Chapter 09 - The South's Last Opportunity

SPRING OF 1863: BOTH ARMIES ON THE MOVE

In the spring of 1863 the Northern grip on the Confederacy was slowly tightening; yet there was still a chance for the South to upset everything, and for a few unendurably tense weeks that chance looked very good. With Rosecrans inactive in Tennessee, and with Grant seemingly bogged down hopelessly in the steaming low country north of Vicksburg, attention shifted to the East, and it appeared that a Southern victory here might restore the bright prospects that had gone so dim in the preceding September. Robert E. Lee set out to provide that victory; winning it, he then made his supreme effort to win the one final, unattainable triumph that would bring the new nation to independence. He never came quite as close to success as men supposed at the time, but he did give the war its most memorable hour of drama.

Joe Hooker had done admirably in repairing the Army of the Potomac. He displayed genuine talents as an organizer and an executive, which was something of a surprise, for he was believed to be a dashing heads-down fighter and nothing more. He saw to it that the routine chores of military housekeeping were performed properly, so that the men got enough to eat and lived in decent camps; he turned his cavalry corps into an outfit that could fight Jeb Stuart's boys on something like even terms; and he restored the weary army's confidence in itself. He himself had abundant confidence - too much, Mr. Lincoln suspected, for Hooker's jaunty remark that the question was not whether he could take Richmond, but simply when he would take it, struck the President as a little too optimistic. But when April came, and the spring winds dried the unpaved roads so that the armies could use them, Hooker led his troops off on a new offensive with the highest hopes.

Hooker had a greater advantage in numbers than McClellan had ever had. The manpower shortage was beginning to handicap the Confederacy. Union troops were moving about the Virginia landscape on the south side of the lower James River, apparently with aggressive intent; to hold them in check, and to keep that part of the country open so that its bacon and forage could be used. Lee had had to detach James Longstreet and most of Longstreet's army corps early that spring, and when Hooker began to move, Lee's army in and around Fredericksburg numbered hardly more than 60,000 men of all arms. Hooker had more than twice that many, and he was handling them with strategic insight.

He would not repeat Burnside's mistake, butting head-on against the stout Confederate defenses at Fredericksburg. Instead, he left a third of his army at Fredericksburg to hold Lee's attention, and took the rest on a long swing up the Rappahannock, planning to cross that river and the Rapidan twenty-five miles away, and then march in on Lee's unprotected left and rear. He made the move competently and swiftly, and he sent his cavalry on ahead to make a sweep across Lee's lines of communication near Richmond. He would compel Lee to retreat, his own army would lie on Lee's flank when the retreat began, Lee would have to attack this army on ground of Hooker's choice - and, all in all, this might be the recipe for a resounding Union victory.

It might have worked, except for two things. At the critical moment Hooker lost his nerve - and Lee refused to act by the script which had written. What followed was one more dismal Union defeat, and the end of another of those "on to Richmond" drives that never seemed to get anywhere.

THE BATTLE OF CHANCELLORSVILLE

The first part of Hooker's plan went very smoothly. Hooker got more than 70,000 men established around Chancellorsville, a crossroads a dozen miles back of Lee's left flank, and his cavalry went swooping down to cut the Richmond, Fredericksburg, and Potomac Railroad farther south. But Lee ignored the cavalry raid and used Stuart's cavalry to control all of the roads around Chancellorsville, so that Hooker could not find out where the Confederates were. Worried and somewhat bewildered, Hooker called a halt and put his troops in sketchy fieldworks near Chancellorsville, instead of pushing on to the more open country half a dozen miles to the east, which was where he had originally planned to take position. Then Lee, in the most daring move of his whole career, split his army into three pieces and gave Joe Hooker an expensive lesson in tactics.

Lee left part of his men at Fredericksburg to make sure that the massed Federals there did not do anything damaging. With 45,000 men he went to Chancellorsville to face Hooker; and after making a quick size-up of the situation he gave Stonewall Jackson 26,000 of these and sent him on a long swing around Hooker's exposed right. Two hours before dusk on May 2 Jackson hit that right flank with pile-driver force, shattering it to pieces, driving a whole Yankee army corps in wild rout, and knocking Hooker's army completely loose from its prepared position. Two or three days of confused and desperate fighting ensued - around Chancellorsville clearing and back at Fredericksburg, where the Federals forced a crossing and then found they could accomplish nothing in particular - and in the end Hooker beat an ignominious retreat, pulling all of his troops north of the Rappahannock. He had lost 17,000 men, he had let an army half the size of his own cut him to pieces, and he had handled his men so poorly that a very substantial part of his immense host had never been put into action at all. Chancellorsville was Lee's most brilliant victory. It had been bought at a heavy cost, however, for Stonewall Jackson was mortally wounded, shot down by his own troops in the confused fighting in the thickets on the night of May 2.

