rising. In November Winfield Scott resigned, age and physical infirmities making it impossible for him to continue in active command, and Lincoln made McClellan general in chief of all the armies. McClellan had boundless self-confidence, this fall, and when Lincoln feared that the load of command might be too heavy, McClellan replied jauntily: "I can do it all." He would control military operations all across the board, but he would remain with the Army of the Potomac and would make it his first concern.
THE WAR ESCALATES - ON THE WESTERN FRONT
Yet the war really began to get into high gear a long way from Virginia. Then and now, what happened in Virginia took the eye. The two capitals were only a hundred miles apart, the armies which defended and attacked them got the biggest headlines, but the war actually took shape in the West. Before McClellan got the Army of the Potomac into action, battles of lasting consequence had been fought in the Mississippi Valley.
To begin with, early in September, Kentucky ceased to be neutral and reluctantly but effectively cast its lot with the North. The Federals had a concentration of troops at Cairo, Illinois, where the Ohio River joins the Mississippi, and these troops obviously would invade the Southland sooner or later, either via the Mississippi or up the channels of the Tennessee and the Cumberland. General John Fremont, commanding for the Federals in the western area, lacked competence and would presently be replaced, but he had done two things of prime importance: he had started construction of a fleet of gunboats, and he had put a remarkably capable, although little known, brigadier general named U. S. Grant in command at Cairo.
Top man for the Confederacy in western Tennessee was Major General Leonidas Polk, a classmate of Jefferson Davis at West Point, who had resigned from the army years ago to take holy orders and had become a bishop in the Episcopal Church. When the war began, he returned to military service, and this fall he rightly concluded that the Yankees would soon be occupying Kentucky. He beat them to it, moving troops up to seize and fortify the bluffs at the town of Columbus, on the Mississippi, northern terminus of the Mobile and Ohio Railroad. Grant countered by seizing Paducah, which controlled the mouths of the Tennessee and Cumberland rivers, and Kentucky was squarely in the war.
Davis sent out a new man to take overall command in the West: a highly regarded regular army officer, General Albert Sidney Johnston, who was thought to be perhaps the ablest of all the professional soldiers who had joined the Confederacy. Johnston was woefully handicapped by a shortage of manpower and equipment, but he did his best with the materials at hand. He made a strong point out of Columbus, mounting heavy guns to control the river and establishing a garrison of some 20,000 troops there. The rest of his line extended eastward through Kentucky, with 25,000 men or more in and around Bowling Green, and with a smaller contingent anchoring the eastern end of the line in the mountainous country along the Tennessee border near the upper reaches of the Cumberland River. Rising in the Kentucky mountains, the Cumberland makes a long loop into Tennessee, passing the state capital, Nashville, and then turning north to flow into the Ohio. Just below the Kentucky-Tennessee line it flows more or less parallel with the Tennessee, twelve miles to the west.
These two rivers offered a military highway of prime importance. The Cumberland led to Nashville, and the Tennessee led all the way to northern Mississippi and Alabama. With the powerful works at Columbus blocking the way down the Mississippi, a Federal invasion was almost certain to follow the line of these two rivers, and just below the Kentucky line the Confederates had built two forts to bar the way - Fort Henry on the Tennessee and Fort Donelson on the Cumberland. These forts drew Federal attention as the year 1862 began.
Federal command in the West was divided. Fremont had been replaced by Major General Henry Wager Halleck, a professional soldier who possessed vast book knowledge of war, had certain talents as an administrator, and was known, somewhat irreverently, in the old army as Old Brains. Halleck's control, however, extended only to the Cumberland. East of that, Federal forces in Kentucky were commanded by Brigadier General Don Carlos Buell, a close friend of McClellan and a cautious type who shared McClellan's reluctance to move until every preparation had been made. Between them, Halleck and Buell commanded many more men than Johnston could bring to oppose them, but neither man had real driving force, and it seemed to be very hard for them to cooperate effectively. McClellan, who could give orders to both of them, was too far away to enforce real coordination, and most of his attention was centered on Virginia.
