FEDERAL CHANGE OF COMMAND
Toward the end of the summer of 1862 the mirage of final Southern independence looked briefly and dazzlingly like an imminent reality. In April the Confederacy had been on the defense everywhere - New Orleans lost, McClellan approaching the gates of Richmond, Halleck coming in on Corinth as slowly and irresistibly as a glacier, Missouri gone and the whole Mississippi Valley apparently about to follow it. But by August the Southern nation had gone on the offensive, and for a few weeks it looked as if the gates were about to open. Never before or afterward was the Confederacy so near to victory as it was in the middle of September, 1862.
There was a tremendous vitality to the Southern cause, and it was aided this summer by fumbling military leadership on the part of the North. For a time the Federals had no overall military commander except for the President and the Secretary of War, who were men who knew exactly what they wanted but who did not quite know how to get it. Then, in July, Lincoln called General Halleck to Washington and made him general in chief of the Union armies.
On form, the choice looked good. The great successes had been won in Halleck's territory, the West, and as far as anyone in Washington could tell, he was fully entitled to take the credit. Except for continuing guerilla activity, Kentucky and Missouri had been swept clear of armed Confederates, western Tennessee had been reclaimed, there was a Yankee army in Cumberland Gap, another one was approaching Chattanooga, and a third was sprawled out from Memphis to Corinth, preparing to slice down through Mississippi and touch hands with the Union occupation forces in Baton Rouge and New Orleans. If any Northern general was entitled to promotion, that general certainly appeared to be Halleck.
Halleck was a bookish sort of soldier, a headquarters operator who could handle all of the routine chores of military housekeeping with competence, but who somehow lacked the vital quality which such Confederates as Lee and Jackson possessed in abundance - the driving, restless spirit of war. The impulse to crowd a failing foe into a corner and compel submission simply was not in him, nor did he have the knack of evoking that spirit in his subordinates. His grasp of the theories of strategy was excellent, but at heart he was a shuffler of papers.
He came east to repair disaster. McClellan had been beaten in front of Richmond, and his army was in camp on the bank of the James River - still close enough to the Confederate capital, and still strong enough to resume the offensive on short notice, yet temporarily out of circulation for all that. (Like Halleck, McClellan was not especially aggressive.) In northern Virginia the Federal government had put together a new army, 50,000 men or thereabouts, troops who might have gone down to help McClellan in the spring, but who had been held back because of Jackson's game in the Shenandoah Valley. This army had been entrusted to one of Halleck's old subordinates, John Pope, who had taken Island Number Ten and New Madrid, and who seemed to have a good deal of energy and a desire to fight. Pope was moving down toward Richmond along the line of the Orange and Alexandria Railroad, and the general notion was that Robert E. Lee could not possibly fend off both Pope and McClellan.
The general notion was good enough, but Lee had accurately appraised the generals he was fighting. He suspected that McClellan would be inactive for some time to come, so while he held the bulk of his own army in the defensive lines around Richmond, he detached Stonewall Jackson with 25,000 men and sent him north to deal with Pope. (Pope was given to bluster and loud talk, and Lee held him in contempt: he told Jackson he wanted Pope "suppressed," as if the man were a brawling disturber of the peace rather than a general commanding an army of invasion.)
Arriving in Washington, Halleck could see that the Union military situation in Virginia was potentially dangerous. Pope and McClellan together outnumbered Lee substantially, but they were far apart, and communication between them was slow and imperfect. Lee was squarely between them, and unless both armies advanced resolutely he might easily concentrate on one, put it out of action, and then deal with the other at his leisure. Halleck went down to the James to see McClellan and find out if he could immediately move on Richmond.
This McClellan could not quite do. He needed reinforcements, material, time, and he had no confidence that Pope was going to do anything important anyway. Convinced that the Army of the Potomac would not advance, Halleck ordered it to leave the Peninsula and come back to Washington. It seemed to him that the sensible thing was to unite both armies and then resume the drive on the Confederate capital. Protesting bitterly, McClellan prepared to obey. But it would take a long time to get all of his troops back to the Washington area, and the move presented Lee with a free gift of time to attend to General Pope. Of this gift Lee took immediate advantage.
It began on August 9, when Jackson advanced, met a detachment of Pope's army at Cedar Mountain, not far from Culpeper, and drove it in retreat after a sharp battle. This Confederate victory gained very little, since Pope's main body was not far away and Jackson soon had to withdraw, but it was a forecast of things to come. Concentrating his troops in front of Pope, and leaving only detachments to see McClellan off, Lee began a series of maneuvers which caused Pope to retreat to the north side of the upper Rappahannock River. Pope held the river crossings and, for the time at least, seemed quite secure. McClellan's troops were coming north, some of them marching west from Fredericksburg and others going by boat to Alexandria, across the Potomac from Washington; with Halleck's blessing, Pope proposed to stay where he was until these troops joined him. Then the Federal offensive could begin in earnest.