Once more, Lee had taken the initiative away from his Federal opponent. The next move would be his, and after conferences with President Davis and his cabinet in Richmond, that move was prepared: Lee would invade Pennsylvania, trying in the early summer of 1863 the move that had failed in the fall of 1862.

This decision may have been a mistake, a thing which is more easily seen now than at the time it was made. It would be a gamble, at best - a bet that the magnificent Army of Northern Virginia could somehow win, on Northern soil, an offensive victory decisive enough to bring the war to a close. The army was certain to be outnumbered. The thrust into the Northern heartland was certain to stir the Federals to a new effort. The business would have to be a quick, one-punch affair - a raid, rather than a regular invasion - for Confederate resources just were not adequate to a sustained campaign in Northern territory. If it failed, the Confederacy might lose its army and the war along with it. When he marched for Pennsylvania, Lee would be marching against long odds. He would have Longstreet and Longstreet's soldiers, which he had not had at Chancellorsville, but he would greatly miss Stonewall Jackson.

But the fact is that no really good move was available to him. If he stayed in Virginia, holding his ground, the North would inevitably refit the Army of the Potomac and in a month or so would come down with another ponderous offensive. That offensive might indeed be beaten back, but the process would be expensive, and the campaign would further consume the resources of war-racked Virginia. European recognition and intervention - that will-o'-the-wisp which still flickered across the Confederate horizon - could never be won by defensive warfare. A good Confederate victory in Pennsylvania might, just possibly, bring it about.

GRANT'S BREAKTHROUGH IN THE WEST

Furthermore, the Confederacy was beginning to feel the pressure which Grant was applying in the Vicksburg area. An invasion of the North might very well compel the Federals to pull troops away from the Mississippi Valley; certainly a Southern victory in Pennsylvania would offset anything that might be lost in the West... for it was beginning to be obvious that a great deal was likely to be lost in the West, and fairly soon at that.

For Grant, having tried all of the schemes that could not work, had finally hit upon one that would work, and he was following it with an energy and a daring fully equal to Lee's own.

To get east of the river, where he could force his enemy to give battle, Grant had followed the simplest but riskiest plan of all. He would march his troops downstream on the Louisiana side of the river; he would use gunboats and transports - which first must run the gauntlet of the powerful Vicksburg batteries - to get the soldiers over to the eastern shore; and then he could march to the northeast, destroying any field army that might come to face him, cutting Pemberton's lines of communication with the rest of the Confederacy, herding Pemberton's troops back inside of the Vicksburg entrenchments, and then laying siege to the place and capturing army, fortress, and all. Like Lee's move at Chancellorsville, this would be a dazzling trick if it worked. If it did not work the North would lose much more than it could afford to lose.

As the month of May wore on, Grant was making it work.

The area which his army would have to traverse on the Louisiana side was swampy, with a tangle of bayous and lakes in the way. The western pioneers in Grant's army were handy with the axe and spade, and they built roads and bridges with an untaught competence that left the engineer officers talking to themselves. Downstream the army went; and downstream, too, came Admiral Porter's gunboats and enough transports to serve as ferries, after a hair-raising midnight dash past the thundering guns along the Vicksburg waterfront. The navy proved unable to beat down the Confederate defenses at Grand Gulf, twenty-five miles below Vicksburg, but Grant got his troops across a few miles farther down, flanked the Grand Gulf defenses, beat an inadequate force which Pemberton had sent down to check him, and then started out for the Mississippi state capital, Jackson, fifty miles east of Vicksburg. Jackson was a supply base and railroad center; if the Richmond government sent help to Vicksburg, the help would come through Jackson, and Grant's first move was to take that piece off the board before it could be used.

Grant made his river crossing with some 33,000 men. (He had more soldiers in the general area, and would have many more than 33,000 before long, but that was what he had when he started moving across the state of Mississippi.) At this time the Confederates had more troops in the vicinity than Grant had, but they never could make proper use of them; Grant's swift move had bewildered Pemberton much as Lee's had bewildered Hooker. Just before he marched downstream, Grant had ordered a brigade of cavalry to come down from the Tennessee border, riding between the parallel north-south lines of the Mississippi Central and the Mobile and Ohio railroads. This brigade was led by Colonel Benjamin H. Grierson, and it was eminently successful; it went slicing the length of the state, cutting railroads, fighting detachments of Confederate cavalry, and reaching Union lines finally at Baton Rouge. For the few days that counted most, it drew Pemberton's attention away from Grant and kept him from figuring out what the Yankees were driving at.