In any case, as the new year began these armies started to move. The first action came at the eastern end of the line, where Johnston's right wing, under Major General George B. Crittenden, crossed the Cumberland and began an advance toward central Kentucky. Buell's left was led by Virginia-born Brigadier General George H. Thomas, and Thomas fell on Crittenden's little force near the hamlet of Mill Springs and completely routed it. The eastern anchor of Johnston's defensive line was to all intents and purposes annihilated.
Shortly afterward, Halleck ordered Grant to move on Fort Henry. Grant took 15,000 men and a squadron of new ironclad gunboats commanded by Flag Officer Andrew Foote, and by February 6 he got men and boats up to this bastion. Fort Henry proved unexpectedly weak: built on low ground, it was partly under water, the Tennessee being almost at flood stage then, and Foote's gunboats pounded it into surrender before the infantry could get into position to make the attack. Grant promptly turned east, marching his troops cross-country to attack Fort Donelson, on the Cumberland, and sending Foote around to join him by water, and a week after Fort Henry had fallen, the Federals opened their attack.
Donelson was a tougher nut to crack. The fall of Fort Henry made Johnston see that the whole center of his line was in peril, and he evacuated Bowling Green, sending 15,000 men to defend Fort Donelson and taking the rest back to Nashville. Donelson held out for three days, but Grant got strong reinforcements and shelled the place into submission. It surrendered on February 16, and Grant suddenly found himself famous - not only had he captured 15,000 Confederates, but his note demanding capitulation had struck a chord that stirred Northern emotions powerfully: "No terms except an immediate and unconditional surrender can be accepted."
Now the Confederates were in serious trouble. Johnston could do nothing but retreat, posthaste, and this he did without delay. Nashville could not be held, and it was evacuated, with substantial military stores falling into Union hands. Even the fortress at Columbus had to be given up. P. G. T. Beauregard, so unhappy in Virginia, had been sent west to be second in command to Johnston, and he led the Columbus garrison south: he and Johnston, if the Federals let them, would reunite their forces at Corinth, Mississippi, just below the Tennessee line. Here the vital railway line which led east from Memphis, connecting the western part of the Confederacy with Virginia, crossed the north-south line of the Mobile and Ohio. Richmond was scraping the seacoast garrisons to provide reinforcements, and if Johnston could reassemble his forces he would have perhaps 50,000 men. Halleck and Buell, between them, could send 70,000 against him if they managed things properly.
Really effective management was not forthcoming. As a reward for victory, Halleck had been given top command in the West and Grant had been made a major general, and under Halleck's orders Grant was moving up the Tennessee with approximately 45,000 men while Buell was marching down from Nashville with 25,000 more. But Halleck had his columns moving slowly; both Grant and Foote wanted to press the beaten foe with vigor, but one delay succeeded another, and Johnston and Beauregard were given just time to regroup and reorganize their troops at Corinth. There Johnston realized that the Federals would before long bring overpowering numbers against him. Grant had put his army on the western bank of the Tennessee at Pittsburg Landing, with most of the men in camp near a country meetinghouse known as Shiloh Church, a little more than twenty miles from Corinth. Johnston concluded that his only hope was to strike Grant before Buell could arrive, and in the first days of April the Confederate army marched up from Corinth to give battle.
The result was the bewildering and bloody Battle of Shiloh, fought on April 6 and 7, 1862. Grant was caught off guard, and in the first day's fight his army was almost pushed into the Tennessee River. It rallied just in time, Johnston was killed in action, and at dark Buell's troops began to arrive and one of Grant's divisions which had been delayed in reaching the field got to the scene. On the second day the Federals reversed the tide, and by midafternoon Beauregard had to admit defeat. He drew his badly battered army back to Corinth, and the Federals, equally battered, made no more than a gesture of pursuit. The greatest battle ever fought on the American continent, up to that date, was over. The Federals had lost 13,000 men, the Confederates, 10,000. The troops had fought with impressive valor, but they had been poorly handled, especially on the Union side.