THE SECOND BATTLE OF BULL RUN
Lee could see as clearly as anyone that time was on the side of the Federals. If McClellan and Pope finally got together, their strength would be overwhelming; Lee's only hope was to beat Pope before this happened. With consummate skill he set about this task, although he was compelled to take some hair-raising risks in the process.
According to the military textbooks, no general should ever divide his forces in the presence of the enemy. This is a very sound rule in most cases, but it is a rule that was made to be broken now and then, and Lee was the man to break it. He was in the immediate presence of John Pope's army, with the shallow Rappahannock River between; and now he divided his army, sending half of it, under Stonewall Jackson, on a long hike to the northwest, and holding the remainder, with Major General James Longstreet in immediate command, to keep Pope occupied. Jackson swung off behind the Bull Run Mountains, came swiftly east through Thoroughfare Gap, and pounded suddenly on the Federal army's base of supplies at Manassas Junction, twenty miles or more in Pope's rear. Pope turned to attend to Jackson, and Lee and Longstreet then followed Jackson's route, to join him somewhere east of the Bull Run Mountains.
Seldom has a general been more completely confused than Pope was now. He had vast energy, and he set his troops to marching back and forth to surround and destroy Jackson, but he could not quite find where Jackson was. With his 25,000 men, Stonewall had left Manassas Junction before the Federals got there - destroying such Federal supplies as could not be carried away - and took position, concealed by woods and hills, on the old battlefield of Bull Run. Pope wore out his infantry and his cavalry looking for him, blundered into him at last, and gathered his men for a headlong assault. There was a hard, wearing fight on August 29, in which Jackson's men held their ground with great difficulty; on the morning of August 30 Pope believed he had won a great victory, and he sent word to Washington that the enemy was in retreat and that he was about to pursue.
No general ever tripped over his own words more ingloriously than Pope did. Unknown to him, Lee and Longstreet had regained contact with Jackson on the afternoon of August 29, and on August 30, when Pope was beginning what he considered his victorious pursuit, they struck him furiously in the flank while Jackson kept him busy in front. Pope's army was crushed, driven north of Bull Run in disorder, and by twilight of August 30 the Confederates had won a sensational victory. Pope had lost the field, his reputation, and about 15,000 men. The Confederate casualty list had been heavy, but in every other respect they had won decisively.
Lee had acted just in time. Some of McClellan's divisions had joined Pope and had taken part in the battle, and the rest of McClellan's army was not far off. Two or three days more would have made the Union force safe: the big point about Lee was that he was always mindful of the difference that two or three days might make.
By any standard, Lee's achievements this summer had been remarkable. He had taken command of the Army of Northern Virginia in June, almost in the suburbs of Richmond, badly outnumbered by an enemy which had thousands upon thousands of additional troops not far away. By the end of August he had whipped the army that faced him, had whipped the army that came to its relief, and had transferred the war from the neighborhood of Richmond to the neighborhood of Washington. (After the Bull Run defeat the Federals withdrew to the fortifications of Washington, leaving practically all of Virginia to the Confederates.) Now Lee was about to invade the North.
In the spring the Federal War Department had been so confident that it had closed the recruiting stations. Now Secretary Stanton was frantically appealing to the Northern governors for more troops, and President Lincoln - to the great joy of the soldiers - was reinstating McClellan in command of the Army of the Potomac, with which Pope's troops were incorporated.
Technically, McClellan had never actually been removed from that command. His army had simply been taken away from him, division by division, and when the Second Battle of Bull Run was fought, McClellan was in Alexandria, forwarding his men to Manassas but unable to go with them. After the battle, speedy reorganization was imperative, and Lincoln could see what Stanton and the Republican radicals could not see - that the only man who could do the job was McClellan. Such men as Stanton, Secretary of the Treasury Salmon P. Chase, and Senators Ben Wade and Zachariah Chandler believed that McClellan had sent his men forward slowly, hoping that Pope would be beaten; Lincoln had his own doubts, but he knew that the dispirited soldiers had full confidence in McClellan and that it was above all things necessary to get those soldiers back into a fighting mood. So Pope was relieved and sent off to Minnesota to fight the Indians, a task which was well within his capacities; and McClellan sorted out the broken fragments of what had been two separate armies, reconstituted the Army of the Potomac, manned the Washington fortifications, and early in September marched northwest from Washington with 95,000 men to find General Lee, who had taken the Army of Northern Virginia across the Potomac into western Maryland on September 5.