From Port Gibson, a town in the rear of Grand Gulf, Grant moved on Jackson. Joe Johnston was at Jackson. He had recovered from his wounds, and Davis had sent him out to take general command in the West - an assignment which Johnston did not care for, because Pemberton's and Bragg's armies, for which eh now had responsibility, were widely separated, and Johnston did not see how he could control both of them at once. He was trying now to assemble enough of a force to stave Grant off and then, with Pemberton, to defeat him outright, but Grant did not give him time enough. On May 14, having driven off a Confederate detachment at the town of Raymond, Grant occupied Jackson, and Johnston, moving north, sent word to Pemberton to come east and join him. (It was clear enough to Johnston that Pemberton would lose both his army and Vicksburg if he were ever driven into his entrenchments and compelled to stand siege.)

VICKSBURG UNDER SIEGE

Pemberton was in a fix. From Richmond, Davis was ordering him to hold Vicksburg at any cost; Johnston, meanwhile, was telling him to leave the place and save his army; and Pemberton, trying to do a little of both, came quickly to grief. He marched east to find Grant, heeded Johnston's orders too late and tried to swing to the northeast, and on May 16 he was brought to battle on the rolling, wooded plateau known as Champion's Hill, halfway between Vicksburg and Jackson. Grant beat him and drove him back to the west, followed hard and routed his rear guard the next day at the crossing of the Big Black River, and sent him headlong into his Vicksburg lines. Grant's army followed fast, occupying the high ground along the Yazoo River - the ground that had been the goal of all the winter's fruitless campaigning - and establishing there a secure base, where steamboats from the North could reach it with all the supplies and reinforcements it might need. On May 19 and again on May 22 Grant made an attempt to take Vicksburg by storm. He was repulsed both times, with heavy loss, so he resorted to siege warfare. He drew lines of trenches and redoubts to face the entire length of the Confederate lines - all in all, Grant's entrenched line was fifteen miles long by the time it was finished - he detached a sufficient force eastward to hold Joe Johnston at bay, and then he settled down grimly to starve the place into submission. Johnston was building up his relieving army, but he never could make it strong enough. He had perhaps 25,000 men, and Pemberton had 30,000, but Grant was reinforced until he had 75,000, and he could handle both Pemberton and Johnston without difficulty. By the first of June, Pemberton was locked up, Johnston was helpless, and it seemed likely that Vicksburg's fall would only be a question of time.

THE BATTLE OF GETTYSBURG

So when Lee prepared for his own campaign, the inexorable pressure of Grant's grip on Vicksburg was an important factor in his plans. It may be that his best move then would have been to stay on the defensive in Virginia and send troops west so that Johnston could beat Grant and raise the siege of Vicksburg, but to argue so is to indulge in the second-guessing that is so simple long after the event. The move would have been very chancy, at best, and there was no guarantee that the Federals in Virginia would permit it. The Army of the Potomac had been disgracefully beaten at Chancellorsville, but it had not been disorganized, and the battle somehow had not left the depression and low morale which had followed Second Bull Run and Fredericksburg. The army would be ready for action very soon, and if it began a new campaign of invasion, Lee would need every man he could get. To send west enough troops to turn the tables on Grant might be to invite a disastrous defeat in Virginia... and so, in the end, the idea was dropped, and Lee prepared to head north.

Lee began his move on June 3, shifting his troops northwest from Fredericksburg behind the line of the Rappahannock River, aiming to reach the Shenandoah Valley and cross the Potomac west of the Blue Ridge. His army was divided into three corps, now: one led by the redoubtable Longstreet (who took a very dim view, incidentally, of this invasion of Pennsylvania), and the others commanded by two new lieutenant generals, Richard S. Ewell and A. P. Hill. Longstreet's corps led off, passing at Culpeper Court House while Ewell's corps leapfrogged it and went on to drive scattered Federal detachments out of the lower Valley. Hill stayed in Fredericksburg to watch the Yankees.

The movement was made with skill, and Hooker was given no real opening for an attack on the separated segments of Lee's army. Hooker did propose, once he saw what was going on, that he himself simply march toward Richmond, in the belief that that would force Lee to return quickly enough. But Washington did not approve. Hooker's mishandling of the army at Chancellorsville had aroused the gravest distrust of his abilities; and although the administration could not quite nerve itself to remove him (he enjoyed the powerful backing of Secretary of the Treasury Salmon P. Chase), it apparently was unwilling to let him try a new offensive. Hooker was told to act strictly on the defensive, and to follow Lee wherever Lee might go.

By June 14 Lee had pulled Hill out of Fredericksburg, and the whole army was on the move, with Longstreet holding the gaps in the Blue Ridge, and Ewell, behind him, moving toward the Potomac crossings. Hooker's army was sidling toward the northwest, determined, whatever happened, to keep between Lee and Washington. Between the two armies the rival cavalry sparred and skirmished, each commander trying to get news of the enemy's army and deny to the enemy news of his own. Out of all of this sparring came a moment of inspiration to Jeb Stuart. He acted on it, and thereby helped Lee lose the campaign.