But although the terrible casualty list and the fact that Grant had let himself be taken unaware stirred violent criticism in the North, the battle nevertheless had been of decisive importance. At Shiloh the Confederacy made its supreme bid to regain western Tennessee. It failed, and after that the Confederate path in the West went downhill all the way. Nor was Shiloh the only disaster, that spring. At Pea Ridge, Arkansas, a Union army under Brigadier General Samuel Curtis defeated a Confederate army led by Major General Earl Van Dorn. Other Union forces came down the Mississippi itself, taking New Madrid, Missouri, and capturing a powerful fort at Island Number Ten. Union gunboats came down and destroyed a Confederate river fleet at Memphis, and two months after Shiloh, Memphis itself had to be abandoned. Halleck assembled an army of substantially more than 100,000 men near Pittsburg Landing and moved slowly down to take Corinth - moved with excessive caution, for Beauregard had not half of Halleck's numbers and dared not stay to give battle, but Halleck was the most deliberate of generals. In the end Beauregard left Corinth and retreated toward central Mississippi, the Federals held all of western Tennessee and were in a fair way to reclaim the entire Mississippi Valley, and in the West the Southern cause was well on the way to defeat.
But in Virginia everything was very different.
THE PENINSULAR CAMPAIGN
Like Halleck, McClellan moved with deliberation. He also suffered from a handicap which never afflicted Halleck: he had aroused the active distrust and hostility of the radical Republican leaders in Washington, including the Secretary of War, Edwin M. Stanton. These men had come to distrust McClellan's will to fight. Some of them even believed he was pro-Confederate at heart, and they suggested openly that he was potentially a traitor, willing to let the enemy win the war. What McClellan did in the spring of 1862 cannot be appraised fairly unless this bitter hostility and suspicion are taken into account. If McClellan moved later than he said he would move (which was usually the case), he was certain to be accused of sabotaging the war effort; if a battle went against him, there were sure to be grandstand critics in Washington who would proclaim that he might easily have won if he had really wanted to win.
The first result of all of this was that in the middle of March McClellan lost his job as general in chief of all the armies and was limited to command of the Army of the Potomac. The second result was that when he finally made his move he made it under great difficulties, some of them self-inflicted.
McClellan had given up the idea of moving on Richmond via Manassas. instead he wanted to go down to Fort Monroe by steamboat and then advance up to the Virginia Peninsula, with rivers to protect his flanks and a secure line of communications. President Lincoln and Secretary Stanton agreed to this very reluctantly. A Union army moving overland toward Richmond would always stand between Washington and the main Confederate army; but it seemed to these men that under McClellan's plan the capital would be dangerously open to capture by a sudden Confederate thrust. As a soldier, McClellan considered this highly unlikely; as politicians, Lincoln and Stanton were bound to realize that if Washington should be captured the Union cause was irretrievably lost, and they refused to take chances. They let McClellan make his move, therefore, on condition that he leave enough troops in Washington (which by now was strongly fortified) to make it safe beyond question. McClellan agreed to this, but apparently he did not take the business very seriously. After he and the army had taken off for the Peninsula, the President and the Secretary of War began counting heads and discovered that the numbers McClellan had promised to leave behind just were not there. Accordingly, they removed an entire army corps from his command - it was commanded by the General McDowell who had such bad luck at Bull Run - and ordered it to cover the area between Washington and Fredericksburg. Simultaneously, they created a separate command in the Shenandoah Valley, entrusting it to a political major general from Massachusetts, the distinguished, if unmilitary, Nathaniel P. Banks. As a final step they called General Fremont back from retirement and put him in command in western Virginia, with instructions to begin moving east.
So McClellan started up the Peninsula with only 90,000 men instead of the 130,000 he had expected to have. His troubles immediately began to multiply.