Lee seemed bent on getting into Pennsylvania. He had gone to Frederick, Maryland, forty miles from Washington, and then he went off on the old National Road in the direction of Hagerstown, vanishing from sight behind the long barrier of South Mountain, whose gaps he held with Jeb Stuart's cavalry. Following him, McClellan did not know where Lee was or what he was up to, and until he found out, he was in trouble: to lunge straight through the gaps with his massed force would be to risk letting Lee slip past him on either flank and seize Washington itself. A real advance was impossible until he had better information, the news that was coming out of western Maryland was confused, contradictory, and of no value to anyone... and if Lee was not quickly caught, fought, and driven below the Potomac, the Northern cause was lost forever.
It was not only in Maryland that the Federals were in trouble. In the western area, where everything had looked so prosperous, there had been a similar reversal of fortune. At the beginning of the summer a sweeping Federal triumph west of the Alleghenies looked inevitable; by mid-September the situation there looked almost as bad as it did in the East, one measure of the crisis being the fact that Cincinnati had called out the home guard lest the city be seized by invading Rebels.
CONFEDERATE COUNTERSTROKE IN THE WEST
Several things had gone wrong in the West, but the root of the trouble was General Halleck's fondness for making war by the book. The book said that in a war it was advisable to occupy enemy territory, and after the capture of Corinth, Halleck had set out to do that. He had had, in front of Corinth, well over 100,000 men, and with that army he could have gone anywhere in the South and beaten anything the Davis government could have sent against him. But instead of continuing with the offensive under circumstances which guaranteed victory, Halleck had split his army into detachments. Grant was given the task of holding Memphis and western Tennessee. Buell was sent eastward to occupy Chattanooga, rebuilding and protecting railway lines as he moved - a task that took so much of his time and energy that he never did get to Chattanooga. Other troops were sent to other duties, and by August the war had come to a standstill. Halleck was in Washington by now, and Grant and Buell were independent commanders.
The principal Confederate army in the West, the Army of Tennessee, was commanded now by General Braxton Brigg - a dour, pessimistic martinet of a man, who had an excellent grasp of strategy and a seemingly incurable habit of losing his grip on things in the moment of climax. (Beauregard, this army's former commander, had been relieved, the victim of ill-health and inability to get along with President Davis.) Bragg had his men, 30,000 strong, in Chattanooga; Major General Edmund Kirby Smith was in Knoxville with 20,000 more; and in August these generals moved northward in a campaign that anticipated nothing less than the reoccupation of western Tennessee and the conquest - or liberation, depending on the point of view - of all of Kentucky.
The small Union force at Cumberland Gap beat a hasty retreat all the way to the Ohio River. Buell, outmaneuvered, gave up railroad-building and turned to follow Bragg, who had slipped clear past him. Grant was obliged to send all the troops he could spare to join Buell; and to keep him additionally occupied, the Confederates brought troops from across the Mississippi and formed an army of between 20,000 and 25,000 men in northern Mississippi under Earl Van Dorn. By late September, Bragg had swept aside the hastily assembled levies with which the Federals tried to bar his path and was heading straight for the Ohio River, Buell marching desperately to overtake him, Kirby Smith near at hand. It looked very much as if Bragg's ambitious plan might succeed, and if Van Dorn could defeat or evade Grant and reach Kentucky too, the Union situation in the West would be almost hopeless.
Never had military events better illustrated the folly of surrendering the initiative in war. In both the East and West the Federals had a strong advantage in numbers; but in each area an inability to make use of that advantage in a vigorous, unceasing offensive and a desire to protect territory rather than to compel the enemy's army to fight had caused the Federals to lose control of the situation. Now in Maryland, in Kentucky, and in Tennessee, the North was fighting a defensive war, and the Confederates was calling the tune. (To use an analogy from football, the North had lost the ball and was deep in its own territory.)
This was the authentic high-water mark of the Confederacy. Never again was the South so near victory; never again did the South hold the initiative in every major theater of war. Overseas, the British were on the verge of granting outright recognition - which, as things stood then, would almost automatically have meant Southern independence. Cautious British statesmen would wait just a little longer, to see how this General Lee made out with his invasion of the North. If he made out well, recognition would come, and there would be a new member in the world's family of nations.
Then, within weeks, the tide began to ebb.