Joe Johnston had long since evacuated Manassas, but he had not yet got all of his men down to the Peninsula. At Yorktown he had a chain of earthworks and some 15,000 soldiers under Major General John Bankhead Magruder. In the old army Magruder had been famous as an amateur actor, and he used all of his talents now to bemuse McClellan. As the Yankees approached the Yorktown lines Magruder marched his troops up hill and down dale, safely out of range but plainly visible, and he did it so well that the Unionists concluded that he had a very substantial army. McClellan took alarm, erected works facing the Yorktown lines, and prepared to lay siege. He could certainly have overwhelmed Magruder with one push, and even after Johnston got the rest of his army to the scene the Confederate works could probably have been stormed; but McClellan played it safe, and as a result he lost an entire month. Johnston evacuated Yorktown on May 4 - McClellan had his big guns in position, and was going to open a crushing bombardment the next day - and the long move up the Peninsula began. The Confederates fought a brisk delaying action at Williamsburg the next day, but they did not try to make a real stand until they had reached the very outskirts of Richmond.
Meanwhile, other things had been happening which would have a marked effect on McClellan's campaign. The canny Confederates quickly discovered the extreme sensitivity of Lincoln and Stanton about the safety of Washington and made cruel use of it. In the Shenandoah Valley, Stonewall Jackson with 8,000 men faced Banks, who had nearly twice that number; and Fremont was beginning to edge in through the western mountains with as many more. Jackson was given reinforcements, nearly doubling his numbers; then he set out on one of the war's most dazzling campaigns. A quick march west of Staunton knocked back Fremont's advance; then Jackson swept down the Valley, completely deceiving Banks as to his whereabouts, breaking his supply line and forcing him to retreat, and then striking him viciously while he was retreating and turning his withdrawal into a rout. Banks had to go clear north of the Potomac River, and Jackson's quick movements convinced Secretary Stanton that a major invasion of the North was beginning. McDowell had been under orders to march down and join McClellan, who had drawn his lines astride of the Chickahominy River no more than half a dozen miles from Richmond: these orders were canceled, and McDowell had to send troops posthaste to the Shenandoah to break up Jackson's game. Jackson coolly waited until the Federal panic was at its height, then withdrew up the Valley, bloodied the noses of two pursuing Federal columns - and then slipped swiftly down to Richmond to take a hand in the coming fight with McClellan's Army of the Potomac.
All in all, the Federal government had been utterly bamboozled. By skillful use of his 17,000 men Jackson had immobilized more than 50,000 Yankee troops. When the Confederacy fought to defend its capital, it would not have to face nearly as many men as might easily have been sent against it.
Joe Johnston would not be in command in this fight. At the end of May his troops had fought a hard two-day battle with McClellan's left wing at Fair Oaks - an indecisive struggle that left both sides about where they had been before - and Johnston had been seriously wounded. To replace him, Davis called on Robert E. Lee, who would command the most famous of all Confederate levies, the Army of Northern Virginia, until the end of the war.
Lee's part in the war thus far had been onerous and not particularly happy. He had tried to direct Confederate operations in western Virginia, but the situation had been hopeless and the area had been lost. He had helped fortify the Southern seacoast, and then had served Davis as military adviser, in a post which carried heavy responsibility but no genuine authority. (If Jackson had executed the Valley Campaign, the underlying idea was largely Lee's.) Now he was taking an active field command, and within a few weeks he would prove that he was the ideal man for the job.
Because of the success of the Valley Campaign, McClellan's army lay on both sides of the Chickahominy River with substantially less strength than McClellan had expected to have when he took that position. It contained, as June drew to a close, more than 100,000 soldiers, of whom 25,000 were north of the Chickahominy. Lee, his army reinforced to a strength of nearly 85,000, left a few divisions to hold the lines immediately in front of Richmond, marched some 65,000 men to the north bank of the Chickahominy, and struck savagely at the exposed Federal flank.
There followed the famous Seven Days' battles - Mechanicsville, Gaines' Mill, Savage's Station, Frayser's Farm, Malvern Hill, and a host of lesser fights and skirmishes in between - and at the end of all this McClellan's army had been roundly beaten and compelled to retreat to Harrison's Landing on the James River, badly shattered and greatly in need of a refit. McClellan's stock at the War Department was lower than ever, his army was effectively out of action as an offensive unit for some time to come, and the way was open for Lee to take the offensive and give some substance to President Lincoln's fears for the safety of Washington. This General Lee would very quickly do; and as he did it the Southern cause would reach its brief, tragic high-water mark for the war.