THE BATTLE OF ANTIETAM
Preparing to move into Pennsylvania, Lee wanted to maintain some sort of line of communications with Virginia. At Harpers Ferry the Federals had a garrison of 12,000 men, and these soldiers were almost on Lee's communications. It seemed to the Confederate commander that it would be well to capture Harpers Ferry and its garrison before he went on into the Northern heartland. He knew that McClellan was very cautious and deliberate, and he believed the man would be even more so now because he had to reorganize his army. So it looked as if the Army of Northern Virginia could safely pause to sweep up Harpers Ferry: with the South Mountain gaps held, McClellan could be kept in the dark until it was too late for him to do anything about it.
So Lee once more divided his army. The advance, under Longstreet, was at Hagerstown, Maryland, not far from the Pennsylvania border. One division, under Major General D. H. Hill, was sent back to Turner's Gap in South Mountain, to make certain that no inquisitive Federals got through. The rest, split into three wings but all under the general control of Jackson, went down to surround and capture Harpers Ferry.
Now sheer, unadulterated chance took a hand, and changed the course of American history.
Some Confederate officer lost a copy of the orders which prescribed all of these movements. Two Union enlisted men found the order, and got it to McClellan's headquarters, where there was an officer who could identify the handwriting of Lee's assistant adjutant general and so convince McClellan that the thing was genuine. Now McClellan had the game in his hands: Lee's army was split into separate fragments, and McClellan was closer to the fragments than they were to each other. If he moved fast, McClellan could destroy the Army of Northern Virginia.
McClellan moved, although not quite fast enough. He broke through the gap in South Mountain, compelling Lee to concentrate his scattered forces. Lee ordered his troops to assemble at Sharpsburg, on Antietam Creek, near the Potomac. At that point Jackson, who had just time to capture Harpers Ferry, rejoined him; and there, on September 17, McClellan and Lee fought the great Battle of Antietam.
Tactically, the battle was a draw. The Federals attacked savagely all day, forcing the Confederates to give ground but never quite compelling the army to retreat, and when Lee's battered army held its position next day, McClellan did not renew the attack. But on the night of September 18 Lee took his worn-out army back to Virginia. Strategically, the battle had been a Northern victory of surpassing importance. The Southern campaign of invasion had failed. The Federals had regained the initiative. Europe's statesmen, watching, relaxed: the time to extend recognition had not arrived, after all.
Antietam was not only strategically decisive: it has the melancholy distinction of having seen the bloodiest single day's fighting in the entire Civil War. The Union army lost over 12,000 men, and the Confederate loss was nearly as great. Never before or after in all the war were so many men shot on one day.
THE FEDERALS REGAIN THEIR FOOTING IN THE WEST
In the West, too, the Confederate offensive collapsed. Until he actually arrived in Kentucky, Bragg had handled his campaign with vast skill. Now, however, he became irresolute, and his grasp of strategic principles weakened. It had been supposed that the people of Kentucky, crushed under the heel of Northern despots, would rise in welcome once they were liberated by Confederate armies, and whole wagonloads of weapons were carried along by the Confederates to arm the new recruits. The anticipated welcome did not develop, however, recruits were very few in number, and Bragg's swift drive became slower. He lost time by going to Frankfort to see that a secessionist state government was formally installed - it would fall apart, once his troops left - and Buell was just able to get his own army between Bragg's Confederates and the Ohio River.
Buell managed to bring Bragg to battle at Perryville, Kentucky, on October 8. Only parts of the two armies were engaged, and the fight was pretty much a standoff; but afterward the mercurial Bragg concluded, for some reason, that his whole campaign had been a failure, and he and Kirby Smith drew off into eastern Tennessee. Buell pursued with such lack of spirit that the administration removed him and put William S. Rosecrans in his place, and Rosecrans got his army into camp just below Nashville, Tennessee, and awaited further developments. Meanwhile, in northern Mississippi, a part of Grant's army, then led by Rosecrans, had beaten a detachment from Van Dorn's at Iuka on September 19 and 20, and early in October defeated the entire force in a hard-fought engagement at Corinth. Van Dorn retreated toward central Mississippi, and Grant began to make plans for a campaign against Vicksburg.
So by the middle of October the situation had changed once more. The one great, coordinated counteroffensive which the Confederacy was ever able to mount had been beaten back. In the East the Federals would begin a new campaign aimed at Richmond; in the West they would resume the advance on Chattanooga and would continue with the drive to open the whole Mississippi Valley. They would have many troubles with all of these campaigns, but they had at least got away from the defensive. The danger of immediate and final Northern defeat was gone.